16-year-old Nikki Hollis said: “I’ve had tickets to his talk about the Spanish Civil War at the O2 Arena for months, it was the first time I was going to see a Marxist historian live.

“Me and Becky would have been in the fifth row centre aisle, so when he talked about the war being a war of intellectuals it would have been like he was saying it just to us.

“Eric was our hero-storian.”

The Historian Death Helpline, first set up after the wave of teen suicides following the death of AJP Taylor in 1990, has been flooded with calls from distraught fans for whom narrative history has become an obsession.

via Teen vigil at Hobsbawm house.

Quite. Mockery is fair. Compare:

In his dotage in 1994 a respected academic historian, author of bestselling books, and lifelong Marxist was interviewed for the Times Literary Supplement about his youthful commitment to Stalin. The interviewer asked “What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?”

Eric Hobsbawm, who died yesterday aged 95, replied instantly; “Yes”

…an article which goes on to say: Hobsbawm was the Marxist version of David Irving. Why is his death any more worthy of mourning?