Homelands: A Personal History of Europe

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To write the genuine history of present-day Europe: there is an aim for the whole of one's life.'... This translation is by Isaiah Berlin. Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, in Henry Hardy & Roger Hausheer (eds.), The Proper Study of Mankind. An Anthology of Essays, Chatto & Windus, London 1997, p.445. a second birthday, a true rebirth', because 'the wholehistory of the world attaches itself to this place'... Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italienische Reise, entry for December 3, 1786. Garton Ash, der altid har delt sin indsats mellem professorater i historie på Oxford mestendels, journalistik på The Spectator og The Guardian, samt en stribe aktuelle bøger, har et unikt overblik.

the [Polish] local councillor here says he's sorry we have to leave our homeland in this way…'… Lehndorff, Ostpreussisches Tagebuch, p.302. angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents in the When I investigated the lives of the Stasi officers who had spied on me in east Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s… see Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A Personal History, Atlantic Books, London 2009. we may inadvertently have placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger'… see Rodric Braithwaite, Armageddon and Paranoia. The Nuclear Confrontation, Profile Books, London 2019, pp.352-5. For postgraduate study he went to St Antony's College, Oxford, and then, in the still divided Berlin, the Free University in West Berlin and the Humboldt University in East Berlin. During his studies in East Berlin, he was under surveillance from the Stasi, which served as the basis for his 1997 book The File. [3] Garton Ash cut a suspect figure to the Stasi, who regarded him as a "bourgeois-liberal" and potential British spy. [4]xiii) 'he says Europe and means France'… As for so many famous attributed quotations, we have been unable to find a source for him saying exactly this. Hence ‘supposedly’. neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire... Voltaire, ‘Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations’, in Louis Moland, Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, Garnier, Paris 1878, pp.539-43. Homelands 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. a book called Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?… First published in the US in 1970. Publishing the book abroad without permission constituted a crime under Soviet law and regulations. By 1988, the sociologist Jürgen Habermas,… could announce… see his article 'Der Marsch durch die Institutionen hat auch die CDU erreicht', Frankfurter Rundschau, 11 March 1988.

This is not a potted history of the European Union—still less of Britain’s tortuous relationships with it. Instead, the book casts a panoramic eye over a far-flung continent of 850 million people, and heeds the word on the street in Pristina as much as in Paris. . . . [A] fair-minded but warm-hearted book.”—Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times Bogen er ikke 'bare' en reportagebog – selv om forfatteren er en fremragende reporter – nej, den er oveni en intellektuel bedrift af de helt suveræne. Tremendously enjoyable. . . . Thoughtful, honest, open, self-deprecating.”—Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times It would have been interesting to have some discussion of what relationship a more democratic post-Putin Russia might have with Brussels, short of membership. The EU is being pressed to agree to the accession of ever more candidate states in the Balkans and even the Caucasus. What should define the eventual limits of EU enlargement?

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This was not the only disillusionment: Heroes of dissident movements in Central and Eastern Europe turned into ordinary politicians—which, in some cases, meant corrupt politicians. Even Czechs eventually tired of such a towering figure as Vaclav Havel (whom Garton Ash knew well); by the end, they no longer saw exemplary courage and integrity but only, Garton Ash writes, “theatrical gestures and moralistic preaching.” If a child went missing from the group, the others would say, quite matter-of-factly 'oh, he is dead'.… quoted by Mazower, Dark Continent, p.225-6, from the very remarkable book by Dorothy Macardle, Children of Europe, The Beacon Press, Boston 1951. More generally, Garton Ash’s delightful dissection of the “bewildering variety of ways” that Europeans use the word Europe belongs among the most memorable parts of his history illustrated by memoir. The author describes with great erudition our fuzzy and contested ideas of geography; the powerful and problematic beliefs in a historical core region (the “Carolingian” as opposed to the more inclusive, “Ottonian” idea of Europe); the Europe of culture and values, “a well-dressed but distinctly two-faced character”; the institutional organization of Europe one might often – and out of various political sentiments – be inclined to call “Euromess”; not to mention – fifthly – Europe’s crude identification with civilization as such (a pattern which the author rejects). New York had almost gone bankrupt… 'The Night New York Saved Itself from Bankruptcy', The New Yorker, 16 October 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-saved-itself-from-bankruptcy