Timothy Garton Ash, Professor of European Studies, University of Oxford
14th March 2024
Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and one of the founders of the Reuters Institute. As a reporter and a historian, he’s covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, the post-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe and the many changes in Europe in the last 50 years.
Garton Ash has published 11 books, now translated into 21 languages. The most recent one is Homelands, a moving account of some of the most crucial events in the continent’s history. As an illustration on the key themes of the book, he remembered how he had walked through the Berlin wall on the day after it had come down, across what used to be the death strip at Potsdamer Platz. Then he met a very excited young East Berliner who had just seen a hand-written poster saying ‘Only today is the war really over.’
“That’s not just an anecdote, because I would argue that for the whole of Europe behind the Iron Curtain, the whole of Eastern Europe, the war was only over in 1989,” said Garton Ash, who explained that it took him 50 years of travelling around Europe to write this book, a perfect blend of history, memoir and reportage with so many stories that illustrate the history of the continent he loves.