The Age of Revolution; Europe 1789-1848 - E.J. Hobsbawm

I read the first half of this hefty history in a bit of a haze, thanks to my flaky knowledge of the period between the French Revolution and the 1848 failed European revolutions, taking in the British Industrial Revolution. The fog of class war, if you will.

I was much more at home in the second half which takes a thematic line. Each chapter, on such topics as religious ideology, the arts and science, felt like a listening to an episode of In Our Time, of which I am a devotee.

Here’s a taste of Hobsbawm’s lovely and opinionated writing style, on Rousseau:

The views of this disagreeable, neurotic, but, alas, great man need not concern us in detail