Eric Hobsbawm remains one of the great figures of twentieth-century cultural and economic history, a thinker distinguished less by his articulation and defense of a distinctive historiographical style or method than by his exceedingly broad conceptual and thematic ranges of reference, and by the originality, topicality, and suppleness of his Marxist cultural-critical analyses. The incisiveness of his meditations on a diverse array of phenomena, all of enduring intellectual and political import--including nineteenth-century and contemporary working-class cultures, modern jazz, nationalism, globalization, avant-gardism, and banditry--distinguish Hobsbawm as perhaps the preeminent intellectual cosmopolitan of his generation, a reputation secured over the course of a distinguished academic career spanning more than fifty years.

Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt, on 9 June 1917 to Leopold Hobsbawm and Nelly (née Grün), the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant to the East End of London and his Viennese wife...