Eric Hobsbawm’s life began just as the “long nineteenth century” was drawing to a close. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, and formed as a youth in Red Vienna and Weimar-era Berlin, he came to intellectual maturity in interwar Cambridge and postwar London. His Ages tetralogy firmly established him on course syllabi and on the bookshelves of what he called, in The Age of Revolution, “the intelligent and educated citizen, who is not merely curious about the past, but wishes to understand how and why the world has come to be what it is today and whither it is going.” And he was, paradoxically for someone who rose to such popular heights, a proud communist who, for better or worse depending on whom you ask, bound himself to a particular vision of a better future as he bore witness to an epoch he dubbed the “age of extremes.”

Yet despite being, as his biographer Emile Chabal puts it, a “communist polymath, with a remarkable reach over the theoretical and empirical landscape of modern history,” Hobsbawm, unlike many of his continental counterparts, “rarely features in the canon of left-wing or Marxist thought.” Why that is so is one of the questions animating Chabal’s fascinating and wide-ranging new intellectual history, The Age of Hobsbawm.

Chabal is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Edinburgh, and the book’s publication brought him up to St Andrews, Scotland, for an author event at our local independent bookstore. It is a testament to Hobsbawm’s enduring appeal that even now, in a town dominated by golf enthusiasts and posh students, a crowd of unreconstructed Marxists from the 1970s, left-wing autodidacts, and curious graduate students turned up for a spirited discussion of the theory and politics of the twentieth-century left and their prospects today. What follows is an extension of our conversation that evening and an introduction to Hobsbawm’s world and legacy.