Born at the turn of the 20th century & raised in Vienna Eric Hobsbawm who was to become one of the most brilliant & original historians of our age was uniquely placed to observe an era of titanic social & artistic change. As the century progressed the forces of Communism & Dadaism Ibiza & cyberspace would do battle with the bourgeois high culture fin-de-siecle Vienna represented
- the opera the Burgtheater the museums of art & science City Hall. In Fractured Times Hobsbawm unpicks a century of cultural fragmentation & dissolution with characteristic verve & vigour. Hobsbawm examines the conditions that created the great cultural flowering of the belle epoque & held the seeds of its disintegration from paternalistic capitalism to globalisation & the arrival of a mass consumer society. Passionate but never sentimental Hobsbawm ranges freely across his subject: he records the passing of the golden age of the free intellectual & examines the lives of great forgotten men; he analyses the relation between art & totalitarianism & dissects cultural phenomena as diverse as surrealism womens emancipation & the American cowboy myth. Written with consummate imagination & skill Fractured Times is the last book from one of our greatest modern-day thinkers.