The module aims to encourage students to familiarise themselves with what happened during roughly the second half of the hundred years of the twentieth century and consider the extent to which the century can be seen as a discrete period or series of periods, and, if so, how that period (or those periods) might be characterised; The module invites students to familiarise themselves with some of the concepts that have been developed by historians and social scientists to understand it. Was it, for example, the century of the battle of ideologies of Left and Right as Hobsbawm argues, or was democracy, as Mazower suggests, altogether more fragile and rarely achieved throughout its course?