Homelands: A Personal History of Europe

Timothy Garton Ash

Sep 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by John Sackville

About this audiobook

Drawing on half a century of firsthand experience and exemplary scholarship, Timothy Garton Ash tells the story of postwar Europe's triumphs and tragedies Timothy Garton Ash, Europe's "historian of the present," has been "breathing Europe" for the last half century. In Homelands he embarks on a journey in time and space around the postwar continent, drawing on his own notes from many great events, giving vivid firsthand accounts of its leading actors, revisiting the places where its history was made, and recalling its triumphs and tragedies through their imprint on the present. Garton Ash offers an account of events as seen from the ground-history illustrated by memoir. He describes how Europe emerged from wartime devastation to rebuild, to triumph with the fall of the Berlin Wall, to democratize and unite. And then to falter. It is a singular history of a period of unprecedented progress along with a clear-eyed account of how so much went wrong, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the war in Ukraine. From the pen of someone who, in spite of Brexit, emphatically describes himself as an English European, this is both a tour d'horizon and a tour de force.

About the author

Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at the University of Oxford and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His books include The Magic Lantern, his account of the revolutions of 1989; The File: A Personal History, based on reading his own Stasi file; and History of the Present.

John Sackville is an award-winning actor, known for The Wedding Date, House of Anubis, and The Crown.