There was less to Eric Hobsbawm than met the eye. By the standards of British professors in the late 20th century he led an exciting life, but these are not high standards. Born in 1917, his upbringing, first in Vienna and then in Berlin, gave him a certain exoticism. He was Jewish and would have faced danger in the late 1930s had he stayed in Germany. But he had a British passport and was easily able to move to England, where he lived for the rest of his life, bar research trips and a spell in New York at the New School for Social Research. He described himself as a ‘participant observer’, but he observed more than he participated. Though he was a communist, he did not fight in the Spanish Civil War and he was not recruited as a Soviet spy. He served mainly in the Army Educational Corps during the Second World War.

There have already been three biographies of Hobsbawm (including his own autobiography and a memoir by his widow). Is there anything new to say? As it turns out, there is and Emile Chabal is well qualified to say it. This is partly because Chabal – a historian of France and the son of a Moroccan-born historian of the Lusophone world – is not overawed by Hobsbawm’s cosmopolitanism. He is also familiar with cultures in which communism has been a powerful force and in which people who have been communists are expected to account for their political choices. Chabal does not, unlike many British historians of an older generation, treat Hobsbawm’s membership of a party that once pledged unqualified loyalty to Stalin as a minor eccentricity on which it would be ill-mannered to dwell.

Apart from a tantalising aside about a ‘complex and complexed’ attitude to sex, Chabal maintains an old-fashioned, and admirable, reticence about Hobsbawm’s private life, though it would have been good to know more about his brief and unhappy first marriage to a communist of working-class origin. Chabal’s main focus is