CANR

• Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2019
• The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination Oxford University Pres (New York, NY), 2020
• Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich Penguin Press (New York, NY), 2024

1. Hitler's people : the faces of the Third Reich LCCN 2024025047 Type of material Book Personal name Evans, Richard J., author. Main title Hitler's people : the faces of the Third Reich / Richard J. Evans. Published/Produced New York : Penguin Press, 2024. Projected pub date 2408 Description pages cm ISBN 9780593296424 (hardcover) (ebook) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. The Hitler conspiracies LCCN 2020941402 Type of material Book Personal name Evans, Richard J., author. Main title The Hitler conspiracies / Richard J. Evans. Published/Produced New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2020] Description 275 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm ISBN 0190083050 9780190083052 CALL NUMBER DD256.5 .E87 2020 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. Eric Hobsbawm : A Life in History LCCN 2018051780 Type of material Book Personal name Evans, Richard J. Main title Eric Hobsbawm : A Life in History / Richard J. Evans. Published/Produced New York : Oxford University Press, [2019] ©2019 Description xiii, 785 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm ISBN 9780190459642 (hardback) CALL NUMBER D15.H63 E93 2019 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 4. They thought they were free : the Germans, 1933-45 LCCN 2017027110 Type of material Book Personal name Mayer, Milton, 1908-1986, author. Main title They thought they were free : the Germans, 1933-45 / Milton Mayer ; with a new afterword by Richard J. Evans. Published/Produced Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Description xii, 378 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm ISBN 9780226525839 (pbk. : alk. paper) 022652583X CALL NUMBER DD256.5 .M39 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

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  Sir
  Richard J. Evans
  FRSL FRHistS FBA FLSW

  Evans in his role as Provost of Gresham College in 2015
  Born Richard John Evans
  September 29, 1947 (age 76)
  Woodford, London, England
  Parent(s) Ieuan Trefor Evans, Evelyn (Jones) Evans
  Academic background
  Education Jesus College, Oxford (MA)
  St Antony's College, Oxford (DPhil)
  Hamburg University
  Thesis The women's movement in Germany, 1890–1919 (1972)
  Doctoral advisor Tony Nicholls[1]
  Academic work
  Institutions University of Stirling
  University of East Anglia
  Columbia University
  Umeå University
  Birkbeck College
  University of Cambridge
  Gresham College
  Notable students Nikolaus Wachsmann
  Stefan Ihrig
  Main interests History of Germany
  Historical method
  Theory of history
  Historiography
  Notable works The Third Reich Trilogy
  The Pursuit of Power
  Sir Richard John Evans FRSL FRHistS FBA FLSW (born September 29, 1947) is a British historian of 19th- and 20th-century Europe with a focus on Germany. He is the author of eighteen books, including his three-volume The Third Reich Trilogy (2003–2008). Evans was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge from 2008 until he retired in 2014, and President of Cambridge's Wolfson College from 2010 to 2017. He has been Provost of Gresham College in London since 2014. Evans was appointed Knight Bachelor for services to scholarship in the 2012 Birthday Honours.[2][3]

  Early life and education
  Richard Evans was born at Woodford, Essex, to Ieuan Trefor Evans and Evelyn (Jones) Evans, who both came from Wales.[4] He was educated at Forest School, Jesus College, Oxford (MA), and St Antony's College, Oxford (DPhil). In a 2004 interview, he stated that frequent visits to Wales during his childhood inspired both an interest in history and a sense of "otherness".[1] He said one reason that he was drawn to the study of modern German history in the late 1960s was his identification of parallels between the Vietnam War and German imperialism. He admired the work of Fritz Fischer, whom he credits with inspiring him to study modern German history.[1]

  Historian of Germany
  Evans first established his academic reputation with his publications on the German Empire. In the early 1970s, Evans travelled to Germany to research his dissertation, a study of the feminist movement in Germany in the first half of the 20th century.[1] It was later published as The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933 in 1976. Evans followed his study of German feminism by another book, The Feminists (1977), which traced the history of the feminist movement in North America, Australasia and Europe from 1840 to 1920.[1]

  A theme of both books was the weakness of German middle-class culture and its susceptibility to the appeal of nationalism. Evans argued that both liberalism and feminism failed in Germany for those reasons despite flourishing elsewhere in the Western world.[1]

  Evans' main interest is social history, and he is much influenced by the Annales school.[1] He largely agrees with Fischer that 19th-century German social development paved the way for the rise of the Third Reich, but Evans takes pains to point out that many other possibilities could have happened.[5] For Evans, the values of the 19th-century German middle class contained the already germinating seeds of National Socialism.[1]

  Evans studied under Fischer in Hamburg in 1970 and 1971 but came to disagree with the "Bielefeld School" of historians, who argued for the Sonderweg thesis that saw the roots of Germany's political development in the first half of the 20th century in a "failed bourgeois revolution" in 1848. Following a contemporary trend that opposed the previous "great man" theory of history, Evans was a member of a group of young British historians who in the 1970s sought to examine German history during the German Empire "from below".[6] These scholars highlighted "the importance of the grass-roots of politics and the everyday life and experience of ordinary people".[7] "History is about people, and their relationships. It's about the perennial question of 'how much free will do people have in building their own lives, and making a future", Evans has said.[8] He says he supported the creation of a "new school of people's history", which was a result of a trend that "has taken place across a whole range of historical subjects, political opinions, and methodological approaches and has been expressed in many different ways".[7]

  In 1978, as editor of a collection of essays by young British historians entitled Society And Politics in Wilhelmine Germany, he launched a critique of the 'top-down' approach of the Bielefeld School associated with Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka regarding Wilhelmine Germany. With the historians Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, Evans instead emphasized the "self-mobilization from below" of key sociopolitical groups, as well as the modernity of National Socialism. In the 1980s, Evans organized ten international workshops on modern German social history at the University of East Anglia that did a good deal to refine these ideas, to pioneer research in this new historical field and, in six collections of papers, present it to an Anglophone readership.[9]

  Among Evans' major research works are Death in Hamburg (1987), a study of class conflict and liberal government in 19th-century Germany using the example of Hamburg’s cholera epidemics and applying statistical methods to the exploration of social inequality in an industrializing society, and Rituals of Retribution (1996), a study of capital punishment in German history applying structural anthropological concepts to the rituals of public execution up to the mid-19th century and exploring the politics of the death penalty until its abolition by East Germany in 1987.

  In Death in Hamburg, Evans studied the cholera outbreak in Hamburg in 1892, which he concluded was caused by a failure in the medical system to safeguard against such an event. Another study in German social history was Tales from the German Underworld (1998), where Evans traced the life stories of four German criminals in the late 19th century, namely a homeless woman, a forger, a prostitute and a conman.[1]

  In Rituals of Retribution, Evans traced the history of capital punishment in Germany, and using the ideas of Michel Foucault, Philippe Ariès and Norbert Elias as his guide argued that opposition to the death penalty was strongest when liberalism was in the ascendancy, and support for capital punishment coincided when the right was in the ascendancy. Thus, in Evans' view, capital punishment in Germany was never a mere matter of law being disinterestedly applied but was rather a form of state power being exercised.[1]

  In addition, Evans examined such subjects as belief in witchcraft, torture, the last words of the executed, the psychology of mobs, varying forms of execution from the Thirty Years War to the 1980s, profiles of executioners, cruelty, and changing views towards the death penalty.[1]

  In the 1980s, Evans was a conspicuous figure in the Historikerstreit, a controversy surrounding the historical work and theories of German historians Ernst Nolte, Joachim Fest, Andreas Hillgruber, Michael Stürmer, Hagen Schulze, Imanuel Geiss and Klaus Hildebrand, all of whom Evans considered German apologists attempting to white-wash the German past. Evans' views on the Historikerstreit were set forth in his 1989 book, In Hitler's Shadow. In that book, Evans took issue with Nolte's acceptance of the Commissar Order as a legitimate military order; with Nolte's argument that the Einsatzgruppen massacres of Ukrainian Jews were a justifiable "preventive security" response to Soviet partisan attacks; his description (citing Viktor Suvorov) of Operation Barbarossa as a "preventative war" forced on Hitler by an impending Soviet attack; and his complaints that much scholarship on the Shoah expressed the views of "biased" Jewish historians.[10]

  Evans characterized Nolte's statements as crossing the line into Holocaust denial[11] and he singled out Nolte's rationalization that since the victors write history, the only reason why the Third Reich is seen as evil is because it lost the war.[12]

  Evans also denounced, as an attempt to justify the Holocaust, Nolte's claim that Chaim Weizmann's letter of 3 September 1939 to Neville Chamberlain, promising that the Jewish Agency would support the war effort constituted "Jewish declaration of war" on Germany that justified the pre-emptive internment of Jews in concentration camps.[13]

  In his 1989 book, In Hitler's Shadow, Evans also criticised the intentionalist theories of Hillgruber and Hildebrand.[14] and criticized Stürmer's excessive focus on political history and overlooking of social conditions, as a regression to the outmoded great man theory of history.[15] For his part Evans praised Sir Ian Kershaw, who wrote that "The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference".[16] (It was Evans who first suggested to Kershaw that he undertake to write a biography of Adolf Hitler.[17])

