Eric Hobsbawm, who passed away in 2012, was one of the most brilliant and original historians of our age. Through his work, he observed the great twentieth-century confrontation between bourgeois fin de siècle culture and 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, unpacks a century of cultural fragmentation. Hobsbawm examines the conditions that both created the flowering of the belle époque and held the seeds of its disintegration: paternalistic capitalism, globalization, and the arrival of a mass consumer society. Passionate but never sentimental, he ranges freely across subjects as diverse as classical music, the fine arts, rock music, and sculpture. He records the passing of the golden age of the “free intellectual” and explores the lives of forgotten greats; analyzes the relationship between art and totalitarianism; and dissects phenomena as diverse as surrealism, art nouveau, the emancipation of women, and the myth of the American cowboy. Written with consummate imagination and skill, Fractured Times is the last book from one of our greatest modern-day thinkers. By the time of his death, in 2012, Hobsbawm was one of a small handful of serious historians to enjoy worldwide recognition, even celebrity. That he was a lifelong committed Marxist in a world that by his later years had largely come to reject Marxism in its more overt forms did not diminish—and may even have amplified—his renown. Yet in the end, he will likely be remembered not for his politics but for the breadth of his knowledge and the suppleness of his arguments. Both are on ample display in this selection, which collects a variety of speeches, essays, and book reviews from late in Hobsbawm’s career. For the most part, they address the twentieth century and the various forms of fragmentation and failure that it dealt to the artistic and intellectual ideals of high culture. His erudition is on particularly robust display in pieces on the social function of the work of scientists Joseph Needham and John Desmond Bernal, for example, and in a succinct dissection of his fellow Viennese thinker Karl Kraus. An essay on the myth of the American cowboy also asks serious questions about the cultural significance of animal herders in Western culture. Despite some flat moments when Hobsbawm turns from the past to speculate about the future, this is a pithy and varied collection that Hobsbawm’s many fans will appreciate. --Brendan Driscoll Praise for Fractured Times : "Hobsbawm speaks to the crucial need for engaged public intellectuals and the kind of rigorous social and political analysis so well represented by these urgent and important essays." ― Kirkus Reviews " Fractured Times shows this revolutionary traditionalist at his best. It is an account of the collapse of the high bourgeois culture of the nineteenth century, and an examination of the ruins it left behind in the twentieth century." ― The Guardian "Eric Hobsbawm's Fractured Times is a fascinating engagement with the culture of modernity by its most brilliant and insightful historian. Whether he is writing about Jewish emancipation, the avant garde, the Western, Karl Kraus or forties jazz, these penetrating reflections of a participant observer are guaranteed to take you deeper into the perplexities of the modern than anything you have read before." ―Robin Blackburn, Distinguished Visiting Professor of History, The New School "In this wonderful collection of essays, Hobsbawm gives a theoretically informed and historically sensitive reflection on the cultural manifestations of advanced capitalism. Whether commenting on the gradual demise of classical music or the rise of the phenomenon of celebrity, the range of his knowledge is remarkable, only surpassed by his ability to integrate diverse insights into a coherent vision. This book not only confirms Hobsbawm as a great historian and political thinker but is also a compelling contribution to critical theory." ―Patrick Baert, Professor of Social Theory, University of Cambridge "Only Eric Hobsbawm could have written these engaging and moving evocations of the European world to which he was born and which is now only a memory. When he writes of culture, he writes of himself: at odds with the world, filled with its possibilities, both injured by it and alert to its paradoxes. These essays are the fruits of a master, the likes of which we will not see again." ―Jay Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History, Yale University "Punctuated by the four volumes The Age of Revolution , The Age of Capital , The Age of Empire and The Age of Extremes , the works of Eric Hobsbawm served for many of us as indispensable guides to the history of our own time. With his death in 2012, the modern world lost one of its greatest and most controversial historians. This volume of his last essays