Timothy Garton Ash's Top Book Recommendations

Timothy Garton AshI think Evelyn Waugh is one of the great English novelists of the 20th century and he kept this diary intermittently. A lot of it is about the absolutely amazing quantities that he drank. He started quite early in the day. It’s a document of its time. It’s full of hugely politically incorrect and, by the end, almost self-parodic episodes but it’s also brilliant at catching the moment that life is... (Source)

Timothy Garton AshHe was sent by the British military occupation authorities to do this study, which was to try to establish that Hitler had died, and how he’d died, because we didn’t have the corpse. (Source)

Guy WaltersTrevor-Roper was working for M16 after the war and he had to piece together exactly what happened to the senior Nazis, including Hitler. Nobody knew then exactly what had happened, and the Russians, Stalin, were trying to make out that he was still alive and being sheltered by us, the British, so it was mandatory for us to show that this wasn’t true. (Source)

Timothy Garton AshYes, the greatest historical essayist in the English language, in my view. This Everyman edition is two volumes of his essays from The Edinburgh Review, which, as you know, was The New York Review of Books of its time, or maybe I should turn that the other way round. It had long critical review essays of the kind people are still writing. Although Macaulay was a teeny bit dismissive of his own... (Source)

Timothy Garton AshHe is the father of us all. I read it when I was at school and he’s really the first one who goes around with his eyes and ears and notebook open, recording all these fantastic stories and trying to put it all together to work out what happened and why. (Source)

Johanna HaninkThe main subject of his Histories is the Persian invasion of Greece, but he does a lot more than just write about the Greco-Persian wars. He’s very interested in ethnography and documenting the specificities of different cultures beyond Greece (Source)

Timothy SnyderThe reason why I am so fond of Homage to Catalonia, and see it as an even more relevant precursor to dissent, is that in it you can see a man of the Left learning to make the distinction that breaks down the Left with a big L into lots of little lefts. He comes to understand what Soviet power actually is, and that it is qualitatively different to the other sorts of Spanish left, or to European... (Source)

Ben ShapiroA lot of people have read Orwell's 1984, he actually wrote a book that's better. It's [this book]. (Source)

Timothy Garton AshAnyone who wants to go off and write about Egypt, Tunisia or Libya today should pack a copy of Homage to Catalonia. It’s brilliant reportage. As you know, it opens with a vignette of an Italian militiaman in the barracks in Barcelona and he only saw this guy for a few moments but it captures the excitement. (Source)

Timothy Garton AshHere is a writer, a very fine writer, going at it through literature, and what is literature about if not free speech? (Source)

Timothy Garton AshIt’s not just a very coherent and powerful argument, it’s a very moving argument coming from the guy who’s writing it. (Source)

Timothy Garton AshI absolutely love this book. (Source)

Nick CleggThe tradition is that it is given to the president of the Liberal Democrats rather than the leader, which is a subtle but important distinction in Lib Dem land. But you’re quite right. The traditions of J. S. Mill are still handed down like some sort of totemic emblem of everything that we’re supposed to still believe in, even now. It’s extraordinary, given it was written in 1859……What we’re... (Source)

A C GraylingOn Liberty is a very important document, and one which, because of the clarity with which one can read it and its brevity, is slightly passed over. (Source)

Peter SingerMill points out that very often, throughout history, people have thought that they were certainly right, and then turned out to be quite wrong. (Source)

Andrew ChenNow starting the section now these information empires eventually got dismantled, by the internet, cable, and the government antitrust efforts on the 1950s! Awesome book so far (Source)

Seth GodinThis one really stuck with me--a top level analysis of how changes in media change the culture and change the structure of industry. (Source)

Nicholas CarrIf The Information is a sprawling, sweeping story of how information has changed over time, one thing it doesn’t get into is the commercial nature of information as a good that is bought and sold. That’s the story Tim Wu tells in The Master Switch. His basic argument is that whenever a new communication medium arises, a similar pattern occurs. The technology starts off as a hobbyist’s passion,... (Source)