For years before his death in 2012, Eric Hobsbawm was the best-known and most widely read historian in the world, a public intellectual and an influential spokesman for the Left, in Britain and abroad. In this biography, Evans quotes from Hobsbawm’s own writings across many genres, including autobiography, to trace ‘a life in history’, from the young communist in the Weimar Republic to an active old age, still committed to the idea of Communism and still writing in his tenth decade.