6 books about truth and freedom of speech

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Reading lists

Essays 1995 - 2010

When the Facts Change

A great thinker's final testament: a characteristically wise and forthright collection of essays from the author of Postwar and Thinking the Twentieth Century, spanning a career of extraordinary intellectual engagement. Edited and introduced by Jennifer Homans.

Professor Tony Judt was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, the New York Times and many other journals in Europe and the US. His books include Ill Fares the Land, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, and Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, which was one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2005, the winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He died in August, 2010 at the age of 62.

A great thinker's final testament: a characteristically wise and forthright collection of essays from the author of Postwar and Thinking the Twentieth Century that feels all the more potent and important in today’s political climate. 
 
Edited and introduced by Jennifer Homans. 
 
 
Tony Judt’s widow and fellow historian, Jennifer Homans, has gathered together important essays from the span of Judt’s career that chronicle both the evolution of his thought and the remarkable consistency of his passionate engagement and intellectual élan. 
 
Whether the subject is the scholarly poverty of the new social history, the willful blindness of French collective memory about what happened to the country’s Jews during World War II, or the moral challenge to Israel of the so-called Palestinian problem, the majesty of Tony Judt’s work lies in his combination of unsparing honesty, intellectual brilliance, and ethical clarity. 
 
When the Facts Change exemplifies the necessity of minding our history and not letting cheerful fictions suffice in its place. An emphatic demonstration of the power of a great historian to connect us more deeply to the world as it was, as it is, and as it should be, it is a fitting capstone to an extraordinary body of work.

Thinking the Twentieth Century

The final masterpiece by one of the leading historians and thinkers of his generation, the late Tony Judt. 
 
Thinking the Twentieth Century unites the conflicted intellectual history of an epoch into a soaring narrative.

Timothy Snyder's initiative has prompted a sparkling dialogue which, through following the stages of Tony Judt's life and emergence as an exceptional historian, offers important reflections on major currents of political thinking in the 20th century

There is much brilliance here to enjoy ... The best kind of book

Brilliant to the bitter end...Tony Judt was combative and razor-sharp even as he was dying...A moving, enlightening and provocative read...It is impossible not to marvel at the dying man's extraordinary mental recall and moral integrity ... This book, bristling with learning, is a staggering achievement

Thinking the Twentieth Century is a substantial achievement

A treasure trove of ideas and insights...An extraordinarily learned, lively and wide-ranging discussion of 20th century European intellectual history...genuinely exciting

How, you keep asking yourself, could one man remember all this narrative detail, these abstruse references, these verbatim quotations?…Valiant book…Read it and weep that there shall be no more

Reading as one very long yet sophisticated conversation between friends, the final result is something quite astounding and will cement Judt as one of the most formidable intellects in history

Breathtakingly broad overview of Europe's past and present... This book is an absolute treasure – and an education in itself

Stimulating, provocative, and consistently absorbing, this is an intellectual history that manages to be both accessible and challenging... Thinking the Twentieth Century is a treasure trove of fascinating concepts and arguments

A fascinating dialogue… What shines through is as much their deep wisdom as their tough-minded intellectual integrity

Informative, personal and stimulating… Eloquently written and thoughtful, the book also provides a persuasive argument for the kind of future we should strive for

Tony Judt was one of the great historians and public intellectuals of his time. Educated at King's College, Cambridge, and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, he taught at Cambridge, Oxford and Berkeley. He was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University, as well as the founder and director of the Remarque Institute, dedicated to creating an ongoing conversation between Europe and America.The author or editor of fourteen books, Professor Judt was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, and The New York Times. 
 
Timothy Snyder studied at Brown and Oxford, held fellowships in Paris, Warsaw and Vienna and at Harvard, and is The Houslum Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of five award-winning and critically-acclaimed books of European history; the most recent of which, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, won the Leipzig Prize for European Understanding, was named a book of the year by a dozen publications and has beentranslated into twenty-five languages.

Two explorers set out on a journey from which only one of them will return. Their unknown land is that often fearsome continent we call the 20th Century. Their route is through their own minds and memories. Both travellers are professional historians still tormented by their own unanswered questions. They needed to talk to one another, and the time was short. 
 
This is a book about the past, but it is also an argument for the kind of future we should strive for. Thinking the Twentieth Century is about the life of the mind - and the mindful life.

The Memory Chalet

A collection of stirring, poignant personal essays from Tony Judt, one of our leading historians.

