There are details of my books currently in print. And there are copies of articles and reviews and links to other relevant websites. There is a new section with lecture notes and texts as well as interviews.
My latest book is “Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History”, published by Little, Brown in the UK in February 2019 and by Oxford University Press in the USA.
This website is designed for anybody to use who wants to find out more about my work as a historian. I hope you find it useful!
This lecture looks at recent and current research to come up with some surprising answers. Conspiracy theories seem to be everywhere nowadays, encouraged by the internet, and perhaps also by postmodern scepticism. But are they really more common than they … Continue reading
The concluding lecture on The Great Plagues takes the example of HIV/AIDS and discusses how reactions to the epidemic mirrored those found in the social and cultural perception of earlier epidemics. As in earlier epidemics, sufferers have been ostracized, persecuted … Continue reading
Typhus, the subject of the fifth lecture in the series, was caused by a bacterium hosted by the human body louse, and has thus always been associated with dirty and overcrowded conditions and spread above all by armies marching across … Continue reading
‘Asiatic cholera’, which arrived in Europe in the early nineteenth century, was widely seen as Asia’s revenge on Europe for the extension of European empires in the East. During the nineteenth century governments reacted first by trying to establish quarantines, … Continue reading
The third lecture in the series deals with tuberculosis, of all diseases the most widely represented in literature, opera and drama. The disease has been present in humans since prehistory and hence has a particularly long pedigree of representation in … Continue reading
The sexually transmitted disease syphilis is generally thought to have been imported into Europe from the Americas in the late fifteenth century as part of the ‘Columban exchange’, in which other diseases, notably smallpox, travelled in the other direction, with … Continue reading
Bubonic plague first swept Europe in the age of Justinian, in the sixth century, killing an estimated 25 million people in the Byzantine Empire and spreading further west. Its most devastating outbreak was in mid-fourteenth-century Europe, when it destroyed perhaps … Continue reading
European empires, re-divided after the defeat of Germany in 1918, continued to expand after the First World War, reaching their greatest extent in the early 1940s. The imperial ambitions of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany created new empires that turned … Continue reading
This lecture looks at the impact of empire on the colonizers and the colonized. In Europe, ideologies of imperialism emerged, increasingly mingled with racism. These had a material effect on the attitudes of political elites that helped push Europe towards … Continue reading
From the 1880s through to the First World War, European empires slowly imposed their control on the territories that in many cases existed merely on paper. This lecture asks how and why European powers embarked on this trajectory. Often, occupation … Continue reading
In the early 1880s, informal imperial expansion gave way to formal imperial acquisitions. Between this point and the outbreak of the First World War, more colonial territory was acquired by European states than in the previous three-quarters of a century. … Continue reading
