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Homelands is a stunning blend of contemporary history, reporting
and memoir by our greatest writer about Europe. Drawing on half a
century of travel and thinking, Homelands tells the story of Europe
since its emergence from wartime hell in 1945: how 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.
Timothy Garton Ash has spent a lifetime studying Europe. Highly
personal and deeply felt, this book is also full of vivid
experiences, encounters and anecdotes: from his father's memories
of D-Day to interviewing Polish dockers, 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 in the UK, Europe and the US. Homelands is both a
living, breathing history of a period of unprecedented progress and
a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong, from the
financial crisis of 2008 to the war in Ukraine. At its heart, this
book is an urgent call to the citizens of this great old continent
to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved.
Homelands is a stunning blend of contemporary history, reportage
and memoir by our greatest writer about European affairs. Drawing
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. Humane, 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. Homelands 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. Timothy 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.
He 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.
'Timothy Garton Ash holds a mirror that magnifies... He writes
masterfully and with compassion' - Neal Ascherson, Observer For
more than thirty years, Timothy Garton Ash has traveled among truth
tellers and political charlatans to record, with scalpel-sharp
precision, what he has found. Facts are Subversive, which collects
his writings since the millennium, addresses some of the crucial
questions of our time: what happens to people who have endured long
dictatorships when they try to found a democratic state? How can
freedom from tyranny be won? How are free expression, equality
before the law and equal rights for men and women sustained in a
society of different faiths and ethnicities? This is history of the
present on a scale by turns panoramic and human: urgent,
exhilarating and necessary.
In 1978 Timothy Garton Ash went to live in Berlin to see what that
divided city could teach him about tyranny and freedom. Fifteen
years later, by then internationally famous for his reportage of
the downfall of communism in Central Europe, he returned to look at
his Stasi file which bore the code-name 'Romeo'. Compiled by the
East German secret police, with the assistance of both professional
spies and ordinary people turned informer, it contained a
meticulous record of his earlier life in Berlin. In this memoir, he
describes rediscovering his younger self through the eyes of the
Stasi, and then confronting those who had informed against him.
Moving from document to remembrance, from the offices of Britain's
own security service to the living rooms of retired Stasi officers,
The File is a personal narrative as gripping, as disquieting, and
as morally provocative as any fiction by George Orwell or Graham
Greene. And it is all true.
The Magic Lantern is one of those rare books that capture history
in the making, written by an author who was witness to some of the
most remarkable moments that marked the collapse of Communism in
Eastern Europe. Timothy Garton Ash was there in Warsaw, on 4 June,
when the communist government was humiliated by Solidarity in the
first semi-free elections since the Second World War. He was there
in Budapest, twelve days later, when Imre Nagy - thirty-one years
after his execution - was finally given his proper funeral. He was
there in Berlin, as the Wall opened. And most remarkable of all, he
was there in Prague, in the back rooms of the Magic Lantern
theatre, with Vaclav Havel and the members of Civic Forum, as they
made their 'Velvet Revolution'.
"We, the free, face a daunting opportunity. Previous generations
could only dream of a free world. Now we can begin to make it." In
his welcome alternative to the rampant pessimism about
Euro-American relations, award-winning historian Timothy Garton Ash
shares an inspiring vision for how the United States and Europe can
collaborate to promote a free world.
At the start of the twenty-first century, the West has plunged
into crisis. Europe tries to define itself in opposition to
America, and America increasingly regards Europe as troublesome and
irrelevant. What is to become of what we used to call "the free
world"? Part history, part manifesto, Free World offers both a
scintillating assessment of our current geopolitical quandary and a
vitally important argument for the future of liberty and the shared
values of the West.
The Oxford-based Central and East European Publishing Project was a
remarkable initiative to support embattled Central and East
European publishers and journals, and to punch holes through the
cultural iron curtain by encouraging translations and a 'common
market of the mind' between East and West. The nine years of its
existence straddle the largest watershed in European history since
1945, and the Project's history - told here by some of its leading
participants - illuminates the nature of the recent changes in
Central and Eastern Europe. In a vivid personal account, Timothy
Garton Ash recalls the work of the Project, ranging from smuggling
in subsidies to underground journals and samizdat publishers in the
pre-1989 period to supporting high-quality translations and
East-West workshops in the period after 1989. Also included are an
Introduction in which Ralf Dahrendorf, Chairman of the Project,
reflects on the importance of both publishing and foundations for a
healthy civil society; an annotated catalogue of the Project's
work, prepared by Elizabeth Winter; and a detailed and original
report by Richard Davy on the state of publishing in the Czech
Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary, with suggestions for
further Western help.
For forty-five years Europe was divided, and at the center of that
divided continent lay a divided Germany. In this brilliantly
nuanced book, one of our most respected authorities on Central
Europe tells the story of German reunification. Garton Ash has
produced a panoramic, dramatic, and definitive account of events
that are continuing to transform the map of Europe.
The Magic Lantern is one of those rare books that define a history
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 sympathy and power.
If there had been all-news television channels in 1956, viewers
around the world would have been glued to their sets between
October 23 and November 4. This book tells the story of the
Hungarian Revolution in 120 original documents, ranging from the
minutes of the first meeting of Khrushchev with Hungarian bosses
after Stalin's death in 1953 to Yeltsin's declaration made in 1992.
Other documents include letters from Yuri Andropov, Soviet
Ambassador in Budapest during and after the revolt. The great
majority of the material appears in English for the first time, and
almost all come from archives that were inaccessible until the
1990s.
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