Born in 1917 the year of the Russian Revolution the eighty-five years of Eric Hobsbawms life are backdropped by an endless litany of wars revolutions & counter-revolutions. He has led a remarkably fulfilling & long life; historian & intellectual fluent in five languages a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain until it dissolved itself & writer of countless volumes of history. He has personally witnessed some of the critical events of our century from Hitlers rise to power in Berlin to the fall of the Berlin wall. Hobsbawm has kept his eyes & ears open for eighty-five years & has been constantly committed to understanding the interesting times (as the Chinese curse puts it) through which he has lived. His autobiography is one passionate cosmopolitan Jews account of his travels through that past which is another country where they do things differently & how it became the world we now live in.