Eric Hobsbawm's final book to be published in 2013

Fractured Spring, the final collection of writing from the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who died this week, will be published next March

• Share159
• Email

• Alison Flood
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 3 October 2012 15.12 BST

Eric Hobsbawm. Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe for the Guardian

Delivered to his publisher three months before he died, Eric Hobsbawm's final book, an "incredibly wide-ranging" collection of studies, will be published next spring.

Hobsbawm, a Marxist and one of the 20th century's most respected historians, died on Monday, aged 95. He left behind a wealth of works, capped by his four-volume Age of … series, a history of the 19th and 20th centuries which his fellow historian Niall Ferguson called "the best starting point I know for anyone who wishes to begin studying modern history".

His publisher Little, Brown said today that Hobsbawm handed in his final book, Fractured Spring, three months ago, and it will be published in March. Described as a collection of studies on "the history of the 'classical' arts and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries, written by one of Britain's foremost political historians, taking in subjects as diverse as religion, manifestos and the myth of the America cowboy", Fractured Spring is an exploration of culture and society in the 20th century.

Hobsbawm's editor Richard Beswick called it an "incredibly wide-ranging" book. "It covers the effects of the 20th century revolution in science and technology and the way mass consumer society generated an explosion in the potential of western economies," he said. "Culturally he explores the extraordinary changes in the 20th century, from the decline of the most elite arts to the figure of the Alpha male, swaggering cowboy figure of mid-century America."