Historian Eric Hobsbawm has died. We send our condolences to his family and friends, but Hobsbawm was a political figure — he deserves to be judged and commented on politically.
Unfortunately, Hobsbawm was not the "Marxist historian" he is usually described as, but a Stalinist, through many twists and turns, to the very end. He was also one of the Communist Party intellectuals who provided the Labour right with a theoretical justification for their retreat from anything resembling class politics during the 1980s.
We will print an obituary soon [we did - see here]. Meanwhile:
Comment on Eric Hobsbawm's 2007 Guardian article on the Spanish revolution