The life and times of Stalin's last apologist and Britain's best-known Marxist historian

'In 1990, Hobsbawm embarrassedly asserted that nations are no longer "a feasible project" just when the nations of Eastern Europe, now free from Soviet Tyranny, reasserted themselves'

'I've come to the conclusion that revolution is something you can't make It's a happening rather than a planned operation and attempts to force it don't quite work out'

Our 'national teddy bear' of an historian has got it wrong more times than he would like mentioned