Books, Arts & Manners

The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, by Eric Hobsbawm (Pantheon, 627 pp., $30)

WITHIN the former Soviet bloc, nobody of any repute has appeared to defend Communism or to lament its demise. It has been left to a veteran Communist in the West, Eric Hobsbawm, to do that. Often he refers to Communism as “socialism,” but that is wordplay. A key sentence of his book reads: “The failure of Soviet socialism does not reflect on the possibility of other kinds of socialism.” The whole murderous enterprise would start again, if he had his way.

About the Author

David Pryce-Jones

David Pryce-Jones (1936–2025) was a British author and commentator and served as a senior editor of National Review.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

History

The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, by Eric Hobsbawm (Pantheon, 627 pp., $30)

WITHIN the former Soviet bloc, nobody of any repute has appeared to defend Communism or to lament its demise. It has been left to a veteran Communist in the West, Eric Hobsbawm, to do that. Often he refers to Communism as “socialism,” but that is wordplay. A key sentence of his book reads: “The failure of Soviet socialism does not reflect on the possibility of other kinds of socialism.” The whole murderous enterprise would start again, if he had his way.