Eric Hobsbawm

Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria to British and Austrian Jewish parents and raised in Vienna and Berlin, witnessing the rise of Adolf Hitler firsthand before emigrating to England in 1933. He studied at King's College, Cambridge, and taught at Birkbeck, University of London.

Hobsbawm was one of the most widely read historians in the world, renowned for coining the concepts of the 'dual revolution' (French political and British industrial revolutions), the 'long nineteenth century' (1789–1914), and the 'short twentieth century' (1914–1991). His 1994 opus 'The Age of Extremes' was translated into more than forty languages.