As a result of this thread, I realised I was missing a copy of Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution. It arrived just this morning and includes the following quote from a review by AJP Taylor, himself no slouch when it came to relating history. "A brilliant account of Europe in its revolutionary age..... No-one could ask for more".

A selective quote without a doubt, and it would be interesting to see whether the rest of Taylor's review was quite as fulsome. Even so, there are three other review quotes on the back cover, all of them from highly respected sources. They all use the word brilliant.

An apologist for Stalinism, or a Marxist equivalent of David Irving, EJ Hobsbawm most certainly was not.