Volume 32, Number 19 · December 5, 1985
Master of Exceptions
By Roy Foster
Workers: Worlds of Labor
by Eric Hobsbawm
Pantheon, 369 pp., $11.95 (paper)
Last year a touching and curious film was shown on British television. It consisted essentially of home movies made by a left-wing Cambridge undergraduate in 1939; the jerky camera captured and preserved moments of uncomplicated political activity on marches and in discussion groups, shared by a jeunesse engagée perched on the edge of apocalypse. Many of the faces who smiled self-consciously into the camera were fated for oblivion; but every now and then one caught a fascinating glimpse of features doomed later to prominence. Among these appeared the unmistakable aquiline profile of Eric Hobsbawm, sardonically amused and strangely unchanged. Amid all those round English faces, curly hair, cheerful tweedy earnestness, he looked affectionate but abstracted, as if he were already marching to different music.
Review, 3572 words
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