Timothy Garton Ash
Timothy Garton Ash
Timothy Garton Ash CMG FRSAis a British historian, author and commentator. He is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University. Much of his work has been concerned with the late modern and contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth12 July 1955
democracy east administration
A central claim of the Bush administration's foreign policy is that the spread of democracy in the Middle East is the cure for terrorism.
lying hero men
Facts are subversive. Subversive of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and post-modernists. Subversive of lies, half-truths, myths; of all those "easy speeches that comfort cruel men.
europe problem
Europe's biggest problem is its success.
writing europe feelings
I have a dreadful feeling in my bones that future historians may write of the May 2014 elections: "This was the wake-up call from which Europe failed to wake up.
creativity europe diversity
To be in Florence is to reflect on Europe's intricate diversity - and its lost creativity.
europe turkeys doe
After saying yes to Turkey, the EU is having difficulty finding clear and consistent grounds for saying no to other, still more remote candidates - but being in the general vicinity of Europe does seem to be a continuing requirement.
keys survival liberty
The key to the survival of liberty in the modern world is the embrace of multiple identities.
past violence kind
One thing, however, I know with certainty: violence, or the direct threat of violence, of the kind we have seen in the past few days, is totally unjustified as a response to any published word or image.
gone economy eurozone
The Eurozone has clearly gone spectacularly wrong, pulling down all the continental economies.
country heart unions
I love this country, but the union jack leaves me cold.
weakness criminals reactions
I have also been saddened, though hardly surprised, by the weakness of the EU's reaction to the criminal attack on the Danish embassy in Syria, which seems to have been permitted, if not actively encouraged, by the Syrian regime.
thinking america erosion
Ordinary Americans, and especially the small minority active in Democrat and Republican primaries, must learn more of what people across the globe are thinking and saying about the US. For if you follow that, you realise that the erosion of American power is happening faster than most of us predicted -- while the politicians in Washington behave like rutting stags with locked antlers.
war democracy east
If you had said to anyone in 1945, at the end of the Second World War with the continent it ruins, that you could have a European Union of 28 member states stretching from Portugal in the West to Estonia in the East, all of them more-or-less liberal democracies - they wouldn't have believed you.
animal cities america
Except for its worst inner-city slums, America is not the primitive capitalist jungle of European imagination, where human beings slink away like wounded animals to die in bloodstained holes.