  Evans' In Defence of History defends the discipline of history against postmodernist skepticism of its value. The limitations of our ability to understand and learn from the past notwithstanding, it is still possible, he argues, to reconstruct past events. Evans suggests that the spread in the 1980s and 1990s of post-modernist theories, which declare that history is solely the construct of the historian and depict the rationalist tradition of the West as a form of oppression, was not necessarily left-wing or progressive, for by denying the possibility of accessing past facts, it had also done much to increase the appeal of Holocaust denial.[18]

  Role as an expert witness in Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt
  See also: Irving v Penguin Books Ltd
  Evans is probably best known to the general public in the role of an expert witness for the defence in the high-profile libel case of David Irving against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt in 2000, Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt. Lipstadt was sued for libel by Irving, after she referred to him as a "Holocaust denier" and "an ardent follower of Adolf Hitler" in her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust. Lipstadt further accused Irving of "distorting evidence and manipulating documents to serve his own purposes...[as well as] skewing documents and misrepresenting data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions, particularly those that exonerate Hitler."[19]

  Evans acted as an expert witness for the defence in the case. Starting in the autumn of 1997, Evans, along with Thomas Skelton-Robinson and Nik Wachsmann, two of his PhD students, closely examined Irving's work.[20] They found instances in which he had used forged documents, disregarded contrary evidence, selectively quoted historical documents out of context, and mis-cited historical records, thus misrepresenting historical evidence in order to support his prejudices.[21][22] Evans subsequently proved to be a powerful witness in Lipstadt's ultimately successful defence. In his expert witness report he wrote:

  Not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about. ... if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian.[23]

  The cross-examination of Evans by Irving was noted for the high degree of personal dislike between the two men.[24] Such was the degree of dislike that Irving challenged Evans on very minor points, such as Evans doubting the fairness of a 1936 German election in which the Nazi Party (the only legal political party in Germany at the time) received 98.8% of the vote (in a rigged election).[25] A subject that drew Irving and Evans deep into debate was a memo by the Chief of the Reich Chancellery Hans Lammers to the Reich Justice Minister Franz Schlegelberger in which Lammers wrote that Hitler ordered him to put the "Jewish Question" on the "back-burner" until after the war.[26] Evans chose to accept the interpretation of the memo put forward by Eberhard Jäckel in the 1970s;[27] Irving chose to interpret the memo literally and taunted Evans by saying, "It is a terrible problem, is it not that we are faced with this tantalizing plate of crumbs and morsels of what should have provided the final smoking gun, and nowhere the whole way through the archives do we find even one item that we do not have to interpret or read between the lines of, but we do have in the same chain of evidence documents which ... quite clearly specifically show Hitler intervening in the other sense?"[28]

  In response, Evans stated, "No, I do not accept that at all. It is because you want to interpret euphemisms as being literal, and that is what the whole problem is. Every time there is a euphemism, Mr. Irving ... or a camouflage piece of statement or language about Madagascar, you want to treat it as the literal truth, because it serves your purpose of trying to exculpate Hitler. That is part of ... the way you manipulate and distort the documents."[29]

  In a 2001 interview, Evans described to the Canadian columnist Robert Fulford his impression of Irving after being cross-examined by him as: "He [Irving] was a bit like a dim student who didn't listen. If he didn't get the answer he wanted, he just repeated the question."[30]

  His findings and his account of the trial were published in his 2001 book Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, which was published as Telling Lies About Hitler in the United States in 2002. The High Court rejected Irving's libel suit and awarded costs to the defence.[31]

  Evans' involvement in the trial was included in the 2016 film Denial, in which he was played by British actor John Sessions.[32]

  The Third Reich Trilogy
  Main article: The Third Reich Trilogy
  Between 2003 and 2008, Evans published a three-volume history of the Third Reich. Drawing on years of experience as a leading scholar of German history, Evans produced what some historians call the most extensive and comprehensive history of the rise and fall of Hitler's regime ever produced by a single scholar. Reviewer Peter Mansoor says, "The Third Reich at War is a superb piece of scholarship that is likely to emerge as the definitive account of life and death inside Hitler's blood soaked Third Reich."[33] Robert Citino says, "Read together, the three volumes constitute a remarkably comprehensive treatment of the origins, course, and death of the Hitler regime, and are likely to be standard works for a long time to come."[34] Ed Ericson says:

  Evans masterfully interweaves testimony that has come to light in the intervening decades with learned judgments from hundreds of authors to create a balanced and thoughtful narrative. This book, therefore, will assuredly become the definitive work on The Third Reich at War.[35]

  The first volume, The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany (published by Penguin in 2003), shows how a country torn apart by the First World War, the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation and the Great Depression moved towards an increasingly authoritarian solution. The book explains in detail Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 and how the Nazis transformed Germany into a one party dictatorship. The first volume featured highly favourable words of praise from Evans's friend Ian Kershaw on its cover.[1]

  The second volume, The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939: How the Nazis Won Over the Hearts and Minds of a Nation (published by Penguin in 2005), covers the years of Nazi rule between 1933 and 1939. The final chapter examines the road to the Second World War, but the real focus is on life inside the Third Reich. Evans allows small stories of key individuals to illustrate many of the key social, economic and cultural events of the period. Richard Overy described this installment of the trilogy as "magisterial".[36]

  The third volume, The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Led Germany from Conquest to Disaster (published by Penguin in 2008), looks at major developments from 1939 to 1945, including the key battles of the Second World War, a vivid, moving and detailed account of the mass murder enacted during the Holocaust and Hitler's dramatic downfall in Berlin in 1945. In an October 2008 review of the third volume for The Times, best-selling historian Antony Beevor writes: "With this third volume, Richard Evans has accomplished a masterpiece of historical scholarship ... [He] has produced the best and most up-to-date synthesis of the huge work carried out on the subject over the past decades."[37] Aspects of it, however, were sharply criticised by Timothy Snyder.[38]

  Walter Reich, former Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., states about the third-volume of the trilogy, The Third Reich at War, "If any work of accurate history has a chance to correct the distortions of public memory, this is it."[39]

  The Third Reich trilogy has been, or is being translated, into sixteen foreign languages.

  Recent publications and current work

  Evans at the Frankfurt Book Fair presenting his book about the Third Reich in 2016
  In 2013, Evans delivered the Menachem Stern Jerusalem Lectures to the Historical Society of Israel, publishing them in 2014 as Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History. The book puts forward a variety of arguments against the use of long-range alternative historical timelines as an aid to serious historical understanding. In "Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent" (2009, an expanded version of his Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor), he explored the reasons why so many British historians have made such major contributions to the historical understanding of other European countries. The Third Reich in History and Memory (2015) is a collection of 28 articles and review essays on modern German history published since the turn of the century.

  In 2016, Evans published The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914, volume 7 in the Penguin History of Europe. It has been widely reviewed. Gerard De Groot, writing in The Times, commented that the book "chronicles a turbulent and confusing century with wonderful clarity and verve...in one great canvas of immense detail and beauty ... transnational history at its finest." Dominic Sandbrook, in The Sunday Times, described it as "dazzlingly erudite and entertaining". It has been, or is being translated into Dutch, Spanish, German, Greek, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese and Italian.[40]

  He has written a biography on the historian Eric Hobsbawm entitled Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History. From 2013 to 2018 he was principal investigator in a £1.6 million Leverhulme Programme Grant on conspiracy theories and is preparing work based on the findings of the project.

  Regius Professor of Modern History
  In 2008, Evans was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge (in 2010 the word "Modern" was removed from the title by royal decree). The post is a royal appointment in the gift of the Prime Minister of the day and dates back to 1724. Previous holders of the title have included John Dalberg-Acton (1895), Herbert Butterfield (1963), Geoffrey Elton (1983), Patrick Collinson (1988) and Quentin Skinner (1998). Evans is the first historian to have to apply for the post and be interviewed by a Board of Electors, including Cambridge's Vice-Chancellor, Alison Richard, and representatives of the history faculty and the university, as well as external assessors from Yale, Harvard, Oxford and London. The board selected a shortlist of four, each of whom was asked to give a presentation to the entire Cambridge history faculty. The shortlist of four was then reduced to two, whom the board interviewed, resulting in the board's recommendation of Evans to the Prime Minister and in the issue of a Royal Warrant for his appointment.[41] As well as serving as Regius Professor, Evans served as chairman of the history faculty from October 2008 to 30 September 2010.

  Evans is used to combining administration with research. At Birkbeck College, London, where he worked before Cambridge, he acted as Master of the college when Baroness Blackstone left suddenly to become Tony Blair's first higher education minister. On 27 January 2010 he was elected to the position of President of Wolfson College, Cambridge, serving the statutory seven-year term of office until retiring from the post on 30 September 2017. During this period he focused on building up the college as a centre of contemporary culture, with art exhibitions by Richard Deacon and Anthony Green, and talks by Martin Amis and Neil MacGregor, among many others. In 2014 he was appointed Provost of Gresham College, in the City of London, an institution founded in 1597 to provide free lectures to Londoners. There are now over 2,000 lectures on the college's website and the 130 lectures a year are all live-streamed.

