David Harvey was born in Gillingham, in the South-East of England, in 1935, and studied at the University of Cambridge, where he took his doctorate in Geography in 1961. Over the following decades, in a series of university positions ranging from Uppsala to Bristol, Baltimore, Oxford, the London School of Economics and New York City, he has become a crucial critical presence both in his discipline and in the theoretical forums of the Left worldwide. Harvey’s interventions have been meta-theoretical in ambition and deeply practical in implication. His first book asserted the intelligible unity of the geographical as an object of knowledge. Since then he has insisted, as a premise of his work, on the irreducible reality of space in an adequately conceived historical materialism and, in doing so, has at the same time refashioned geography as an engaged intellectual force, inescapably answerable to considerations of social justice. This politico-intellectual understanding has led naturally to involvements in local struggles—in Baltimore and Oxford-Cowley, for example—alongside his continuing academic work, as exemplified most recently by his cross-media commentary A Companion to Marx’s Capital and The Enigma of Capital (both 2010).