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Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name Main Edition
Author(s): Timothy Garton Ash (Author)
- Publisher: Atlantic Books
- Publication Date: 1 July 2009
- Edition: Main
- Language: English
- Print length: 496 pages
- ISBN-10: 1848870892
- ISBN-13: 9781848870895
Book Description
‘During times of universal deceit’, wrote George Orwell, ‘telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.’ For more than thirty years, Timothy Garton Ash has traveled among truth tellers and political charlatans to record, with scalpel-sharp precision, what he has found. This book confirms his reputation as our foremost historian of the present. Facts are Subversive contains Garton Ash’s eye-witness accounts of the fate of countries, including Serbia, Poland and Ukraine, making the transition from dictatorship to democracy, and his dispatches from places such as Egypt, Burma and Iran, where that transformation has yet to take place. A recurring theme, of the book and the decade, is freedom and its discontents. An encounter with the drug gangs of Sao Paulo raises disturbing questions about liberal democracy; his examination of immigration and Islam in Europe challenges the clichés of multiculturalism. Often humorous mini-essays, selected from his columns in the Guardian, rub shoulders with in-depth treatments of subjects including Günter Grass, George Orwell and Isaiah Berlin. Facts are Subversive also includes Garton Ash’s most recent reportage on the election of Barack Obama and its implications for the world.
Editorial Reviews
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 ―
ObserverAbout 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.
