Well, I woke up today with a sore head and a signed copy of Eric Hobsbawm's Uncommon People by my bed. How did this come to pass? With a little mutual encouragement between Jona and I, and Dutch courage courtesy of Marker's Mark bourbon.

I had heard EH was talking in Foyle’s around now but I'd lost the precise date. Jona calls me yesterday "It's today. I'll get tickets." This it rather exciting news and I feel enormously let down when I get a text telling me the event has been sold out for days. Recognising that this may be the last chance to catch the 86-year-old legendary historian I resolve that we'll go anyway and try and blag our way in.

On the way of course we pop in to a pub to discuss what approach is likely to be most effective and consider options over a couple of glasses of this tasty bourbon. After the first drink we elect to play it by ear ("like jazz!") and improvise in response to events ("what would Derren Brown do?"). So, excited we head over to the store and head up to the second floor. Whilst I'm still composing my opening line we edge toward and then past the ticket collector, Jona steaming in and me directing him to the free wine bar. As too often I am reminded that, left to my own devices, I will invariably over complicate matters when a simpler option is more likely to be successful.

Hobsbawm is promoting the paperback realise of his memoir Interesting Times and talks about his life, the sense of impermanence created by having lived so long and seeing such profound change ("the colonialist world that constituted "concrete" realism when I was growing up had every bit as much a sense of permanence as US economic imperialism has today") and then takes questions from the floor. By this time a growing sense of frustration with EH is present in me that, whilst his analysis is one which strikes me as both carefully crafted, persuasive scholarship and also as correct, his failure to extend his thought (this is perhaps unfair since after all he is a historian) to anything other than very vague prescriptions in favour of "tackling global injustice" is perhaps somewhat reformist. What I seemed to be faced with is an honest intellectual who in virtue of his honesty, which contrasts so clearly with the emperor's new clothes-ness of Huntingdon-Berman-Bobitt-Fukuyama-Kagan etc, is characterised as a radical! Hobsbawm offers an account of history that is unsympathetic to the prevailing power structure and demands progress in response. So, I asked him whether this progress, the change he was looking for contra "global injustice" (his words) was best achieved via the ballot box or through alternative, revolutionary means - adding "do we need leaders?" as an after thought to point him to comment on who makes history. He replied that the possibilities of revolution in advanced societies are highly limited and probably untenable. On the other hand, he pointed out that the ballot box was rendered virtually useless by now due to the limited democratic input (once every five years) and the subversion of the process to simple brand recognition (cf. governor Arnold and Berlusconi).

I wasn't sure whether he was taking the Arthur MacEwan line that democratic institutions are only purposive if they reflect popular social movements - that is if they are engaged and engaging citizens. Or whether he was pointing to Alan's Dilemma, moderate affluence (big TV’s relatively cheap... people isolated so even if they're disaffected they're likely to feel that they're alone in this...) equals apathy = standard violent revolution unlikely AND despite technically having the legal right to replace all of evil government with entirely new set of individuals with a mandate to actually improve society, the propaganda model encourages mindless consumption and general apathy, particularly towards political process ("why should we be paupers with the ballot in out hand?" = because we're too retarded to cash our cheque) = same old shit. Either way he wasn't offering any insight into the opportunities and dangers ahead. He did please me immensely when some US academic asked him some stupid question about TWAT (The War Against Terror), although he did go on to give an analysis largely within this type of talk, he opened with "terrorism isn't a historical or political term but a propagandists term". Rather than then talking about state terrorism he did unfortunately just focus on the more small scale "independent" ventures that are generally considered the sum total of terrorism.

There was some excitement when the question of whether the cost of displacing Hitler (50m lives) would have been thought worth it had we known as we made the decision to participate what the cost would be. A lively Zionist type in the audience pretty much denounced him for even raising the, perfectly legitimate, question ("all Europe would have become one great gas chamber"). He then questioned the appropriateness of comparing Palestinian political violence with that perpetrated by the early Zionist revolutionaries against the UK earlier in the century - since the former involves deliberately targeting civilians in a way which the later did only incidentally (cf. the Duke of York hotel). I wasn't entirely satisfied with EH's response on this point, I don't recall him having a satisfactory response. I would have thought directing the comparison between the horror of Palestinian political violence and the horror of Israeli political violence as approaching equivalence in their moral vacuity, if not in their scale, would have been the point to make.

And so it ended and I couldn't resist wanting to chat to him further (can I get him to join us down the pub I wondered?) so Jona and I, floating as we were from out success so far, "picked up" copies of his books and simply joined the queue to get them signed. As he kindly inscribed my book I made some quip to the effect of "maybe the coming revolution will be the real one - ending the leader/led dichotomy" which raised a chuckle from the old boy and we left, careful to remove the security tags, 'natch, into the night refreshed and invigorated and making plans for tomorrow.

Tonight, Pilger and Tariq Ali at LSE... watch this space...