Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century

'Hobsbawm's talents and expertise are firmly on display' Noel Malcolm, Daily Telegraph

Eric Hobsbawm, one of the most brilliant and original historians of our age, was born almost one hundred years ago and grew up in Vienna and Berlin. His early life placed him perfectly to observe the forthcoming era of titanic social and artistic change. As the twentieth century wore on, bourgeois fin de siècle culture was forcefully confronted by myriad new movements and ideologies, from communism and extreme nationalism to Dadaism to the emergence of information technology. In Fractured Times, Hobsbawm, with characteristic verve and consummate imagination and skill, unpicks a century of such fragmentation, in the last book from one of our greatest modern-day thinkers.

'A historian of exceptional lucidity, with a staggering range and ease of reference . . . As he goes back in time, the essays catch fire . . . They remind us that Hobsbawm didn't only have a commanding knowledge of the history of the 'short 20th century': he lived it, and he gave it a name' Sam Leith, Spectator

'Fractured Times shows this revolutionary traditionalist at his best . . . No historian was better at deploying a killer fact to make an argument stick in your mind' Nick Cohen, Guardian