Short answers, pulled from the story.
Eric Hobsbawm was best known for his four-volume history of the modern era: The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes. He also coined the term "long nineteenth century" and edited the volume that introduced the concept of "invented traditions".
Hobsbawm was a lifelong Marxist who joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1936 and retained his membership until shortly before the party dissolved in 1991. He remained in the party even after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, when thousands of other British Communist Party members resigned.
Eric Hobsbawm was born on the 9th of June 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt. He spent his early childhood in Vienna and Berlin before moving to London in 1933 after the Nazi Party came to power, enrolling at St Marylebone Grammar School.
In a 1994 BBC television interview with Michael Ignatieff, Hobsbawm said that the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens under Stalin would have been worth it if a genuinely communist society had resulted. He repeated a similar position the following year on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs.
Hobsbawm received the Balzan Prize for European History since 1900 in 2003, was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1998, became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1976, and was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971. He was named the third most important historian of the previous 60 years in a 2011 History Today poll.
Hobsbawm wrote his jazz column for the New Statesman under the pseudonym Francis Newton, a name taken from Frankie Newton, Billie Holiday's communist trumpet player. He had become interested in jazz during the 1930s, when the Communist Party disapproved of it.