  Media appearances

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  Evans has appeared regularly on a number of TV documentaries related to Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. He recently appeared on a major TV documentary on the History Channel which examined the Valkyrie bomb plot against Hitler in July 1944.

  He writes reviews of history books for the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian, as well as historical reflections on recent events for American magazines and websites, including Foreign Policy, The Nation, and Vox.

  Other contributions
  Evans has been co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary History since 2000, and has also served as Deputy Chair of the Spoliation Advisory Panel, a UK government non-departmental public body formed to make recommendations to the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on the restitution of cultural objects looted during the Nazi era. He has been a judge of the Wolfson History Prize, the UK's richest history book award, for over twenty years.

  Lectures and commentaries
  In 2011, Evans became involved in a polemical exchange of letters with Peter Baldwin after agreeing with Leif Jerram, who wrote in Cosmopolitan Islanders in 2009 that students in Britain could find a richer selection of courses on the histories of other countries in British universities than students from other countries could in their own countries.[42]

  Hobsbawm lecture
  On 7 February 2019, Evans gave a lecture at Chancellor's Hall in the University of London's Senate House to launch his new biography of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, A Life in History.[43] At the time, a boycott of the University of London including the Senate House, organised by the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain and supported by a number of high-profile politicians, journalists and academics, including John McDonnell, Owen Jones, Ken Loach and David Graeber in order to pressure University of London to bring their outsourced maintenance staff back in house, was in place.[44][45] Claiming it was hypocritical breaking a boycott in support of workers' rights to give a talk about a lifelong committed communist, the union and other supporters encouraged Evans to relocate his talk, Evans said he supported the cause and would "bring it to the attention of the meeting".[46][47] Birkbeck College said they supported the University in bringing he staff in house, a process that, they said, was already underway.[47]

  Honours and distinctions
  1978 Fellow of the Royal Historical Society 1988 Wolfson History Prize 1989 William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine 1993 Civic Medal for Arts and Sciences of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg

  1993: Fellow of the British Academy (FBA)
  1994 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History 1998 Honorary Fellow, Jesus College, Oxford 1999 Honorary Fellow, Birkbeck, University of London

  2000: Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL)
  2010 Founding Fellow, Learned Society of Wales (FLSW) 2011 Honorary Fellow, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

  2012: Knighted for services to Scholarship in the 2012 Birthday Honours
  2012 Honorary Doctor of Letters, University of London 2015 Honorary Doctor of Letters, University of Oxford 2015 British Academy Leverhulme Prize and Medal 2017 Honorary Fellow, Wolfson College, Cambridge

  Works
  The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933, London: SAGE, 1976.
  "German Women and the Triumph of Hitler", The Journal of Modern History Vol. 48, No. 1, 1976.
  The Feminists: Women's Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia, 1840–1920, London: Croom Helm, 1977.
  (ed.) Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany, London: Croom Helm, 1978.
  The German Family: Essays on the Social History of the Family in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Germany, London: C. Helm; Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981.
  (ed.) The German Working Class, 1888–1933: The Politics of Everyday Life, London: Croom Helm; Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1982.
  (ed., with W. R. Lee) The German Peasantry: Conflict and Community in Rural Society from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, London: Croom Helm, 1986.
  (ed., with Dick Geary) The German Unemployed: Experiences and Consequences of Mass Unemployment From The Weimar Republic to the Third Reich, London: C. Helm, 1987.
  Rethinking German History: Nineteenth-Century Germany and the Origins of the Third Reich, London: Allen and Unwin, 1987.
  Comrades and Sisters: Feminism, Socialism, and Pacifism in Europe, 1870–1945, Brighton, Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987.
  Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830–1910, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
  The German Underworld: Deviants and Outcasts in German History, London: Routledge, 1988.
  In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past. London: I.B. Tauris. 1989. ISBN 1-85043-146-9.
  Proletarians and Politics: Socialism, Protest, and the Working Class in Germany Before the First World War, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990.
  The German Bourgeoisie: Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century London: Routledge, 1991.
  Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600–1987, London: Oxford University Press, 1996.
  Rereading German History: From Unification to Reunification, 1800–1996, London: Routledge, 1997.
  Tales from the German Underworld: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
  In Defence of History, London: Granta Books, 1997; rev. edn. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999; edn. with extensive new afterword, London: Granta, 2000.
  Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, New York: Basic Books, 2001; published in the United Kingdom as Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial, London: Verso, 2002.
  The Coming of the Third Reich, London: Allen Lane, 2003.
  The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939, London: Allen Lane, 2005.
  The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Led Germany from Conquest to Disaster, London: Allen Lane, 2008.
  Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
  Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History, Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2013.
  The Third Reich in History and Memory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
  The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914, London: Allen Lane, 2016.
  Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, London: Little, Brown, 2019.
  The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination, New York: Oxford University Press (ISBN 9780190083052); London: Allen Lane, 2020 (ISBN 978-0-241-41346-3)
  Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich, London: Allen Lane, 2024.

• Richard J. Evans website - https://www.richardjevans.com/

  CV
  I was born in Woodford, Essex, and grew up in Loughton and Theydon Bois, two villages further down the Central Line, the latter on the edge of Epping Forest. My first school experience was at Oaklands School, Loughton, Essex, where my mother taught. From 1955 to 1959 I attended St Aubyn’s School, Woodford, London E17, then went on a county scholarship from 1959 to 1966 to Forest School, Walthamstow, London, E17, where I obtained A-level Grade ‘A’ in History, English, Latin, and Ancient History.

  From 1966 to 1969 I was Open Scholar in Modern History, Jesus College, Oxford, where I was awarded First-Class Honours in Modern History in 1969. I attended lectures by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Christopher Hill, James Campbell, Jack Galbraith, Penry Williams and many other leading historians of the time. Apart from the required courses in British history, where my tutors were Richard Grassby and John Walsh, I took the Crusades further subject with Maurice Keen, and the Commonwealth and Protectorate special subject with Keith Thomas. I was awarded the university’s Stanhope Essay Prize in 1969, for an essay on the set topic of John Knox; this also involved reading an extract at Encaenia, in the presence of Harold Macmillan, as Chancellor of the University.

  I then moved on to St. Antony’s College, Oxford, where I was a junior member from 1969 to 1972. My doctoral project was funded by the Social Science Research Council, and involved two years’ research in Germany, which from 1970 to 1972 were partly funded by a Hanseatic Scholarship of the FVS (Alfred Toepfer) Foundation. The first year I spent in Hamburg; the second I divided between Berlin and Oxford. In Hamburg I was a member of the Europa Kolleg, a self-governing graduate residential community in Klein-Flottbek.

  I was enrolled in Hamburg University but never attended any courses. I submitted my thesis in October 1972, and was examined by F. L. Carsten and Agatha Ramm. I delayed taking my degree so I could take it simultaneously with my M.A., in 1973.

  I have collected several other degrees in the course of my career. In 1990 I was awarded a Litt D by the University of East Anglia, and in 2001 a Ph.D. by incorporation, University of Cambridge (necessary in order to give me borrowing privileges at the university library after I leave or retire). In November 2012 I was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of London. In 2015 I took the degree of Doctor of Letters at Cambridge University and was awarded an Honorary D.Litt by Oxford University.

  From 1972 to 1976 I was Lecturer in History at the University of Stirling, Scotland. I joined the AUT (later UCU) immediately and remained a member up to 2005, when I resigned because I felt the union was not representing the interests of university teachers; I also objected to its antisemitic pursuit of an academic boycott of Israel (antisemitic because it did not pursue the policy in relation to other, much more objectionable regimes). While at Stirling I was also a DAAD Research Scholar at the Institute for European History, Mainz (1975) and I obtained a British Academy Small Research Grant in 1976 for research, and also a publication grant from the Sir Ernest Casell Educational Trust publication grant the following year.

  From 1976 to 1983 I was Lecturer in European History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, in the School of European Studies (later renamed School of Modern Languages and European History). By this time I had published article and books (see publications section), and I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1978.

  While at East Anglia I served in the Fall Semester of 1980 as Visiting Associate Professor of European History, Columbia University, New York City, U S A, and in the Spring of 1981 I was a Visiting Lecturer in History, Umeå University, Sweden, which invited me to teach because a Swedish translation of one of my books was being used as the basic textbook in a history course.

  This was a time of great expansion in the historical profession, and many new societies were being founded. In 1979 I was a founder member of the German History Society, serving on its committee until 1988, and as Chair from 1989 to 1992; and I also joined the Social History Society (I left it in 2003 when I felt it was focusing too much on British history and was no longer of much use to my work). In 1980 I became a member of the Association for the Study of German Politics, leaving it in 2005 when the cost of subscribing to its journal no longer seemed to be justified in view of the fact that the Association had long since lost its originally historical approach to modern German politics.

  In 1979 I received a grant from the SSRC/DFG Research Exchange Scheme for Social Scientists, spending the time researching in Berlin. The following year, 1980, I was awarded an Institute of Historical Research grant from the Twenty-Seven Foundation, and in 1980 I was again a DAAD Research Scholar, this time at the Free University of Berlin. The following year I became a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Free University of Berlin (renewed 1985, 1989). I also received British Academy overseas conference grants in 1980 and 1982, both for conferences in the USA.

