Description: A master historian's account of the middle-class world of our grandparents and how its sudden collapse in World War I laid the basis for the catastrophes of the 20th century. 54 photos, maps, charts.
Review Quotes: "Its sheer power and eloquence will make this book a classic." --Neal Ascherson, Sunday Observer (London)
"It is Mr. Hobsbawm's achievement both to have captured the exuberance of an age, and to have shown how and why that world was coming to an end. . . . He not only captures the age of empire he also illuminates the course of the twentieth century." --Kennedy, The Economist (London) "A virtuoso performance. . . . Few, if any, present practitioners of the historian's craft can equal. the astonishing range and dazzling erudition of Mr. Hobsbawm's scholarship." --David M. Kennedy, The New York Times Book Review "A splendid answer to those critics who complain that academic historians no longer write readable prose. . . . The great strength of this book is the way in which what seems in so many ways a wholly vanished epoch is related to our situation today." --James Joll, The New York Review of Books