Historian Eric Hobsbawm died this morning of pneumonia at the age of 95. The BBC report of his death is here, with an obituary here. Unrepentantly Marxist in his orientation to "doing history," Hobsbawm has had a profound influence within not only the discipline of history but also in other cognate disciplines.
Among his many significant works, I personally find his introductory and concluding essays to The Invention of Tradition (1993), co-edited with Terence Ranger, truly remarkable. His three-volume history of the long nineteenth century (The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848; The Age of Capital, 1848-1875; The Age of Empire, 1875-1914, supplemented by The Age of Extremes: a History of the World, 1914-1991) and his Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality are essential must-read critical discussions of capitalism, nationalism and the invention of the myths of "modernity."
Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale...