From the other came more measured accounts of his professional triumphs and the vagaries of his private life, punctuated by a steady drip of regret that he had never felt able to recant his support for the Soviet regimes of the 1930s. Even the Observer review by Neil Ascherson, a one-time pupil who spoke at his memorial service, admitted that his former tutor’s political statements up until 1956 – the year of the Hungarian uprising – “make unhappy reading”.

There is a quite a bit of unhappy reading in Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, which turns out to be overlong (650 pages of text plus another 100 or so of end-notes), over-admiring, over-defensive, and heroically over-absorbed in such weighty matters as the editorial finesse brought to bear on its subject’s autobiography, Interesting Times.

On the other hand, there are two areas in which Evans –  Regius Professor of History emeritus at Cambridge and a world authority on the Third Reich – scores highly. The first is what might be called the question of Hobsbawm’s political upbringing in pre-Nazi Germany, from which his businessman father sprang him in 1933. The second takes in his conception of what the role of a Left-wing historian in a western parliamentary democracy ought to be.

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Today's voguish communists should remember Budapest

By James Bloodworth

To return to the intimations of contempt, there is no getting away from Hobsbawm’s inflexibility over Stalin, for it runs through his career like quartz through a rock. All very well for Evans to protest that the question put to him by Michael Ignatieff in a notorious TV interview (“What it comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?”) was “hypothetical”, but the fact remains that Ignatieff asked it and Hobsbawm by no means reluctantly answered “yes”. To Evans, the explanation lies in “tribal” loyalties: the reaction of a teenager who had seen Nazism at work, clung limpet-like to the only force he believed to be capable of opposing it, and could never quite bring himself to forswear the affiliations of his formative years.

Communism, to Hobsbawm, was never a ‘God that failed’, to borrow the title of that famous symposium from 1949 by a collective of ex-Communists headed by Arthur Koestler; it was simply a God who had made the fatal mistake of manifesting himself in the wrong place and at the wrong time: come the collapse of the Berlin Wall, he veered much closer to the traditional territory of the Labour pragmatist, for whom even an electoral pact with the LibDems was not too insensate a step if it meant the end of the hated Tories.

But as well as being a tribalist, Hobsbawm was also, as Evans shows in extravagant detail, a classic example of a type of apparatchik that Left-wing political parties of the 20th century, whether British or continental, have always hastened to attract: the intellectual guru.

In fact, Hobsbawm’s guru status, if such it was, looks to have arrived comparatively late on. He was already in his mid-sixties when he began to interview titans of the Labour movement for Marxism Today, and Evans offers amusing accounts of his sit-downs with such politicians as Tony Benn (whose diary suggests that he barely knew who his interlocutor was) and a waffling Neil Kinnock. As for his achievements in this line, Evans claims that Tony Blair “clearly felt he owed a debt to Eric for the part he had played in laying the intellectual foundations for New Labour”. And as for what this role might have amounted to, Evans is convinced that Hobsbawm helped bring about “the reorientation of the party towards an appeal to intellectuals in the broadest sense, to professionals and the urban middle classes as well as to its traditional base among the manual working class”.

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By Douglas Murray

If this makes the Sage of Nassington Road – no surprise to find that the Hobsbawms lived in Hampstead and gave glamorous parties there – sound like a reformed Bolshevik gaily welcoming the Mensheviks back on board, then it should immediately be said that the guru has a long and relatively distinguished history in 20th-century British political life. If, on the Left, the role was occupied at various times by such luminaries as Keynes, Harold Laski, G.D.H. Cole and Anthony Crosland (a bona-fide Labour intellectual whose The Future of Socialism (1956) was the first serious attempt to introduce his party to consumer materialism’s encroaching tide), then the Right, too, nearly always possessed a band of intellectual heavy infantry waiting for a chance to scuttle out into no-man’s land and lob a bomb into the nearest social democratic trench.

This was especially true of the Thatcherite revolution of the early Eighties. If Mrs Thatcher was, as Sir Alfred Sherman once put it, “a person of belief rather than ideas”, then her fascination with clever men and the intellectual ballast they could bring to the task of policy formulation was undimmed. Sir Keith Joseph; Sherman himself; the stalwarts of the Institute for Economic Affairs: all them played a part in Thatcherism’s unveiling 40 years ago and the different kinds of Conservatism let rip across the body politic in the decade that followed.

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It would be overstating the case, here in 2019, to claim that the ‘party intellectual’ is more or less extinct, for there are still gurus busily at work on either side – Lord Willetts, say, for the Conservatives, or Paul Mason, the author of Postcapitalism, for Labour. But the Hobsbawm figure – the Hampstead intellectual with his Marxist quotation, falling over himself to remind you what Bevan said to Conference in 1953 – is as dead as the dodo.

Part of this, naturally, has to do with the widespread distrust of intellectualism that infects modern politics like a distemper, and set against which the Wilson cabinet, with its clutch of Oxford firsts, looks like a meeting of the British Academy. But another part has to do with the changing nature of political loyalties. Hobsbawm’s ‘tribe’ was the pre-war Communists, a political grouping whose ideology was founded on class and hostility to nationalism and in which women were barely allowed a ringside seat. In much the same way, most of the thinking of the current Corbyn Labour Party harks back to the kind of municipal-cum-Trade Union anti-European socialism in whose crucible its leaders were forged all of 40 years ago.

None of this, alas, cuts much ice with the 20- and 30-somethings who flocked to join the party after the 2015 election, for their tribal loyalties have moved on from social class to take in such items as identity, gender and eco-activism, while the communities that sustain them are more likely to be found in cyberspace than committee rooms in London N1.

