"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