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“... the confusion and silence of American liberal thinking on the subject (as well, perhaps, as Tony Blair’s syntactically sympathetic me-tooism). Historically, liberals have been unsympathetic to ‘wars of choice’ when undertaken or proposed by their own government. War, in the liberal imagination (and not only the liberal one), is a last resort, not ...”

“... am more or less the same age as George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Gerhard Schröder, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – a pretty crappy generation, when you come to think of it, and many names could be added. It is a generation that grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor ...”

“... My relations with Tony Judt date back a long time but they were curiously contradictory. We were friends, though not intimate ones, and while both of us were politically committed historians, and both preferred wearing informal gear as historians rather than regimental uniform, we marched to different drummers ...”

“... our early opinions. In other words, ‘postwar Europe’ is us. How will we look, in these pages? Tony Judt might have blurred his focus, as so many writers on the subject do. He might have attempted to define European civilisation, a term which proved meaningless in this black-hearted continent after 1945. He might have struck a transatlantic ...”

“... is still going on, but should older nightmares be revived in the process? This is the question Tony Judt asks at the end of Postwar, in relation to the Holocaust. Can letting go offer a kind of renewal, or is it merely a convenience for oppressors and bystanders? In the mid-1990s black artists were angered by Walker’s insistence on raising these ...”

“... altogether clear that these books are histories in any conventional sense, although in the case of Judt it is only fair to inform the reader that his equivalent of Khilnani’s project is not this volume – which is something like an extended pamphlet, on the order, as he says himself, of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Idéologie française – but rather his more ...”

“... a centrist political party with a treasure trove of £50 million has surfaced. One of its patrons, Tony Blair, explained in the New York Times last March that ‘for liberal democracy to survive and thrive, we must build a new coalition that is popular, not populist.’ A reinvigorated centrism, he wrote, had to acknowledge ‘genuine cultural ...”

“... is increasingly turning its back on Europe.’ Writing in 2003, at a time of high Euro-optimism, Tony Judt described Israel as a ‘characteristically late 19th-century separatist project’ in ‘a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers and international law … Israel, in short, is an anachronism.’ Today, it is ...”

“... foundational precept became an obfuscating fiction. As many people privately acknowledge, and as Tony Judt has now proposed in the New York Review of Books, the conditions for an independent Palestinian state have been killed off by the inexorable and irreversible advance of the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. The two-state solution to the ...”

“... For Tony Judt What is a collective passion? And is it something we should want, or get excited about? Today the political climate across the Western world is marked, we are told, by a curious and disabling atrophy or disaffection. We do not care enough. The election of Obama would be the exception. His election was of course inspirational, notably in terms of collective life: the mass registration of black voters was close to what might be called the forging of a new political constituency across generation and race ...”

“... history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.’ What is specific to our age, as Tony Judt once observed, is that we have become extremely skilful at teaching the lessons of history, but quite bad at teaching actual history. The truth is that today’s threats to democracy don’t parallel 20th-century experiences. Fascism – as ...”

“... his recent Leonard Stein lectures, in which he went on to describe his subsequent disillusionment. Tony Judt is now an incisive critic of Israeli policy but as a youthful Zionist he flew out to help the Jewish state during the war, and remembers – this by way of contrast with his students 40 years later at New York University – that opinion at ...”

“... Saudi Arabia’s top supplier of advanced military technology.2 In one of his last interviews, Tony Judt said: When Bush said that we are fighting terrorism ‘there’ so that we won’t have to fight them ‘here’, he was making a very distinctively American political move. It is certainly not a rhetorical trope that makes any sense in ...”

“... craving for universal mastery and control was rekindled in 1989 among many members of what Tony Judt called the ‘crappy generation’ – the one that ‘grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political’. Judt’s indictment extended beyond ...”

“... the major West Bank towns. In the long run all this is damaging to Israel’s future: as Tony Judt has recently argued, Israel cannot remain on Palestinian land and is simply putting off the inevitable withdrawal. The war against terrorism has permitted Israel and its supporters to commit war crimes against the Palestinian population of the West ...”