Histiory Of The Present

History

Timothy Garton Ash

Europe

Random House]

The Polish Revolution

Penguin Books, Ltd.

The 1990s. An extraordinary decade in Europe. At its beginning, the old order collapsed along with the Berlin Wall. Everything seemed possible. Everyone hailed a brave new Europe. But no one knew what this new Europe would look like. Now we know. Most of Western Europe has launched into the unprecedented gamble of monetary union, though Britain stands aside. Germany, peacefully united, with its capital in Berlin, is again the most powerful country in Europe. The Central Europeans—Poles, Czechs, Hungarians—have made successful transitions from communism to capitalism and have joined NATO. But farther east and south, in the territories of the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, the continent has descended into a bloody swamp of poverty, corruption, criminality, war, and bestial atrocities such as we never thought would be seen again in Europe. Timothy Garton Ash chronicles this formative decade through a glittering collection of essays, sketches, and dispatches written as history was being made. He joins the East Germans for their decisive vote for unification and visits their former leader in prison. He accompanies the Poles on their roller-coaster ride from dictatorship to democracy. He uncovers the motives for monetary union in Paris and Bonn. He walks in mass demonstrations in Belgrade and travels through the killing fields of Kosovo. Occasionally, he even becomes an actor in a drama he describes: debating Germany with Margaret Thatcher or the role of the intellectual with Václav Havel in Prague. Ranging from Vienna to Saint Petersburg, from Britain to Ruthenia, Garton Ash reflects on how "the single great conflict" of the cold war has been replaced by many smaller ones. And he asks what part the United States still has to play. Sometimes he takes an eagle's-eye view, considering the present attempt to unite Europe against the background of a thousand years of such efforts. But often he swoops to seize one telling human story: that of a wiry old farmer in Croatia, a newspaper editor in Warsaw, or a bitter, beautiful survivor from Sarajevo. His eye is sharp and ironic but always compassionate. History of the Present continues the work that Garton Ash began with his trilogy of books about Central Europe in the 1980s, combining the crafts of journalism and history. In his Introduction, he argues that we should not wait until the archives are opened before starting to write the history of our own times. Then he shows how it can be done.

History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s

At the start of the 21st century, the world plunged into crisis. What began as an attack on the West by Osama bin Laden soon became a dramatic confrontation between Europe and America. Britain has found itself painfully split, because it stands with one foot across the Atlantic and the other across the Channel. The English, in particular, are hopelessly divided between a Right that argues our place is with America, not Europe, and a Left that claims the opposite. This is today's English civil war. Both sides tell us we must choose. In this powerful new work Timothy Garton Ash, one of our leading political writers, explains why we cannot, need not and must not choose between Europe and America.

Free World

The Magic Lantern is one of those rare books that define a historic moment, written by a brilliant witness who was also a participant in epochal events. Whether covering Poland’s first free parliamentary elections—in which Solidarity found itself in the position of trying to limit the scope of its victory—or sitting in at the meetings of an unlikely coalition of bohemian intellectuals and Catholic clerics orchestrating the liberation of Czechoslovakia, Garton Ash writes with enormous sympathy and power. This book is a stunningly evocative portrait of the revolutions that swept Communism from Eastern Europe in 1989 and whose aftereffects are still being felt today. As Garton Ash writes in an incisive new afterword, from the perspective of three decades later: “Freedom’s battle is never finally won. It must be fought anew in every generation.”

The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague

Vintage

Britain may not be divided physically, but it lives culturally, economically and socially in a constant tension between Europe and America. And it's divided politically between a Right which argues that our place is with America, not Europe, and a Left which claims the opposite. This is today's English civil war. Both sides

Free World : Why a Crisis of the West Reveals the Opportunity of Our Time

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Allen Lane.

Homelands: A Personal History of Europe

Homelands: A Personal History of Europe - Updated with a New Chapter

Homelands

'Tremendously enjoyable ... thoughtful, honest, open, self-deprecating' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times 
'Readers could hardly wish for a wiser guide ... panoramic ... defiantly hopeful' Financial Times\nDrawing from the people who lived it, Homelands explores how Europe slowly recovered and rebuilt from World War Two. And then faltered.\nTimothy Garton Ash, our greatest writer about Europe, has spent a lifetime studying Europe and this deeply felt book is full of vivid experiences: from his father's memories of D-Day and his own surveillance at the hands of the Stasi to interviewing Albanian guerrillas in the mountains of Kosovo and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents.\nHomelands is at once a living, breathing history of a period of unprecedented progress, a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong and an urgent call to the citizens of this great old continent to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved.\n'The right book for Europe, at the right time' Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny 
'A moving love letter to Europe' Lea Ypi, author of Free

Bodley Head

Homelands is a stunning blend of contemporary history, reportage and memoir by our greatest writer about European affairs.\nDrawing on half a century of interviews and experience, Homelands tells the story of Europe in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries - how, having emerged from its wartime hell in 1945, it slowly recovered and rebuilt, liberated and united to come close to the ideal of a Europe 'whole, free and at peace'. And then faltered.\nHumane, expert and deeply felt, Homelands is full of encounters, conversations and anecdote. It is also highly personal: Timothy Garton Ash has spent a lifetime studying and thinking about Europe and this book is full of life itself, from his father's experience on D-Day, to his teenage French exchange, to interviewing Polish dockers, Albanian guerillas and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents in the UK, Europe, and the US.\nHomelands is both a singular history of a period of unprecedented progress and a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong, all the way from the financial crisis of 2008 to the war in Ukraine. It culminates in an urgent call to the citizens of this great old continent to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved.\nTimothy Garton Ash was 17 when Britain joined the European Community and 64 when Britain left it. In the intervening years he has lived and breathed European politics, witnessing some of the most dramatic scenes in its history, interviewing many of its key players and analysing how life has evolved for ordinary Europeans across the breadth of the continent.\nHe is Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford and a columnist for the Guardian. He has won many prizes and plaudits for his journalism and books, including The File, his riveting autobiographical account of investigating the contents of his Stasi file after the fall of East Germany.

Facts are Subversive

One of Britain's most influential and admired commentators presents his latest volume of dispatches from a troubled world. This fascinating collection includes essays from the last ten years on Islam and freedom, Orwell as an informer, the Lives of Others and Gunter Grass in the Waffen-SS. Timothy Garton Ash witnessed the fall of Milosevic in Serbia, visited Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, watched the Orange revolution in Ukraine and talked to militant mullahs in Iran, and all these are recorded here, alongside critical reflections on the future of Europe, multiculturalism and terroris, all in these last ten years. The literature of fact is a theme that runs through the whole volume. When is it legitimate to cross that heavily mined frontier between fact and fiction? How do we know when a writer (Ryszard Kapuscinski, for example, or Paul Theroux) has strayed across the line? How do we ever know what we can know, given the notorious unreliability of eyewitnesses? We all have a novelist in our heads called Memory, and (s)he starts rewriting the script the minute after something happens. Yet Tim Garton Ash maintains against every post-modernist in the world that there are facts, and that establishing them is both a political and a moral imperative. And an aesthetic one, too. 'I will bring you,' the poet Craig Raine has written, 'the beauty of facts'.

Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name

Constitutional Law

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Books by Timothy Garton Ash

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Timothy Garton Ash. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Histiory Of The Present

The Polish Revolution

History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s

Free World

The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague

Free World : Why a Crisis of the West Reveals the Opportunity of Our Time

Homelands: A Personal History of Europe - Updated with a New Chapter

Homelands

Homelands

Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name