Eric Hobsbawm: he loved a battle of ideas On stage that day, he also displayed those qualities that made him such a great scholar and undaunted public intellectual: a cosmopolitan breadth of learning, a profound analytical insight, and a descriptive ability to recall historical periods as if he had been there himself (which, in some cases, he had). And while he gave voice to social classes and marginalised groups often under-represented by the traditional writing of history, he also used the colour and characters of the past to craft histories for a broad, public readership. Like GM Trevelyan, he wanted his histories on the bedside table and, whilst Hobsbawm could certainly give as good as he got, he never lost himself in the pedantry and footnote point-scoring of so much academic work. Instead, his life's work as a scholar was a sustained rejection of the ethos he found at work in the post-war Cambridge University History Department, which he found "self-satisfied, insular, culturally provincial, deeply prejudiced against theories, explanations and ideas, and even against too much professionalism - suspicious of anything that came too close to the present." His purpose was to disavow that way of doing history. Hobsbawm's historical sweep would begin with the social and economic foundations, but go on to encompass cultural, intellectual, literary and socialist history right around the world. He brought a rancourous, Continental bravura to the staid ethos of British academia. Which is why he found the debate and drama of events like the Hay Festival - of which he was President - so satisfying. He wanted his works acknowledged, disputed, and even denounced. Since his death on Sunday night, that discussion has been taking place in Manchester, Kolkatta, Rome, Brasilia and Harvard. An historian can ask for little more. And it is what Hobsbawm's extraordinary scholarship and status deserves. Tristram Hunt, MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central, is the author of 'The Frock-Coated Communist', a Life of Friedrich Engels