  In 1983 the Chair of European History at the University of East Anglia became vacant on the retirement of Werner Mosse; I applied for the job and was appointed Professor of European History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, a post I held until 1989.

  Visiting positions during this period included a spell in 1986 as Visiting Fellow, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra; the stay included a lecture tour of New Zealand, funded by British Council and Goethe Institute lecturing grants. In 1987 I was British Council Visiting Fellow at the Karl-Marx-University, Leipzig, GDR, researching the history of the death penalty.

  In 1987 I published “Death in Hamburg”, a project for which I received a British Academy Small Research Grant in 1985; the book won the 1987 Wolfson Literary Award for History and the 1989 William H Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine. It resulted in my being appointed to the Hamburg Senate’s committee to organize the centenary commemoration of the 1892 epidemic, at which I gave the principal address in the City Hall; this was rewarded in 1993 with the Medaille für Kunst und Wissenschaft des Senats der Freien-und Hansestadt Hamburg (civic medal for cultural services).

  In 1989 as a result of an internal London University inquiry into the History Department at Birkbeck, it was decided to fill the Chair of History vacated by Roderick Floud; I applied and was appointed. Thus from 1989 to 1998 I was Professor of History, Birkbeck College, University of London, serving as Vice-Master of the College 1993-97 and Acting Master in 1997 after the appointment of the Master, Baroness Blackstone, to the Blair government.

  In 1993 I was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. I became a Member of Modern History Section of the British Academy; in 1995-8 served on the Academy Activities Committee; in 1995-8 on the Meetings Committee; from 2001-4 on the Section Standing Committee as Chairman of Section 2001-4, which made me ex officio a Member of the Humanities Group.

  In 1994 I was awarded the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History for the 20th-century sections of my (then unpublished) book on capital punishment in Germany. In 1993 I was DAAD Senior Research Scholar, University of Karlsruhe. In 1994 I was also awarded £69,000 from Wellcome Trust for ‘Disease and the Social Order in Modern Europe’ for Dr Dorothy Porter;

  1996 a British Academy Small Research Grant; in
  1997 British Academy 3-year postdoctoral fellowship for Dr Laurence Cole, £71,312.

  Other grants included (1991) a Lecturing grant from the British Council (Hamburg and Amsterdam) and in 1993 a Lecturing grant from Anglo-German Society, Bonn as well as, in 1996, a British Academy overseas conference grant.

  In this period I also began judging book prizes: from 1995 onwards as a Member, Panel of Judges, Wolfson Literary Awards for History; from 1996 until 2014 as a member of the Panel of Judges, Fraenkel Prizes in Contemporary History; from 2011 until my retirement I was Chairman of the Judges’ Panel, and I instituted a major change in the requirements for the Prizes in 2012. From 1996 to 1969 I was a member of the Panel of Judges of the short-lived René-Kuczynski-Preis für Geschichte; this was funded by Thomas Kuczynski through a Foundation and was awarded to the best book of the year on German social and economic history; it foundered when disputes between the other judges made it unworkable.

  From 1966 to 1969 I was a Patron of the Holocaust Exhibition Wing of the Imperial War Museum. This involved checking through the captions on the exhibits. I suggested numerous changes, not all of which were accepted (especially in the area of German resistance, which I thought the exhibition short-changed).

  In 1997 my experience of being a Vice-Chancellor (Birkbeck is an independent, degree-awarding body like the other Colleges of London University, directly funded by the HEFCE, so the Master is ex officio a member of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals, now Universities UK), convinced me I would not be able to write any more History if I continued down the managerial road, so when the Professorship of Modern History at the University of Cambridge became vacant on the retirement of Derek Beales, I applied for the position and was appointed on the recommendation of the Board of Electors without either an interview or a presentation.

  I deferred taking up the post until I had completed my term at Birkbeck and seen in the new Master, Tim O’Shea. On arrival in Cambridge in 1998 I was also elected a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where I remained until 2010.

  I had two visiting posts in this period. In 2006 I served as Golo Mann Distinguished Visiting Professor at Claremont-McKenna College, California; and in 2007 I was Visiting Distinguished Miegunyah Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. In 2008 I also attended by invitation the Fourth Petra Conference of Nobel Laureates in Jordan, organized by King Abdullah and Elie Wiesel.

  A number of honorary fellowships were awarded in this period. In 1998 I was elected an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford; in 1999 an Honorary Fellow of Birkbeck College, University of London; and in 2011 an Honorary Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge.

  In 2000 I was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2010 I was appointed one of the Founding Fellows of the Learned Society of Wales.

  In 2005 and 2006 I was a History Honoree in the Los Angeles Times Book Awards; this honour, for, respectively, the second and third volumes of my Third Reich trilogy, involved being flown out for an Oscars-style ceremony in LA, where the five Honorees in each category, including History, attended a gala award ceremony and reception in a movie theatre; I didn’t win the prize on either occasion, but it was great fun all the same.

  Grants during this period were mainly for research fellows to work with me. In 1997 I was awarded a British Academy 3-year postdoctoral fellowship for Dr Laurence Cole, £71,312, to work on the later history of the Habsburg Monarchy.

  Over the years I have acted as a referee and consultant for Oxford University Press (Oxford and New York), Cambridge University Press, Weidenfeld, Harvard University Press, Macmillan, Yale University Press, Berg, Harper-Collins, I.B. Tauris, Penguin, Boxtree Books, Unwin Hyman, Blackwell, Polity Press, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Rowohlt Verlag, etc..

  I have also been a referee for research project proposals for SSRC/ESRC, Wellcome Trust, National Endowment for the Humanities (USA), British Academy, Humanities Research Board, Israel Science Foundation, Leverhulme Trust, and University of Manchester research fund. As a member of the Standing Committee of the Modern History Section of the British Academy I refereed all applications in the field for postdoctoral research fellowships, research leave, and similar schemes, as well as recommendations for the British Academy Book Prize (successful in 2001), and as Chairman of Section H10, I co-ordinated the views of the Standing Committee in these areas.

  I have acted at various times as External Assessor for Chairs in Universities of Kent, Strathclyde and London. I also act frequently as an invited and independent assessor for tenure and full professorship applications in American and Australian universities and for readerships and personal chairs in British universities, as well as for Research Fellowships in Cambridge. I am regularly consulted by Search Committees for major chairs in the USA (most recently, for the ongoing search for a senior German historian to replace Ute Frevert at Yale).

  In the last decade and a half have been awarded several grants for visiting fellows of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation:

  1998-9 £26,000 Feodor Lynen postdoctoral research fellowship, Dr Wolfram Kaiser.
  2001-2 £26,000 Feodor Lynen postdoctoral research fellowship, Dr Olaf Blaschke.
  2003-4 £26,000 Feodor Lynen postdoctoral research fellowship, Dr Ulrike Lindner
  2009-10 £26,000 Feodor Lynen postdoctoral research fellowship, Dr Patrick Schmidt
  2010-11 £26,000 Feodor Lynen postdoctoral research fellowship, Dr Kim Priemel
  2010-14 €105,000 DAAD grant, “Promoting German Studies in the UK: Germany and the World in the Age of Globalization”
  2013-14 £52,000 Feodor Lynen postdoctoral research fellowships, Dr Anne-Kristin Sass and Dr Wencke Meteling
  In 2013 I applied for and was awarded a Leverhulme Programme Grant on “Conspiracy and Democracy”. The total sum awarded for the 5-year programme was £1,584,611. As Principal Investigator on the project, which is based at CRASSH in Cambridge, I manage a programme with two co-investigators and seven postdoctoral researchers. The project’s website is at www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org.

  In 2008 on the retirement of Quentin Skinner I applied for the Regius Professorship of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. Prime Minister Gordon Brown had devolved the appointment of all 28 UK Regius Professors on to their respective universities, requiring them only to submit to him the name of the appointee (who had to have accepted the post in writing) for forwarding to the Queen. I was the first Regius appointed under this new procedure; after a presentation to the Faculty of History I was interviewed by a panel chaired by the Vice-Chancellor and including four external assessors (from Oxford, London, Harvard and Yale) and was appointed to the post by the Queen in October 2008.

  Since journalists found it incomprehensible that ‘modern history’ at Cambridge began with the fall of the Roman Empire, and there were already Chairs of Modern and Medieval History at Cambridge, I immediately began the process of dropping the word ‘modern’ from the title, in conformity with practice in Oxford for some years; this took a year and required the permission of the Faculty Board, the General Board of the Faculties, the University Council, the Cabinet Office, the Prime Minister and the Queen.

  In 2010 I was elected President of Wolfson College, Cambridge, for a seven-year term. Since the Colleges and the Faculties are quite separate in Cambridge, unlike in Oxford, it is possible to hold this post in conjunction with a Professorship in the University. I retired from the Regius Professorship on reaching the statutory age in 2014 but continued at Wolfson College until the end of the term of office in September 2017. .

