Historian who excited wide controversy Eric Hobsbawm, who has died at the age of 95, was a historian of the 19th and 20th centuries who in a long life achieved global renown and excited as wide controversy. His three Ages - The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (1962); The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (1975) and The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (1987) - were masterpieces of political, social and, to a lesser degree, economic history in their ability to forge historical narrative and give it life. His series of books, from 1959 onwards, on Primitive Rebels (1959); Bandits (1969) and Captain Swing (1969) unearthed the worlds of 18th and 19th century revolt, seeing in those then condemned as criminals and terrorists the sketch for a more general revolution - one led by the working class, whose world he revealed in Labouring Men (1964) and Worlds of Labour (1984). He was for many years jazz critic of the New Statesman, writing under the name of Francis Newton - and under that name did a fine book, The Jazz Scene (1989), and later brought his political and musical tastes together in Uncommon people: resistance, rebellion and jazz (1998). He hated nationalism in most of its forms: one of his most-read books - and one whose name has become a common phrase - is The invention of tradition (1983: editor, with Terence Ranger), which includes a sharp essay by Hugh Trevor Roper on the English origin of the modern kilt. He was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain for much of his adult life, leaving it a little before it itself left the stage. There is no question that allegiance to the party and to the world communist movement, deeply influenced his historical writing; in his fourth Age - The Age of Extremes: the short twentieth century, 1914-1991 (1995) he was famously reticent or evasive or curt about the vast crimes of Stalinism. He would explain to interviewers, and in his writing, both that "he had made his choice" and that the global threat of Nazism, uniting Communists, Social Democrats, Liberal and Conservatives was the primary struggle, one to which consideration of Stalin's massacres before and during the war had to defer, "the chance of a new world being born amid great suffering would still have been worth backing." At the same time, he was a strong supporter of the reformist communism of Mikhail Gorbachev, and was critical both of Boris Yeltsin (who was later to become Russian president) and the leaders of the various republics, for destabilising them by appealing to ethnic nationalism, once thought long buried. He saw the strife which was unleashed by the end of the USSR - especially in the Caucasus - as underpinning his objections. His main public contribution to mainstream politics in the UK was his essay The Forward March of Labour Halted, where he pointed out - this at a time of great labour union militancy - that the working class could no longer win elections on its own, and thus Labour party leaders would have to seek new alliances. He was accused on the left of paving the way for Tony Blair and New Labour: he disliked Blair, but did embrace the euro communism of the Communist party of Italy (which itself evolved into social democracy) - doing a lengthy interview on the need for the EU with Giorgio Napolitano, then a leading CPI member and now president of Italy. He was born in Alexandria in 1917, of Jewish parents, who both died when he was young. Under the care of his aunt and uncle, he moved to Vienna and Berlin, then to London, thence to Cambridge where he took a doctorate on the Fabian Society - not, for a Communist, a wholly sympathetic organisation. He served in the army during the war, taught after that at Birkbeck College in London and later at the New School of Social Research in New York. His second wife, Marlene, with whom he had two children, Julia and Andy and, from an earlier relationship, a son named Joshua, survive him.