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“... Back in the now remote summer of 1990, when we were still celebrating the birth of a ‘new Europe’, a book was published simultaneously in several European languages. Written by Jean-Baptiste Duroselle and entitled, in the English edition, Europe: A History of Its Peoples, it is a classic example of the Whig interpretation of European history, a historical supplement to Jacques Delors ...”

“... I recently received a letter from a German theatre director, objecting to a passage of my book The File in which I wrote that, back in the Stalinist Fifties, an East German friend of mine had been ‘denounced’ by one Dr Warmbier, then a lecturer in Marxism-Leninism at Leipzig University. ‘It’s the word “denounced” that is wholly inappropriate,’ the director wrote, in defence of his old friend Dr Warmbier ...”

“... two grew apart. ‘To say that Germany had become normal since unification was common sense,’ Timothy GartonAsh writes towards the end of In Europe’s Name. ‘Anyone who thought that it was normal to live with a wall through Berlin was not quite normal. It was more normal to take a bus from the ...”

“... the ancien régime, and were then forced to build monuments to their own revolutionary past. Timothy GartonAsh would appreciate this tragicomic accident: it comes close to the spirit of ethically engaged irony that permeates his best work. Although he is my political opponent, I always consider him worth reading ...”

“... European Marxist intellectual, an Ernst Fischer or Isaac Deutscher fallen among Stalinists. Timothy GartonAsh met Wolf while working on The File and felt both the charm and the deep-seated denial. Wolf, he suggests, was the Albert Speer of East Germany, another argument from moral equivalence that ...”

“... any group, the Communists aside, that he hoped might put him in a post appropriate to his rank. Timothy Snyder, the author of this biography-cum-history, holds a chair at Yale and has written accounts of the rise and collapse of kingdoms and popular movements in Eastern and Central Europe. Garlanded with encomia from ...”

“... Timothy Snyder​ , a historian of Modern Eastern Europe at Yale and the most rhetorically gifted defender of the anti-Russian US foreign policy establishment, must have been rubbing his eyes in wonder last year as the theatrics of the Republican primary gave way to the rise of an ersatz Führer. How to describe those private security men ejecting protesters from rallies if not as the first recruits to an American SS? How long until the diatribes against Muslims were followed by a demand that they wear yellow crescents on their lapels? What is the Wall if not a way to secure an American Lebensraum? As the cabinet appointments snapped into place, there was Rex Tillerson, ready to renew the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, while Trump’s economic advisers seethed about trade deficits as if they were unjust war reparations ...”

“... would fulfil the required standards better than Vaclav Havel. But how about this – Tim Garton Ash writing about the Czech Chartists in 1984? If ever a real thaw comes – from above? after change in Moscow? – they will be ready with their busts of Tomas Masaryk, their editions of Franz Kafka and their memorials to Jan Palach. They know from ...”

“... the three Anglo-musketeers regularly featured in the New York Review of Books: Neal Ascherson and Timothy GartonAsh (spurs won in Eastern Europe) and Ian Buruma (in East Asia). United by common liberal convictions, the trio are otherwise quite distinct. Garton Ash, a generation ...”

“... a marketplace of ideas, where the true drives out the false. If anything, the converse is true. Timothy GartonAsh, acknowledging in his book Free Speech the ubiquity of lies in American political argument, responds: ‘Yet at least in most democratic countries there are two (or more) competing false narratives, and ...”

“... in the peace of the graveyard. ‘Why did it happen? And why did it happen so quickly?’ asks Timothy GartonAsh in his splendid new We the people.* I merely jib at the ‘and’, for it is evident now that the rulers of the GDR were right when they asserted that orthodox Marxism-Leninism was the sole raison ...”

“... a handful of simple, grabbing truths in it is the sort of book everybody can buy and linger over. Timothy Garton-Ash has done it several times already, so why shouldn’t she? Warsaw, Sofia, Budapest, Prague, all cities in which women make soup and grumble about their menfolk in their overcrowded apartments, blur into ...”

“... of thousands), surveillance promotes safety for the sake of community. They are believers in what Timothy GartonAsh calls ‘a connected world’.Garton Ash is a classical liberal with hopes for the attainment of a culture of international tolerance and freedom. His book Free ...”

“... of Cold War liberalism’ that have been reiterated recently by public intellectuals such as Timothy GartonAsh, Michael Ignatieff and Leon Wieseltier. To hold his own against such adversaries, he suggests that he isn’t speaking solely for himself. Instead, he is giving recognition to the ‘millennial and ...”

“... the Opportunity of our Times (2004), an early dirge about the waning of Anglo-American power, Timothy GartonAsh approvingly quoted a Canadian friend as saying that the trouble with Britain is that ‘it doesn’t know what story it wants to tell.’ This was certainly true of New Labour, which had invested heavily ...”