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

Timothy Garton Ash

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1848870892 ISBN 13: 9781848870895

Publisher: Atlantic Books, 2009

Synopsis

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'.

About this title

About the Author

Timothy Garton Ash is the author of eight books of political writing or 'history of the present' that have charted the transformation of Europe over the last three decades. He is Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and his weekly column for the Guardian is widely syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas. He has received many awards for his writing, including the Somerset Maugham Award and the Orwell Prize.

Review

What sets Garton Ash apart is that he never loses sight of the bigger European picture... he remains the best Anglophone observer of contemporary Europe -- Niall Ferguson * Evening Standard * Timothy Garton Ash holds a mirror that magnifies... He writes masterfully and with compassion -- Neal Ascherson * Observer *

Edition details

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1848870892
• ISBN 13: 9781848870895
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 352