The new Hobsbawm, if such a guru could now exist, would – you might hope – be a Crosland-style figure, capable of squaring the need for state intervention with the right to personal and economic freedom and reconnoitring the very considerable task of how to live decently in an increasingly pluralist age. The Hobsbawm of Richard J. Evans’ biography was, by the end of his long life, not so much an “evil sod” as an anachronism.

The ticket inspector comes through. Lilac puts his feet on the floor and shows his ticket. “Surprised he’s got one,” I think, smugly, holding up my season card. The inspector doesn’t acknowledge my smile: few people do once you hit middle-age, I find. Or maybe she read my thoughts. But what’s this? “I like your hair!” she trills at Lilac. He grins, and I see him, properly, for the first time, and realise: in another life, I would have found him beautiful.

But not in this one. What’s going on? Leave this middle-aged scowling fool for a while. We’ll come back to him, but I’m hungry now, so let’s grab something to eat.

How about a Gregg’s? Sausage roll, yum yum. Except I’m vegetarian, and don’t eat (porky) sausages. (Insert puerile joke here). But on Tuesday Gregg’s launched a rather nice-looking sausage roll that’s free from any animal products. A bona fide vegan roll is on the High Street: Listen To Your Belly Groan!

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By John Gray

Surely, in a country ripped apart by Brexit, on a planet choking in its plastic waste, lost in its unimportant corner of a coldly indifferent universe: surely the arrival of a sausage roll that vegetarians can eat is a simple Good Thing.

No. Because: vegan. Plant-based foods invoke the same reaction in many that lilac-dyed hair does in me: a sign-based trigger, and on social media (where else?) all hell broke loose. Piers Morgan: “No-one was waiting for a vegan sausage, you PC-ravaged clowns.” Danny Baker: “Call it a vegetable extract mush roll”. The kerfuffle over the insertion of processed soya into a puff pastry blanket led UnHerd writer Julie Bindel to remark, caustically: “This is a major atrocity and human rights violation.”

Choices we make, about hair colour or food or many other things, have developed a meaning that transcends their actuality. This is very, very weird, if you think about it: the food I eat should have literally zero bearing on my views about politics. Your hair colour should contain literally no information about your vote.

But the statistician in me, who looks for patterns and imbues them with meaning for a living, won’t accept that. It’s simply not true that a randomly-selected vegetarian is as likely to be Tory Graeme as he is to be Labour Jeremy; the vegan activists who annoy Brighton’s restaurant customers are hard-Left ‘social justice warriors’. Equally, I’d be pretty confident that while the link between dyeing one’s hair pink and choosing to march through central London screaming about “austerity” would be weak, it would still, however, be positive.

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Why do the elites despise the 'aspidistra class'?

By Graeme Archer

We all do this – imbue meaning to signs – what’s more, we must, because without them you can’t draw a map to navigate life, and without learning the meaning of the signs on the map, you’d just be blundering around in a life-long game of blind man’s buff. Willfully to understand nothing beyond immediate sensation, and never to recall similar sensations from the past, is never to learn from experience.

But it’s gone wrong: a vicious circle has taken hold. Because of the mild correlation between signs and politics, irrelevant facets of our make-up are fashioned into the armour of our caste: signage as tribe. I’ve heard myself in recent years apologising to guests for my diet, not because I worry they’ll dislike lentils, but because of what I fear they’ll infer about my politics.

I’d call this the age of semiotics, and it has terrible consequences. As more and more signs are tribalised, so the deconstruction of signs – semiotics – has become our chief political diagnostic: Pink hair? Vegan? Probably a Corbyn supporter, so probably anti-Semitic. Safely hated. Or: England flag in window? White working-class? Probably a Leave voter, so probably a racist. Safely hated. I haven’t even mentioned the hijab. Or the saltire. It’s like looking at a street sign and deliberately believing that name tells you everything about the infinitely-varied human life on the street itself. Everything.

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Why does the Left hate gay Tories?

By Graeme Archer

When signs become politics, everything suffers, including – of course – art. What Sarah Phelps, the writer of ‘The ABC Murders’ this Christmas, seems unable to understand is that it’s not her politics that enrages (most of the writers I revere are of the Left), but her lazy signage, that ahistorical projection of Brexit onto 1930s fascism.

Agitprop writers aren’t angry young men kicking against the class system for its iniquity and waste of talent, in the hope of changing society, as in the 1950s. Rather, they’re complacent middle-aged men and women, flagging their politics for the adulation of everyone else in their tribe, and to hell with the rest of you. That’s not art; it’s political painting by numbers. (Read Niall Gooch’s superb review here.)

The solution to this isn’t ‘big’, but it does require courage. Once, in a more innocent time – all of thirty years ago – my father was driving me down Great Western Road to my student digs in Glasgow, and we passed a green-haired girl pushing her bike up from the Kelvin river-path (to feel the city air rush past her body, in the words of the beautiful song.) Isn’t it great, mused my dyed-in-the-wool Conservative father, isn’t it great that there’s a space for everyone to be themselves?

Even at the time I knew he was speaking to me and about me, his newly gay son. My father had the ability to note signs but not to be skewed by them; to see them, but never to assume that life is no more than its visible surface. He never reduced me to the sum of my labels.

No more should the rest of us. Look up from the rolling countryside outside, Graeme. Look at the man across from you on the train, and smile. Who knows? Maybe you can share a vegan sausage roll. Next stop: Stevenage, where this train terminates. All change, please.