  In 2006 and 2008 I gave public lectures as Visiting Professor of History, Gresham College, London. The College was founded by Sir Thomas Gresham in 1597 to provide free instruction for the citizens of London; there are no examinations or courses as such, just lectures, all of which are available on the College’s website. In 2009 I was appointed Professor of Rhetoric, one of the original posts from 1597; nowadays this is used to provide lectures on History or Politics. My three-year term of office was extended for a fourth year in 2012. In 2014 I applied for the post of Provost of Gresham College and was appointed for an initial three-year term, renewable for another three years from 2017.

  In 2014, in recognition of my successful campaign to force the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, Michael Gove, to withdraw his proposals for revising the National History Curriculum, I was awarded the Norton Medlicott Medal of the Historical Association. In 2015 I was awarded the British Academy Leverhulme Medal and Prize for services to German history.

  In 2012 I was appointed Knight Bachelor in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, for services to scholarship.

Evans, Richard J. HITLER'S PEOPLE Penguin Press (NonFiction None) $35.00 8, 13 ISBN: 9780593296424

Penetrating biographies of Hitler and 21 other Germans who played important roles in Nazi-era atrocities.

Evans, author of the Third Reich Trilogy and other acclaimed books of German history, offers these eye-opening portraits of the heart of evil in an effort to understand what kind of people fell under Hitler's spell. The subjects include the "Paladins," top Nazis such as Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels; "Enforcers," such as Rudolf Hess, Reinhard Heydrich, and Adolf Eichmann; and "Instruments," including filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and military officer Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb. "What had happened to their moral compass?" asks the author in this robust historical investigation. "Were they gangsters acting with criminal intent?" Were they "ordinary Germans" or "deviants" of some kind? Seeking answers, Evans thoroughly examines each of his subjects' early years, their reasons for joining the Nazi party, what they did in the war years, and their postwar fates. Common denominators include a desire to find someone to blame for the loss of World War I and for the Great Depression, as well as the belief that a strong leader could return Germany to its rightful place in the world. Tellingly, few ever showed remorse for their deeds. Hitler's virulent antisemitism and his charismatic speaking style combined with ruthless opportunism to bring him to power, even though the Nazis never attained a majority of the electorate in a fair election. Hitler's delusion that Germany could fight three much larger powers--the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the U.S.--was widely shared among Germans, though its effects were exacerbated by their leader's constant overruling of his generals and the derangement of his later years. The author avoids drawing parallels to any current political figures or movements.

A meticulously researched, sobering look at the Nazi era and the people who helped bring its evil intents to fruition.

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"Evans, Richard J.: HITLER'S PEOPLE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A797463087/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e12f9134. Accessed 13 July 2024.

Evans, Richard J. The Hitler conspiracies: the protocols--the stab in the back--the Reichstag fire--Rudolf Hess--the escape from the bunker. Oxford, 2020. 288p bibl Index ISBN 9780190083052 cloth, $27.95; ISBN 9780190083069 ebook, contact publisher for price

(cc)

58-3325

DD256

CIP

Evans, a leading historian of modern Germany, examines and debunks the topics of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the stab-in-the-back legend regarding the German army in 1918; the Reichstag fire; Rudolf Hess's flight to Britain; and Hitler's supposed escape during the fall of Berlin. Many people think the Protocols motivated Nazi anti-Semitism. In fact, as Evans details, Nazi anti-Semitism was established before they encountered the Protocols, which they adopted as part of their propaganda. Next, Evans shows that the stab-in-the-back theory was a myth. Many Germans did not accept their defeat in WW I, and General Ludendorff and the High Command covered up their responsibility for losing the war by falsely claiming that defeatist civilians in the government were responsible for the surrender. He then reveals the Reichstag fire to be the act of a single deranged individual rather than a communist or Nazi plot. Evans concludes that Rudolf Hess acted alone in his peace mission to Britain, and addresses speculations about Hitler escaping to Argentina or other places as common but baseless. Evans's convincing presentation is well written and researched, and covers a timely subject for the post-truth era. Summing Up: ** Recommended. General readers through faculty.--R. Fritze, Athens State University

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association CHOICE
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Fritze, R. "Evans, Richard J.: The Hitler conspiracies: the protocols--the stab in the back--the Reichstag fire--Rudolf Hess--the escape from the bunker." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 58, no. 11, July 2021, p. 1126. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A666366302/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=94f17578. Accessed 13 July 2024.

by Aaron J. Leonard

Historian Richard J. Evans is a preeminent scholar on Hitler and Nazi Germany, most pointedly through his trilogy on the history of the Third Reich. His most recent work, " (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-hitler-conspiracies-9780190083052?cc=us&lang=en&) The Hitler Conspiracies : The Stab in the Back - The Reichstag Fire - Rudolf Hess - The Escape from the Bunker," takes on the key conspiracy theories generated out of the Hitler era. (http://www.aaronleonard.net/) Aaron J. Leonard recently conducted an interview with him via email to discuss his work, the current invoking of fascism in some quarters, and the contrast between solid historiography and work amplifying and propagating conspiracy theories.

________________

Why do you think Hitler and his murderous regime -- which ought to be repellent -- loom so large in the popular imagination?

They loom so large in the public imagination precisely because they are so repellent. Hitler has come to stand as a kind of substitute for Satan in an increasingly secular world: he is the epitome of evil. When we think of Hitler, we think of dictatorship, war and genocide, of cultural repression, racism and the looting of art on an unprecedented scale. The more the Holocaust has become part of mainstream public memory, the more it has brought Hitler into the center of public attention as its originator.

Your chapter detailing the "Stab in the Back" myth, which claims the German army was sabotaged from victory in World War I by various anti-patriotic left-wing forces, made me think of a Vietnam veteran I encountered a few years back who was adamant that in that war, the US was forced to fight with 'one hand tied behind its back.' It seems one of the features of many of these conspiracy theories or 'alternative histories' is to take a loss or weakness, and turn it into something less. Is that accurate, or is there something else going on?

The idea that a war -- or an election -- wasn't really lost, but betrayed by a backstairs conspiracy, is an easy and perennially attractive way (to some people at least) of explaining defeat: defeat, after all, is very difficult and painful to admit. It also disqualifies a whole section of society as not really part of it, whether that's the Jews or the socialists in Germany in 1918, or the Democrats in America in 2020.

In your book (https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/richard-j-evans/lying-about-hitler/9780786723782/) Lying About Hitler -- which recounts the libel suit brought by David Irving against historian Deborah Lipstadt, a trial in which you testified -- you literally had to chase down footnotes to show how he manipulated evidence to minimize and deny the Holocaust. Irving is arguably more insidious than some of those you challenge in your current work because he was seen as a scholar, rather than a crackpot -- and yet, his methodology is not far removed from the crassest of conspiracists. How would you contrast the two methods employed between conspiracy-based ones -- which are not wholly devoid of evidence -- versus those based on the method of honest historians?

Conspiracy theorists very frequently imitate the methods of honest historians: You will find their works weighed down with footnotes and crammed with elaborate, solid-looking detail. Only when you subject them to detailed scrutiny does it become clear that the detail isn't solid at all -- it's full of deliberate errors, falsifications, manipulations, misquotations, mistranslations, calculated omissions and manufactured connections, speculation, innuendo and supposition. Irving's Holocaust denial work was full of mistakes, as the judge in the libel action he brought against Deborah Lipstadt in 2000 noted, but they were not honest mistakes, since they all went to support his arguments. Honest mistakes are random in their effect; his were not. Honest historians know they have to abandon their arguments when the evidence turns out to disprove them; dishonest historians and conspiracy theorists bend the evidence to fit the argument.

Quite a few people, particularly on the left, have taken to invoking the word 'fascism' or otherwise draw parallels to the National Socialists of the 1930s & 40s, to describe various current phenomena. What do you see as the limits -- and benefits if any -- of such historical analogies?

Fascism is one of those concepts that can seem almost infinitely elastic; it's just too tempting for polemical purposes to accuse any authoritarian politician of being like Hitler, or any populist movement of being fascist. But we have to remember that fascism was a militaristic movement, aiming at war and conflict, territorial expansion and empire. Fascists put every citizen into uniform, drilled the people into uniformity and obedience in training camps, and subordinated private life, business companies, and institutions of all kinds to the state. Fascists were ultimately genocidal, whether it was the Nazis exterminating the Jews, or the Italian Fascists exterminating the Ethiopians (among other things, by using poison gas). Nazism and Fascism also put science at the center of their belief systems, in particular, racial and eugenic 'science', and regarded religion as a leftover from medieval times that would soon disappear. In all these respects it differed from 21st-century populism, which is hostile to the state, anti-scientific, and opposed to militarism both within the country and outside it. The classic fascist mass consisted of endless marching columns of identically uniformed men; today's populist mass, as in the storming of the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, consist of thousands of informally and in some cases eccentrically attired individuals heaving about in a chaotic heap, violent and aggressive but not organized in any military way. The problem with calling today's right populism 'fascist' is that it's fighting today's battles with the weapons of the 1920s and 1930s. Time has moved on since then.

I am constantly astonished, and not a little frustrated, that so much taken for 'common knowledge' has already been countered by professional historians and yet it seems we live in a world where too often "alternative history" operates as actual history in the popular imagination. How can that ever change, or at least not command such power?

