Eric Hobsbawm dies aged 95 He will be greatly missed not just by his wife of 50 years, Marlene, and his three children, seven grandchildren and great grandchild, but also by his many thousands of readers and students around the world. Born on June 9, 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt, Hobsbawm was schooled in Vienna in the interwar period before leaving for Berlin in 1931. He fled to London two years later when the Nazis came to power in Germany. After reading history at Cambridge, Hobsbawm began teaching in 1947 at Birkbeck College in London. Hobsbawm was a Marxist and a long-standing member of the now disbanded Communist Party of Great Britain. In 1998, the Blair government made him a Companion of Honour. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.