Timothy Garton Ash's Book Recommendations (Updated for 2026)

1

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Tim Wu

4.2

In this age of an open Internet, it is easy to forget that every American information industry, beginning with the telephone, has eventually been taken captive by some ruthless monopoly or cartel. With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could history repeat itself with the next industrial co

Recommended by Andrew Chen, Seth Godin, Nicholas Carr, and 1 others.

Timothy Garton Ash

Tim Wu is an American ‘cyberlawyer’—a new category of human being—and a rather brilliant one. [source]

Andrew Chen

General Partner/Andreessen Horowitz

Now 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 Godin

Author, Marketer, Entrepreneur

This one really stuck with me--a top level analysis of how changes in media change the culture and change the structure of industry. [source]

2

On Liberty

John Stuart Mill

4.2

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780140432077

Published in 1859, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty presented one of the most eloquent defenses of individual freedom in nineteenth-century social and political philosophy and is today perhaps the most widely-read liberal argument in support of the value of liberty. Mill's passionate advocacy of spontaneity, individuality, and diversity, along with his con

Recommended by A C Grayling, Anne Heller, Brink Lindsey, and 7 others.

Timothy Garton Ash

Mill is one of those mildly irritating authors like Tocqueville, who say so much so well that it’s difficult to say it better. [source]

A C Grayling

On 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]

Anne Heller

Imagine how John Stuart Mill would feel if he were made to wear a seatbelt because the federal government tells him so. [source]

3

How to Cure a Fanatic

Amos Oz

4.0

Internationally acclaimed novelist Amos Oz grew up in war-torn Jerusalem, where as a boy he witnessed firsthand the poisonous consequences of fanaticism. In two concise, powerful essays, the award-winning author offers unique insight into the true nature of fanaticism and proposes a reasoned and respectful approach to resolving the Israeli Palestinian conflict. As an added feature, he comments on

Recommended by Timothy Garton Ash.

Timothy Garton Ash

I absolutely love this book. [source]

Cover unavailable

4

Defending My Enemy: American Nazis, the Skokie Case, and the Risks of Freedom

Aryeh Neier

4.3

Are Nazis entitled to freedom of expression? In 1977, Frank Collin, leader of the National Socialist Party of America, sought to hold a Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois. Skokie had one of the largest Holocaust survivor populations outside New York City. In this Chicago suburb, over half the population was Jewish. The proposed march sparked a host of legal actions: the Village of Skokie asked for an

Recommended by Timothy Garton Ash.

Timothy Garton Ash

It’s not just a very coherent and powerful argument, it’s a very moving argument coming from the guy who’s writing it. [source]

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5

Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship

J. M. Coetzee

4.4

J.M. Coetzee presents a coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of one who has lived and worked under its shadow. The essays collected here attempt to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring. He argues that a destructive dynamic of belligerence and escalation tends to overtake the rivals in any field ruled by censorship.
From Osip Ma

Recommended by Timothy Garton Ash.

Timothy Garton Ash

Here is a writer, a very fine writer, going at it through literature, and what is literature about if not free speech? [source]

6

Homage to Catalonia

George Orwell

4.3

In 1936 George Orwell travelled to Spain to report on the Civil War and instead joined the fight against the Fascists. This famous account describes the war and Orwell’s own experiences. Introduction by Lionel Trilling.

Recommended by Ben Shapiro, Guy Raz, Timothy Garton Ash, and 1 others.

Timothy Garton Ash

Anyone 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]

Ben Shapiro

A lot of people have read Orwell's 1984, he actually wrote a book that's better. It's this book. [source]

Guy Raz

The other reason I picked this book is that Orwell, like Dan Schorr, was an outsider. When he went to Spain, he was an unknown. He wasn’t Hemingway. He wasn’t a well-connected intellectual. He just had this amazing eye for detail. He was an amazing observer, and he could write so powerfully. This book, to me, is just one of the classics of foreign reporting. [source]

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7

The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories

Robert B. Strassler, Herodotus, Andrea L. Purvis, Rosalind Thomas

4.6

From the editor of the widely praised The Landmark Thucydides, a new Landmark Edition of The Histories by Herodotus.Cicero called Herodotus "the father of history," and his only work, The Histories, is considered the first true piece of historical writing in Western literature. With lucid prose, Herodotus's account of the rise of the Persian Empire and its dramatic war with the Greek city sates se

Recommended by Johanna Hanink and Timothy Garton Ash.

Timothy Garton Ash

He 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 Hanink

The 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]

Cover unavailable

8

Critical and Historical Essays, Vol 1 of 2

Baron Macaulay, Thomas Babington MacAulay

4.1

Recommended by Timothy Garton Ash.

Timothy Garton Ash

Yes, 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 work in the genre they are actually models of their kind, full of wonderful insight. The essay on Frederick the Great in volume two will just have you rolling in the aisles. [source]

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9

The Last Days of Hitler

Hugh Trevor-Roper

4.2

Late in 1945, Trevor-Roper was appointed by British Intelligence in Germany to investigate conflicting evidence surrounding Hitler's final days and to produce a definitive report on his death. The author, who had access to American counterintelligence files and to German prisoners, focuses on the last ten days of Hitler's life, April 20-29, 1945, in the underground bunker in Berlin—a bizarre and g

Recommended by Guy Walters and Timothy Garton Ash.

Timothy Garton Ash

He 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 Walters

Trevor-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]

Cover unavailable

10

The Diaries Of Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh, Michael Davie

4.0

Evelyn Waugh kept a diary almost continuously from the age of seven until a year before his death in 1966, and extracts from the diaries caused sensation when they were published by in The Observer. Providing the background to the novels which made Waugh famous, these diaries are a sharp and baleful view of the social history of our times.

Recommended by Timothy Garton Ash.

Timothy Garton Ash

I 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 turned into art. Let me give you an example. He goes off to witness the coronation of Haile Selassie, the event that was turned into Black Mischief, and he says: ‘Monday 3rd November, 1930. Met Polish attaché whose driver had brought him to wrong address. Lunched. Wrote description barbarous gebur. Went out to see what I could barbarous gebur. 3.30 no signs barbarity.’ That is so perfect, because it captures what an awful lot of journalists do. They go with their prejudiced expectations looking for the exotic, the oriental, the ghoulish: the barbarous gebur. They write a description of it and they go out to see if they can find traces of it – but there are no signs of barbarity. At that point you are at the fork in the road. The left path leads to veracity, the Orwellian path of historical truth where you actually have to say, ‘Well, it’s a great shame but it wasn’t so barbarous after all.’ Down the right fork is the path to the novel. I’m afraid that what happens in our own time, far too often, is that people mix the two. [source]