Witty, profound, controversial... Wonderfully written... A wellspring of enlightenment you need to spend time with

Tony Judt, had a wonderful prose style, and his little book The Memory Chalet, a collection of autobiographical essays, is beautiful and moving. Although Judt, who suffered from motor neurone disease, died earlier this year, this late work is more sustaining than sad

Quintessentail Judt: humane, fearless, unsparingly honest

The book is simultaneously awe-inspiring and almost too painful to bear... His head, that of a great historian, political writer and charismatic intellectual, was a treasure house

A book to treasure... Witty, profound, contraversial

In examining his past, Judt has managed to write what amounts to a Bildungsroman of one of the most distinctive writerly personas of the age. At the same time, he has told us something important about ourselves: about what we were and what we have become

The brilliant historian Tony Judt's posthumously published biographical essays, The Memory Chalet show what a learned, witty, subtle, and above all, civilised man we have lost

A tremendously moving memorial to a first-class historian and essayist, moving from the streets of London in the threadbare Clement Attlee years to the dining rooms of New York in the 21st century. If nothing else, Judt led a compellingly colour life...Some of the most affecting passages in this book look back to Judt's childhood, long before his academic fame and fortune. He writes beautifully about the moral and physical atmosphere of his London boyhood...This book is quintessential Judt: humane, fearless, unsparingly honest. In essay after essay the same qualities shine forth, all the more remarkable given the tragic circumstances...That he finished with such a wonderfully moving book is a mark of the man.

Judt calls these charming vignettes "feuillotons" which, without being sentimental, gives them the elegiac quality of falling autumn leaves

Tony Judt was educated at King's College, Cambridge and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and taught at Cambridge, Oxford, and Berkeley. He was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University; in addition to Director of the Remarque Institute, which is dedicated to the study of Europe and which he founded in 1995. 
 
The author or editor of fourteen books, Professor Judt was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, the New York Times and many other journals in Europe and the US. Professor Judt is the author of Ill Fares the Land, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, and Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, which was one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2005, the winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He died in August, 2010 at the age of sixty-two.

It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck. 
 
In 2008, historian Tony Judt learnt that he was suffering from a disease that would eventually trap his extraordinary mind in a declining and immobile body. At night, sleepless in his motionless state, he revisited the past in an effort to keep himself sane, and his dictated essays form a memoir unlike any you have read before. 
 
Each one charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt's prodigious mind. His youthful love of a particular London bus route evolves into a reflection on public civility and interwar urban planning. Memories of the 1968 student riots of Paris meander through the sexual politics of Europe, a series of roadtrips across America lead not just to an appreciation of American history, but to an eventual acquisition of citizenship. 
 
And everything is as simply and beautifully arranged as a Swiss chalet - a reassuring refuge deep in the mountains of memory.

A Treatise On Our Present Discontents

Ill Fares The Land

Sinewy analysis and supple prose, as clear and refreshing as a mountain stream

One of the most remarkable books on politics to have appeared for a very long time

At the time of his death, Tony Judt was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University. In 1996 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. In 2009 Judt was awarded a Special Orwell Prize for Lifetime Achievement for his contribution to British Political writing. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005) was a runner up for the 2006 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

'Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, 
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay' - Oliver Goldsmith 
 
Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of shared purpose. But we have forgotten how to think about the life we live together: its goals and purposes. We are now not only post-ideological; we have become post-ethical. We have lost touch with the old questions that have defined politics since the Greeks: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society? A better world? The social contract that defined postwar life in Europe and America - the guarantee of security, stability and fairness - is no longer assured; in fact, it's no longer part of collective conversation. 
 
In this exceptional short book, Tony Judt reveals how we have arrived at our present dangerously confused moment and masterfully crystallizes our great unease, showing how we might yet think ourselves out of it. If we are to replace fear with confidence then we need a different story to tell, about state and society alike: a story that carries moral and political conviction. Providing that story is the purpose of this book.

Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century

Reappraisals

A provocative, timely assessment of how 20th century world history was created, and what this history means for us today

In Reappraisals the British-born historian, now a university professor in New York, collects 23 essays, written between 1994 and 2006, in which he undertakes a ruthless dissection of the ruling illusions of the post-cold war years...There are illuminating assessments of Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt, a superb deconstruction of the fall of France in 1940, explorations of Belgium's fractured statehood and the ambiguous position of Romania in Europe, analyses of the Cuba crisis and Kissinger's diplomacy, and much else besides...Judt is a liberal thinker dedicated to demystifying liberal illusions. Reappraisals is an indispensable tract for the times by one of the great political writers of the age

Judt is a highly readable authority... He delivers the intellectual's equivalent of a left hook...the uppercut soon follows...and finally, a knockout punch...The intellectual's intellectual

Tony Judt...has an enviable grasp of European cultural history and a sharp and sometimes savage turn of phrase, both of which are well displayed in this collection of long essays and book reviews...[He is] shrewd and revealing...you feel you have been eavesdropping on a sparkling conversation

An exhilarating new collection of essays...In Reappraisals he looks back at the tragedy of Europe in the 20th century - although one should really say the four decades from the outbreak of World War I until the death of Stalin - and in particular at the Jewish tragedy. Judt writes informatively about Manès Sperber, tenderly about Primo Levi, enthusiastically about Hannah Arendt... Few are better than Tony Judt, not only a historian of the first rank but (in a word we need an equivalent for) a politicologue who gives engagement a good name

This is a book that should be read by anyone wishing to understand the modern world.