The Internet and social media are largely though not exclusively responsible for undermining belief in truth and objectivity. Society has become increasingly polarized through the rise of 'identity politics' -- my truth is not the same as your truth (though in fact there can never be two opposing truths; only one of them can ever be the real truth). The spread of hyper-relativism through the dominance in universities of postmodernist culture has also played its part. The mass media, above all television and the movie, have blurred the boundaries between truth and fiction. Holding social media companies to account for the lies they allow to be spread is a beginning. But more needs to be done.

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"Richard J. Evans on Fascism, Today's Right, and Historical Truth." History News Network, 29 Aug. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A673652522/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=da5fcf00. Accessed 13 July 2024.

Richard J. Evans

ERIC HOBSBAWM

A life in history

800pp. Little, Brown. 16.99[pounds sterling].

978 1 4087 0741 8

NEW SORT OF HISTORY: NOT A THREAD BUT A WEB" confidently hailed the headline for an article on trends in historical writing included in the TLS's special issue in October 1961 on "European Exchanges", itself marking in the paper's eyes the end of Britain's long cultural isolation. The unidentified author--anonymity still the house rule was the forty-four-year-old Eric Hobsbawm, a Marxist historian of growing reputation but far from a household name. Noting with satisfaction that "the established if unofficial orthodoxies of academic conservatism" were "increasingly on the defensive", he accused those orthodoxies of having "confined the field of general history to the chronological narrative, supplemented here and there with ad hoc explanations, of the upper ranges of politics, diplomacy, war and to some extent cultural life". Instead, he looked forward to the flourishing of a radically different approach, one forged on the terrain "where history, economics and sociology meet"--and where "ideologies have replaced nations as the chief disturbers of scholarly equanimity". He did not promise it would be easy. For the historian, "to explain the changing texture of a web is technically much harder than to trace a thread"; while for readers, the new history was likely to be "a very much more difficult subject" than for "their fathers and grandfathers".

That prospectus behind him, Hobsbawm almost exactly a year later published his first major book: The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789-1848. "The object of this book", he declared at the outset, "is not detached narrative, but interpretation." So indeed it was displaying interpretative skills of the highest order, with the heaviest analytical guns trained on the French Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution--but there was also a very distinctive flavour to the text. Take, at semi-random, six examples. On page 50, an explanation of how British industrialization relied on "the unplanned supply" of "mechanically skilled and self-reliant men" was a cue for the long-range observation that this accounted for "the shocking neglect of general and technical education in this country, the price of which was to be paid later"; on page 100, a wry reference to how "our generation, which has failed so much more spectacularly in the fundamental task of international diplomacy, that of avoiding general wars, has therefore tended to look back upon the statesmen and methods of 1815-48 with a respect that their immediate successors did not always feel"; on page 150, in the context of the issue of ownership of natural monopolies, the suggestive counter-factual that "even in England" nationalization of the railways was seriously proposed in the 1840s; on page 200, a stirring Lyonnais silk weavers' song, complete with chorus "C'est nous les canuts / Nous n'irons plus tout nus"; on page 250, the magisterial, class-oriented statement that "German classical philosophy was, it must always be remembered, a thoroughly bourgeois phenomenon"; and on page 300, taking flight from a passage about the European landed nobility's continuing wealth and power by the end of the period, a caustic but evocative glance at how "in the Southern USA the cotton-planters even created for themselves a provincial caricature of aristocratic society, inspired by Sir Walter Scott, 'chivalry', 'romance' and other concepts which had little bearing on the negro slaves on whom they battened and the red-necked puritan farmers eating their maize and fat pork". Such an eclectic, cosmopolitan, multi-angled approach is commonplace enough now. It was not in 1962.

Put another way, not many historians deserve a full-length biography, but Hobsbawm is undoubtedly one of them. And it is one of the many strengths of Richard Evans's monumental and shrewdly organized treatment that he precisely shows not only how Hobsbawm caught the moment for a new type of survey-style history, but also how his early decades had equipped him to do so. Hobsbawm's own account (Interesting Times, 2002) gives some sense of his early life, but the Evans version--deploying the full resources, including diaries and letters, of his papers at the Modern Records Centre in the University of Warwick--is far richer and less inhibited.

The broad outline is familiar: the secular Jewish background; the itinerant childhood and adolescence (born in Alexandria to a British-Jewish father and Viennese mother); moves to Vienna, Berlin and London; the parents' early deaths; above all, the witnessing of the Nazi rise to power that gave him a lifetime commitment to the communist cause. On January 25, 1933, five days before Hitler became Chancellor, the fired-up fifteen-year-old boy took part in the German communists' last public demonstration in Berlin; and he kept the tattered song-sheet until he died almost eighty years later. Soon he was living in London with his uncle and aunt, who had taken care of Eric and his sister since their parents' deaths. The new city was politically small beer by comparison, but London was where his real intellectual take-off happened, largely through prodigious, self-prescribed reading (novels, drama and poetry as well as plentiful non-fiction, including philosophy and literary criticism). "When I read and listen, I put what is useful into my mental apparatus", he noted in January 1935, still in his mid-teens. "Gradually I see--very gradually--how a picture of history is crystallizing out of it all.... Of course, you never put it together completely, but perhaps one day I'll have all the cornerstones there. Thanks to the dialectic, I'm on the right way." So impressed was his history teacher at Marylebone Grammar School by his essays that they were shown to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, though sadly we don't have their comments.

Then came three years at Cambridge (largely glittering), followed by six war years in the army (almost wholly unglittering). Professionally, the first decade and a half of peace proved something of a struggle: not because of any lack of talent or industry, but because of his unconcealed political beliefs during the permafrost years of the Cold War. Evans documents in painstaking detail how his progress both in academia and beyond (including the BBC)--was deliberately and almost systematically impeded. Still, he was nothing if not obstinate, and after first making his mark as a labour historian he broadened out into more innovative fields with Primitive Rebels (1959), rather primly subtitled Studies in archaic forms of social movement in the 19th and 20th centuries.

What sort of person, apart from the doggedness and seemingly boundless knowledge, was the young or youngish Hobsbawm? Evans is a fine historian if perhaps not a natural biographer, and sensibly does not over-indulge in psychological speculation, but cumulatively an impression emerges: keen simultaneously to be accepted but different; susceptible to beauty, including natural beauty (as fuelled in adolescence through marathon cycling trips in the English countryside); insecure in relationships with women (including a disastrous first marriage), but a sympathetic enough listener to be attractive to them; and possessor of a strong judgemental streak, shading into intolerance. "Over-rated", he wrote to a cousin in 1943 about the Isle of Wight, "and I'm glad a lot of those Victorian boarding-houses went west." That last character trait was also to the fore in his role between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s as a music critic under the pseudonym Francis Newton. Elvis Presley he dismissed in 1956 as "a peculiarly unappetising Texan lad"; Miles Davis four years later was not only "of surprisingly narrow technical and emotional range", but came unhealthily close to "self-pity and the denial of love"; soon afterwards, the musical limitations of the trad jazz phenomenon were "only exceeded by the deficient amateurishness of many of its musicians". In 1959 his survey entitled The Jazz Scene received a respectful enough review from Philip Larkin. Even so, "there are times when, reading Mr Newton's account of this essentially working-class art, the course of jazz seems almost a little social or economic parable". And Larkin added that "Mr Newton has little charm as a writer".

But of course, charm a la Sebastian Flyte was hardly the point. Over the ensuing decades, Hobsbawm produced an astonishing body of work (above all, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and The Age of Extremes, which between them sought to cover world history from 1848 to 1990) as well as an abundance of short-form writing. He was an inveterate and often dominant presence at historical conferences around the world, and stayed politically engaged. He was also happily married --the biographer's curse--and Evans fails at times to bring to life these years of maturity, with too many dutiful lists of advances agreed, sales figures notched up, colloquia attended and honours received. Accordingly, much of the intensity and interiority of the book's first half goes missing. Yet through it all shine Hobsbawm's immense energy, his relentless but also inquisitive focus (though struggling at times to embrace convincingly the new histories of gender and identity), his driving sense of the unforgiving minute. His mind remained a formidable machine; so too his body, well into his eighties; and both no doubt fortified by belonging to (certainly by the 1990s) the most famous historian alive.

The judgementalism did not go away. The counter-culture's followers may have thought they were creating a new world, likewise the revolutionaries of 1968, but Hobsbawm then and later was almost entirely dismissive. "Incomprehensible to old lefties of my generation", he recalled in his autobiography, so that "as soon as the dense clouds of maximalist rhetoric and cosmic expectation turned into the rain of every day, the distinction between ecstasy and politics, real power and flower power, between voice and action, became visible once more." Yet arguably, in a British context anyway, he got it badly wrong. It was not inevitable that the 1970s would end in Thatcherism and the death of the "1945" dream of greater equality; if instead the Left had been more responsive to that decade's distinctive trends--feminism, environmentalism, antiracism, the primacy of local community, the reaction against high-rise and destruction of the traditional urban environment--and less male, less elderly, less union-dominated and generally more imaginative, then the possibility was there of a "rainbow" coalition and an altogether different political trajectory.

