Historian Eric Hobsbawm spent decades writing some of the most widely read accounts of modern history, from The Age of Revolution to his memoir Interesting Times, while remaining an unrepentant Marxist long after most of his contemporaries had moved on. Produced with the London Review of Books, this film traces his life from a childhood in Vienna and Berlin through emigration to Britain, his academic career at Birkbeck, and the political commitments that shaped both his scholarship and his public reputation. Colleagues, fellow historians, and archival interview footage of Hobsbawm himself are used to examine how a lifelong communist became one of the most respected historians in the English-speaking world, and why his politics remained a source of argument even among admirers. The film treats his ideas and his contradictions with equal seriousness, using his own books and lectures as evidence rather than settling the debate over his legacy for the viewer.