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

"* '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"

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'.

Timothy Garton Ash is the author of eight books of political writing or 'history of the present' which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last quarter-century. He is Professor of European Studies in 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 he writes a weekly column in the Guardian which is widely syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas. In 2006, he was awarded the George Orwell Prize for political writing.