Thatcherism itself, once it arrived, was rapidly identified by Hobsbawm as a dramatic and wholly damaging break with the post-war past. Evans reveals in fascinating detail the extent to which through the 1980s he was a significant influence in pushing for a broad-based (albeit not rainbow-based) non-sectarian approach on the Left that could best advance the chances of Labour winning a general election. Indeed, he was in some sense the intellectual godfather of New Labour. Yet predictably enough, once New Labour took power in 1997, Hobsbawm was soon dismissing Tony Blair as little better than "Thatcher in trousers". Given that Blair himself in the 2001 election repeatedly refused to endorse (in a TV interview with Jeremy Paxman) Labour's historic commitment to the pursuit of greater equality of outcome, it was not an unfair assessment.

Evans reckons that towards the end of his life, Hobsbawm had achieved "national treasure" status. Well, perhaps --but few national treasures provoke the continuing bitterness which, in some quarters, Hobsbawm still did. About twelve years ago, not long after I had seen him speak at an event marking the tenth anniversary of Raphael Samuel's death, I foolishly remarked to the former TLS Editor John Gross, a renowned Cold Warrior, about how impressive the near-nonagenarian had been. "He wouldn't hesitate to have you up against the wall", was his curt response, and the conversation quickly moved on.

Gross was referring of course to Hobsbawm's unrepentant membership of the Communist Party, long after the revelations about Stalin's Terror and long after the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, a membership ending only when the British party itself was dissolved in the early 1990s. The occasion of his autobiography inevitably provoked attacks ("we must be disgusted by Eric Hobsbawm", wrote the youthful commentator Johann Hari); his death in 2012 would provoke more ("He hated Britain and excused Stalin's genocide" was the Daily Mail headline for an article by A. N. Wilson). But to get the truly authentic flavour of how middle England viewed Hobsbawm, one must listen to Sue Lawley's chilly, ultra-polite interrogation on Desert Island Discs in 1995. After he denies knowing at the time about the murderous purges of the 1930s, though adding that if he had come across reports then he would not have believed them, she goes for the jugular:

Lawley: You are saying that such was your commitment and your dedication that if there was a chance of bringing about this communist utopia which was your dream, it was worth any kind of sacrifice?

Hobsbawm (slowly): Yes, I think so.

Lawley: Even the sacrifice of millions of lives? Hobsbawm: Well, that's what we felt when we fought World War Two, didn't we?

Lawley: Isn't there a difference between killing someone in war and killing your own?

Hobsbawm: We didn't know that. Dead is dead. Lawley (after pause): Shall we have record number three?

Almost two and a half decades later, it still makes for excruciating listening. Painful too is when Lawley asks why he decided not to leave the CP after Hungary in 1956. His reply (one made by him many times over the years) is twofold: that "I didn't wish to deny the whole of my life"; and that "I didn't want to suggest to anybody that I was trying to get an advantage by abandoning views which in the past could not have been said to bring me anything except disadvantage". "But isn't there surely also in all of that", asks Lawley, "an element of not wishing to say that perhaps you had been wrong?" To which he answers: "No, not at all".

Psychologically plausible though Lawley's question may be, it is not an explanation which Evans considers. Instead, in some carefully nuanced pages, he shows how Hobsbawm was frequently at odds with the party during the height of the Cold War ("would probably not survive if the Russians came", a colleague at Cambridge told MI5 in 1953); accepted the Soviet invasion of Hungary with what he publicly called at the time "a heavy heart"; over the next few years was at serious danger of expulsion; and from the 1960s was at most a semidetached member. "Eric wanted to have his cake and eat it", concludes Evans. "On the one hand he was wedded at a very deep emotional level to the idea of belonging to the Communist movement, but on the other hand he was absolutely not willing to submit to the discipline the Party demanded."

Quite so. Yet to look at the index to The Age of Extremes, Hobsbawm's survey of "The Short Twentieth Century" that in 1994 became his bestselling, most celebrated book, and see no mention of three of the greatest witnesses-cum-chroniclers of man's inhumanity to man under communist regimes--Vasily Grossman and Nadezhda Mandelstam in Russia, Jung Chang in China--is in its way shocking. There is also arguably a vacuum at the level of causation (his most prized level). "The concession that the USSR was 'bound' to fail is simply an inversion of the previous assumption that it was 'bound' to succeed", reflected Tony Judt in his initially generous but ultimately searing 2003 reappraisal of Hobsbawm. "Either way the responsibility lies with History, not men, and old Communists can sleep easy. This retroactive determinism is nothing but Whig History plus dialectics." And Judt quotes a cynical communist dictum about how dialectics "is the art and technique of always landing on your feet".

In 1969 the TLS's anonymous reviewer of Hobsbawm's Industry and Empire (his overview of Britain from the 1750s to the 1960s) was E. P. Thompson, the other great British left-wing historian of the era and who had left the Communist Party after Hungary, becoming a key figure in the New Left. The praise was sincere--especially of how his "analytic method" showed the reader "how to ask historical questions, how to set them out and argue them, how to resist immersion in trivia, how to scrutinize those hidden conceptual assumptions which often decide the criteria by which facts are selected"--but in the end Hobsbawm's type of history was not Thompson's: in part because "a high proportion of his facts are expressed in numerical form and sometimes give a spurious impression of hardness and indisputability"; but mainly because "we are invited to see history as the hawk or the helmeted airman--even, perhaps, as the cosmonaut --might see it, with a detachment which insists upon large temporal phrasing and a high level of generalization". The price of such detachment, claimed Thompson, was that "he appears to forget at times--as Marx never forgot --that it is men who make their own history". Or in short: "The historical cosmonaut in his orbit must often miss the hand-to-hand struggles, the patches of blood in the sand".

So, Hobsbawm or Thompson? It is not quite Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, but I suspect that for many modern historians of my generation, getting going around the 1970s, this is something we have often pondered. For myself, for all my admiration (even awe) for Hobsbawm's historical capaciousness and sheer quality of ratiocination, it has to be Thompson: the greater archival appetite; the greater openness to emotion and irrationality, including the religious experience; the greater ethical dimension; the greater humanity; the finer writer. To his huge credit, Hobsbawm himself obituarized Thompson after his death in 1993 as--notwithstanding his "intellectual production" being "never wholly controlled"--the "only historian I knew who had not just talent, brilliance, erudition and the gift of writing, but the capacity to produce something qualitatively different from the rest of us, not to be measured on the same scale". While as to the more general question of whether any historians truly last, Evans quotes Hobsbawm's bleak if realistic 2008 verdict that "obsolescence is the unavoidable fate of the historian", with the only exceptions being those of outstanding literary quality like Gibbon, Macaulay or Michelet. Still, future reputations can take care of themselves. For the moment, in our lifetimes, we should express a large measure of gratitude for two such giant practitioners of the craft as Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson. Whatever their flaws, we were fortunate to have them both.

Caption: Eric Hobsbawm, Hay Literary Festival, 2011

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 NI Syndication Limited
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Kynaston, David. "Historical cosmonaut: A national treasure whose politics provoked endless bitterness." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6049, 8 Mar. 2019, pp. 3+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A632057542/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bacb28d8. Accessed 13 July 2024.

Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm, A Life in History (Oxford University Press 2019)

HINTS FOR POTENTIAL readers of this worthwhile book. First, this is "a life in history," not an exhaustive analysis of Eric Hobsbawm's writings. Its subtitle, a "life in history" has multiple meanings: as biography, as the life of a great historian, and as a social history of a leading intellectual from childhood through advanced age. The book is very long (662 pages of text, many more with references), but eminently readable. Finally, it is neither pro- or anti-Marxist and will not sharpen one's polemical skills in either direction. Richard Evans is a distinguished British historian and social democrat who seeks to understand Hobsbawm developmentally using literally all available sources--Hobsbawm's diaries, interviews with colleagues, friends, and family, police records, the press, international contacts, literary agents and publishers, and others.

Evans is particularly interested in Hobsbawm's formative years--nearly half the volume. How does an unusually gifted person become an infinitely curious, multi-lingual cosmopolitan with deep attachments to Marxism and an intellectually independent scholar and superb writer? Hobsbawm's own Interesting Times provided a starting point, but Evans adds much more.

Hobsbawm, was a Polish-Jewish naturalized British citizen, his mother Viennese and a published novelist. Born in Alexandria while his father worked for the Egyptian telephone company, he and the family moved to Vienna after 1918 and then faced economic difficulties. During this period, at age 14, Hobsbawm was orphaned and moved again to Berlin to live with relatives. The dying days of the Weimar Republic were the beginnings of Hobsbawm's. Social democracy and liberalism had both failed, leaving militant opposition to the rise of Hitler by German communists as perhaps the only remaining choice to a passionate adolescent. Evans suggests that the communist movement served as "family" to an orphan who became an omnivorous reader of Marxian texts and world literature. The young Hobsbawm also became an apprentice "fieldworker," travelling, experiencing, questioning, contacting people, following up hunches, and, in general, "Hoovering" data to fill his evolving historical frames.