Tony Judt was educated at King's College, Cambridge, and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and taught at Cambridge, Oxford and Berkeley. He was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University, as well as the founder and director of the Remarque Institute, dedicated to creating an ongoing conversation between Europe and America. 
 
The author or editor of fourteen books, Professor Judt was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, The New York Times and many journals across Europe and the United States. Professor Judt is the author of The Memory Chalet, Ill Fares the Land, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century and Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, which was one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2005, the winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He died in August 2010 at the age of sixty-two.

In Reappraisals award-winning historian Tony Judt argues that we have entered an 'age of forgetting', where we have set aside our immediate past before we could even begin to make sense of it. We have lost touch with generations of international policy debate, social thought and public-spirited social activism - and no longer even know how to discuss such concepts - and have forgotten the role once played by intellectuals in debating, transmitting and defending the ideas that shaped their time. 
 
Reappraisals is a road map back to the historical sense we urgently need. A masterful collection of essays, it examines the tragedy of twentieth-century Europe by way of thought-provoking pieces on Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, Albert Camus and Henry Kissinger amongst others.

Tony Judt

Most impressive... Postwar, Tony Judt's magnificent history of Europe after The Second World War, covers vast tracts of ground with extraordinary skill, weaving together the stories of West and East in a single, compelling narrative

Masterly and exhilarating... Judt has a fine eye for telling detail... This is a splendid book to which no review can do proper justice

Truly superb - a magnificent achievement. It is hard to imagine how a better - and more readable - history of the emergence of today's Europe from the ashes of 1945 could ever be written; I can't think of another work on the latter half of the 20th century that comes close to matching it... All in all, a real masterpiece

A superb work of synthesis, analysis and reflection

Times Literary Supplement, 'Books of the Year'

With Postwar... Judt moves up into the ranks of the grand simplificateurs. He dares to expound the sum total of Europe since 1945 in a seamless narrative... This is history-writing with a human face, as well as with brainpower... It is most unlikely that Judt's achievement will be superseded soon

Judt's brilliant study of Europe after the Second World War is unlikely to be surpassed... Tony Judt has written the standard reference work on European post-war history

A masterly survey of how today's Europe rose from the ashes and exhaustion of 1945

A History of Europe Since 1945

WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY TIMOTHY GARTON-ASH 
 
A magisterial and acclaimed history of post-war Europe, from Germany to Poland, from Western Europe to Eastern Europe, selected as one of New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year 
 
Europe in 1945 was drained. Much of the continent was devastated by war, mass slaughter, bombing and chaos. Large areas of Eastern Europe were falling under Soviet control, exchanging one despotism for another. Today, the Soviet Union is no more and the democracies of the European Union reach as far as the borders of Russia itself. Postwar tells the rich and complex story of how we got from there to here, demystifying Europe's recent history and identity, of what the continent is and has been. 
 
&lsquo;It is hard to imagine how a better - and more readable - history of the emergence of today's Europe from the ashes of 1945 could ever be written&hellip;All in all, a real masterpiece&rsquo; Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler 
 
&lsquo;[Judt] dares to expound the sum total of Europe since 1945 in a seamless narrative&hellip; This is history-writing with a human face, as well as with brainpower&rsquo; Norman Davies, Guardian 
 
&lsquo;Brilliant&hellip; Judt has written the standard reference work on European post-war history. It will provoke fruitful debate, but I find it hard to imagine that it will ever be surpassed.&rsquo; 
Misha Glenny, Irish Times

Tony Judt

Praise for Postwar

Most impressive... Postwar, Tony Judt's magnificent history of Europe after The Second World War, covers vast tracts of ground with extraordinary skill, weaving together the stories of West and East in a sing ...

Masterly and exhilarating... Judt has a fine eye for telling detail... This is a splendid book to which no review can do proper justice

Truly superb - a magnificent achievement. It is hard to imagine how a better - and more readable - history of the emergence of today's Europe from the ashes of 1945 could ever be written; I can't think of another wo ...

Most impressive... Postwar, Tony Judt's magnificent history of Europe after The Second World War, covers vast tracts of ground with extraordinary skill, weaving together the stories of West and East in a sing ...

Masterly and exhilarating... Judt has a fine eye for telling detail... This is a splendid book to which no review can do proper justice

Truly superb - a magnificent achievement. It is hard to imagine how a better - and more readable - history of the emergence of today's Europe from the ashes of 1945 could ever be written; I can't think of another wo ...

Most impressive... Postwar, Tony Judt's magnificent history of Europe after The Second World War, covers vast tracts of ground with extraordinary skill, weaving together the stories of West and East in a sing ...

Masterly and exhilarating... Judt has a fine eye for telling detail... This is a splendid book to which no review can do proper justice

Truly superb - a magnificent achievement. It is hard to imagine how a better - and more readable - history of the emergence of today's Europe from the ashes of 1945 could ever be written; I can't think of another wo ...

Books by Tony Judt

Articles featuring Tony Judt

6 books about truth and freedom of speech

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