Britain's influential socialist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, dies at 95

Professor Eric Hobsbawm, the British historian and lifelong socialist, has died. He was 95.

Hobsbawm, who was president of Birkbeck College at the University of London, died of pneumonia in the British capital after a long illness, his daughter Julia said yesterday.

His best-known works were a trilogy on what he called the long 19th century, covering the period from the French Revolution in 1789 to the outbreak of the first world war in 1914; and his history of the 20th century, The Age of Extremes. His final book, How to Change the World, was published last year.

"We are certainly not entering an age of peace and quiet," Hobsbawm said in an interview in May. "It's a very problematic age in which nobody really knows what's going to happen but nobody is very optimistic."

Born in Alexandria in Egypt on June 9, 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, he was orphaned by the age of 14. Adopted by his maternal aunt and paternal uncle, the family moved to London from Berlin in 1933.

He became a history lecturer at Birkbeck College at London University in 1947 and was professor of history there between 1970 and 1982. He was a visiting professor after his retirement until 1987, a post he had held in the 1960s at Stanford University in the US. He became president of Birkbeck in 2002.