After Hitler took power, Hobsbawm and his guardian-relatives moved to the UK where yet again he faced a new environment. An excellent student, he was accepted at Cambridge in 1936, bearing the reputation of someone "who already knows everything" and winning a scholarship generous enough to finance new travels around Europe. At this point he also joined the British Communist Party. Having evaluated most of Cambridge's historical community in unflattering terms, he eventually found a tutor suitable to his interests in economic history (Mounia Postan). He also became a successful student journalist, an "Apostle" (member of an exclusive group of young intellectuals, many also communist), and received highest honours upon graduation. Following Evans, we discover a young man functioning successfully in a prestigious, somewhat hostile and often socially pretentious new world and also expanding his earlier commitments. Soldiering in World War II, his next stage was a waste, however. As a communist he was stashed away in the UK in places and jobs where he had little contact with other soldiers and was overseen by MI5. After war's ending, he returned to Cambridge for a doctorate and then sought university employment, with initially disappointing results. Publishers refused his book projects, top universities would not hire him, and his first marriage broke down. The academic setbacks were explainable by rejections of Hobsbawm's communist affiliations and Marxist approaches and the fact that Hobsbawm was a synthesizer and not an archival researcher when being the latter was a necessary rite of professional passage. Eventually he secured a job at London's Birkbeck College, which specialized in working and mature students, where he would remain for four decades giving lectures that became the backbones of his mature books. Writing as "Francis Newton," he also became a noted jazz critic and explorer of the lower depths of Bohemian London, both while participating in the stellar Communist historians' group and helping found the eminent journal Past and Present.

Hobsbawm's years of prominence did not begin until his mid-40s, with the 1959 publication of Primitive Rebels, a comparative book about "social bandits," on the wrong side of modernization and the practices they tried to resist the inevitable. The book revealed how penetrating his immense curiosity, harnessed to rigorous sociological categories, could be. By this point he was fully formed intellectually and ideologically and had stabilized his personal life with a fulfilling second marriage and fatherhood. From 1962 to 1994 (by which point he was 77), he published four immensely important "Age of..." books--of Revolution, of Capital, of Empire, of Extremes. Together they analyzed the evolution of--mainly European--capitalism from the French Revolution until the end of the USSR, as epochs of economic development and political class struggles between those in control and those subject to them. The books are convincing Marxian confrontations with "mainstream" historical overviews, even if the histories almost always concluded with capitalism on top. The boss class always finds its ways--sometimes horrific--to block the advances of workers, almost no matter what and how sophisticated the workers were. The books sold millions of copies in multiple translations, were essential for students, historians, and motivated readers, and remain prized in classrooms the world over. Interspersed with them, as Evans underlines, Hobsbawm published highly influential and controversial articles, among them "The Forward March of Labour Halted" (Marxism Today, September 1978) which has turned out to be an important prophecy for our current period.

Evans provides useful summaries of these works, but he is quite as interested in Hobsbawm's life around them. With the huge successes of the Age of books, "life in history" took a rosier turn. The books brought in substantial amounts in royalties and advances--Evans gives us ample details of this--making Hobsbawm prosperous, comfortable, and an international intellectual celebrity. All this helped him travel even more than he had, allowed him to constantly recharge his already extraordinary cerebral data bank, live comfortably in Hampstead (and Wales over summers), frequent and befriend important left political and academic figures, and receive innumerable honorary doctorates. He was also welcomed into the British establishment--a Companion of Honour in 1998 and membership in the Athenaeum Club, among other distinctions. Given his extraordinarily difficult childhood and the undeserved slights of his early professional life, only the most hairshirted and/or envious among us would reproach him for this. When he died, he was buried in Highgate Cemetary, not far from Karl Marx, under a headstone bearing only his name, the dates of his birth and death (1917-2012), and a single word, "historian."

Evans' book has been widely and positively reviewed. A minority of reviews, alas, want us to remember that the Cold War is far from dead, and a few of them unable to see much in Hobsbawm beyond that he was a Communist. At a moment when most Communist Parties are moribund or defunct, this is undoubtedly a method of discounting one of the world's most widely read contemporary historians without acknowledging the importance of his life and work. Hobsbawm never gave an inch to anti-communism, often to a fault. He joined the CPGB following youthful experiences and commitments in Berlin. His CP membership was important at Cambridge in giving him contacts and a community that shared his values and later, in the British CP historians' group and the Past and Present team. He stuck with the party until it expired in the 1990s. Through these years, however, he remained his own man, neither zealot nor disciplined militant, often publicly refusing to be tied to the party's twists and turns. His connections with the party were deeply sentimental, deriving from his personal history, and the CPGB leadership was often unhappy with him, sometimes denouncing and more than once coming close to expelling him. Charles de Gaulle, reflecting about what to do about Jean-Paul Sartre's presences at the barricades during the 1968 student rebellion, decided that "one does not put Voltaire in jail." The British CP leadership seems to have had a similar response to expelling Eric Hobsbawm.

GEORGE ROSS

Universite de Montreal

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Canadian Committee on Labour History
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Ross, George. "Eric Hobsbawm, A Life in History." Labour/Le Travail, vol. 85, spring 2020, pp. 329+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A646860560/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c3a55fa5. Accessed 13 July 2024.

Evans, Richard J. ERIC HOBSBAWM Oxford Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $39.95 4, 1 ISBN: 978-0-19-045964-2

A well-considered life of the influential British historian, written by a Cambridge University historian who himself is well-known for many important works.

With an unusual name that came as a result of an immigration official's misrendering of the original Obstbaum, Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) was unusually erudite at a very early age, well-traveled, and endlessly curious about the ways of the world. He took his birth in the year of the Russian Revolution as something of a talisman, and though Evans (The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, 2015, etc.) deems it a coincidence, it was "one that somehow stood as a symbol for the political commitment he was to gain later on." Already a Marxist as a teen, though one, fellow travelers complained, more given to debate than activism, Hobsbawm was a lifelong polymath who was equally at home in the literature stacks and the historical annals. As Evans enumerates, he devoured detective novels along with the Greek tragedies and works by authors in numerous languages, from Marlowe to Chekhov and beyond. Though a professional chronicler of the past--even the FBI, of which he would run afoul, called him "a noted historian"--Hobsbawm considered himself foremost a writer. His works, such as The Age of Capital (1975), remain widely read today, marked by what Evans justly praises as "readability, analytical penetration and vivid detail." During his long life, Hobsbawm was also a Marxist critic of capitalism, if one who also resisted Stalinism and a fixed party ideology; his opposition to the Vietnam War, for instance, was fierce but nuanced. For all that, as Evans writes with some circumspection, Hobsbawm also enjoyed an active extracurricular life that included a menage a trois as intellectual as it was physical, a surprise in a book full of them.

Evans clearly admires his subject but does not hesitate to consider the rougher edges--a book that will rightly bring new attention to both writers.

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"Evans, Richard J.: ERIC HOBSBAWM." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A571549154/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5224a627. Accessed 13 July 2024.

Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History BY RICHARD J. EVANS. Oxford University Press, 2019, 800 pp.

This biography traces the life of Eric Hobsbawm, one of the greatest historians of the twentieth century and an unrepentant communist. His story, with all its contradictions, parallels that of many radical leftist intellectuals in Europe during the middle of the century. A lower-class Jewish orphan who grew up in Vienna and Berlin during the 1930s, Hobsbawm took to the streets to fight fascists and reasonably concluded that strict solidarity with a radical party was the only way to make political change. He never renounced communism, as so many other leftists ultimately did. But he did come to place greater value on intellectual diversity, tolerant leadership, and grassroots organization within left-wing politics. Hobsbawm's writings helped revolutionize the historical profession. He wrote omnivorously, on banditry, Luddism, local anarchism, rural uprisings, agricultural collectives, and other forms of working-class and peasant resistance to the march of industrialization. In later life, as a respected university professor and BBC lecturer, he penned a series of revisionist Marxist histories of Europe's industrialization, revolutions, and empires that became bestsellers--not least in the developing world, which was then undergoing similar upheavals.

Please Note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
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Moravcsik, Andrew. "Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History BY RICHARD J. EVANS." Foreign Affairs, vol. 98, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 2019, p. 207. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A602995123/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6003d0a2. Accessed 13 July 2024.

"Evans, Richard J.: HITLER'S PEOPLE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A797463087/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e12f9134. Accessed 13 July 2024. Fritze, R. "Evans, Richard J.: The Hitler conspiracies: the protocols--the stab in the back--the Reichstag fire--Rudolf Hess--the escape from the bunker." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 58, no. 11, July 2021, p. 1126. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A666366302/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=94f17578. Accessed 13 July 2024. "Richard J. Evans on Fascism, Today's Right, and Historical Truth." History News Network, 29 Aug. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A673652522/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=da5fcf00. Accessed 13 July 2024. Kynaston, David. "Historical cosmonaut: A national treasure whose politics provoked endless bitterness." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6049, 8 Mar. 2019, pp. 3+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A632057542/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bacb28d8. Accessed 13 July 2024. Ross, George. "Eric Hobsbawm, A Life in History." Labour/Le Travail, vol. 85, spring 2020, pp. 329+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A646860560/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c3a55fa5. Accessed 13 July 2024. "Evans, Richard J.: ERIC HOBSBAWM." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A571549154/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5224a627. Accessed 13 July 2024. Moravcsik, Andrew. "Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History BY RICHARD J. EVANS." Foreign Affairs, vol. 98, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 2019, p. 207. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A602995123/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6003d0a2. Accessed 13 July 2024.

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