Homelands
A Personal History of Europe
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- £1.99
-
- £1.99
Publisher Description
**Winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize 2024**
**A Financial Times Best Book of 2023**
'A moving love letter to Europe' Lea Ypi, author of Free
Drawing from the people who lived it, Homelands explores how Europe slowly recovered and rebuilt from World War Two. And then faltered.
Timothy 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.
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.
'The right book for Europe, at the right time' Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny
'Tremendously enjoyable ... thoughtful, honest, open, self-deprecating' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times
'Readers could hardly wish for a wiser guide ... defiantly hopeful' Financial Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this insightful collection of more than 40 essays, Oxford University historian Ash (Free Speech) artfully weaves together geopolitical analysis with reflections on his travels throughout the European continent since 1971. Along the way, he probes the "paradox" of being a contemporary European: the sense of being "at home abroad," or feeling like one belongs in countries radically different from their own. Ash, a Brit, traces his own trajectory of becoming "a conscious European" from sometime after "the first schoolboy inhalation of Gauloise tobacco smoke" through his work as journalist reporting from behind the Iron Curtain, peppering his account with fascinating snapshots of a 1978 luncheon at the French home of British aristocrats and notorious fascists Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford, a clandestine 1986 meetup with dissident Czech playwright (and later president) Václav Havel, a 1996 dinnertime chat with former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, and more. Throughout, Ash cogently ties these personal experiences and tidbits of European history to the sweeping changes that altered the continent's political structure during these years: the creation of the European Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Brexit. As the subtitle suggests, this is not a comprehensive history of Europe, but it's a scintillating one.
