Erie Hobsbawm belongs to the generation of Marxist historians who have lived to see Marxism as a system in collapse and their prophet largely discredited though not all of them, of course, admit as much. Hobsbawm is not entirely a lapsed Marxist, but he does not paper over the yawning cracks in its record or soft peddle the sins of Stalinism, and his general approach is that of a shaken humanist rather than an ideologue. He is surely one sided in blaming the Cold War primarily on America, since the Soviet Union had openly and vocally thrown down the gauntlet to capitalism, which it believed must collapse eventually, and did much to foment trouble abroad. And is he being objective when he dismisses Kennedy as being "the most over rated American President of the century?" (The corollary to this is that he is surprisingly kind to Reagan for taking the initiative, as he sees it, in sealing down the arms race). Yet: overall this book, in spite of its apparent blind spots, is eloquent and scholarly and powerfully argued, a genuine think piece which deserves careful reading and rereading. Hobsbawm sees 20th century history as a continuous process whose dynamic derives largely from the first World War and its immediate aftermath he condemns the Versailles Treaty outright, and blames it and the Slump for being the two forcing beds for Nazism. More recently, he sees the economic collapse of the Soviet Union as largely the result of its clinging to outdated industrial ideas and of not catching up with the age of microchip technology, rather than of being forced by America to raise the ante continually on nuclear spending. The final chapter, entitled Towards the Millenium, ends: "We do not know where we are going. We only know that his story has brought us to this point and - if readers share the argument of this book - why. If humanity is to have a recognisable future its cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness.