This took me a while to get through but I can definitely say I got a lot from it. Hobsbawm writes about the broad strokes of history in this and there's an overload of information that sometimes makes a chapter too much to read in one sitting.

One tendency Hobsbawm has is to roll off various examples and anecdotes in a single sentence, and since he does this often it can be quite dizzying. I do think as a whole though the book works to fill in most of the gaps of the twentieth century, and I really felt like I had a clear picture of the century after reading, but also an awareness of the historical periods I barely know anything about.

There's also some really fantastic observations from Hobsbawm in this, with one example in the final chapter that's been in my head a lot lately being: "After the end of the Cold War, unavowable actions were no longer so easily hidden behind the iron curtain of ‘national security’". Which I think is a really scathing prod at US foreign policy, while also being frighteningly accurate for a book written in 1995.