Hello I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1995,

and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a historian, a lifelong communist, his series of books on the history of the 19th century

are regarded by many as seminal works of scholarship. In his latest work, the Age of Extremes,

he's turned his attention to the 20th century to equal critical acclaim.

His Marxist beliefs have not made his life easy, and in the early years, particularly academic promotion came slowly.

He takes a detached view of these matters.

Much of my life, he admitted recently, has been devoted to a cause that has plainly failed,

but there is nothing that can sharpen the historian's mind like defeat.

He is Eric Hobbsborn.

So you admit defeat, do you, Professor Hobbsborn, that Marxist Leninism is a dead duck?

The Soviet Union and the October Revolution, to which in my very young teenage

I committed myself, has obviously been defeated and won't return again.

I don't think the cause has been defeated, but at least it will not be realized if at all in the way in which we thought it was going to be realized.

And why was it defeated if I can ask you a very simple question which I'm sure has a complicated answer?

But it's principles of course you would

still argue are right. Would you say that it's therefore been distorted in practice?

Yes it was attempted it seemed to me in a country in which none of the conditions for trying

to build a socialist society were present.

But you've spent practically all of your conscious life devoted to the principles, the dream of this communist utopia.

Is your ability to intellectualise the reasons for its demise constant or do you sometimes

...