Left behind

Roger Morgan’s review of the late Eric Hobsbawm’s Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the 20th Century (“Fragmentation of a framework”, Books, 11 April) remarks on the historian’s “long-held Marxist viewpoint; bourgeois capitalism was in any case doomed to disappear, giving way to some form of socialism”.

Yet Morgan also notes Hobsbawm’s comment that “actually it is inappropriate to ask a historian what culture will look like in the next millennium. We are experts in the past. We are not concerned with the future.” Is this not the most extraordinary retreat from the confident Marxian prediction of revolution?

Nigel Probert
Porthmadog