UNITED KINGDOM AUTHOR · HISTORY · POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT
Timothy Garton Ash
Also known as: Timothy Ash Garton, Ash Timothy Garton
British historian and author
When I first came to Poland I kept hearing a very strange word.
— from The Polish revolution
Most acclaimed
The File
1998
In 1978, fresh out of Oxford, Timothy Garton Ash set out for Berlin to see what he could learn from the divided city about freedom and despotism. As he moved from west to east - from Berlin glamour to Berlin danger - the East German secret police, the so-called Stasi, was compiling a secret file on his activities, monitoring his Berlin days and nights and tracking his growing involvement with the Solidarity movement in Poland. Fifteen years later, with the wall torn down and Berlin now unified, Garton Ash visited Stasi headquarters to find his file. The thick dossier he was given forms the basis for this real-life thriller in which he traces and confronts the German friends and acquaintances who informed on him, and the officers who hired them. Behind Stasi reports of suspicious meetings we discover the love affairs, friendships, and formative intellectual encounters that actually occurred. And behind a baffling web of lies, half-truths, and forgotten stories we find a forty-year-old man spying on his younger self.
The Polish revolution
The author was with the strikers in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. He witnessed the defiance of the workers and the emergence of an improbable leader and hero in Lech Walesa. This book, therefore, acts as an eyewitness account of the occurances cited but also it provides an analysis of the powers ranged against Solidarity and of their pyrrhic victory. The author describes Solidarity's long underground struggle, its triumphant return in 1989 and the ironies of its subsequent disintegration.
Free speech
"Never in human history was there such a chance for freedom of expression. If we have Internet access, any one of us can publish almost anything we like and potentially reach an audience of millions. Never was there a time when the evils of unlimited speech flowed so easily across frontiers: violent intimidation, gross violations of privacy, tidal waves of abuse. A pastor burns a Koran in Florida and UN officials die in Afghanistan. Drawing on a lifetime of writing about dictatorships and dissidents, Timothy Garton Ash argues that in this connected world that he calls cosmopolis, the way to combine freedom and diversity is to have more but also better free speech. Across all cultural divides we must strive to agree on how we disagree. He draws on a thirteen-language global online project free speech debate.com conducted out of Oxford University and devoted to doing just that. With vivid examples, from his personal experience of China's Orwellian censorship apparatus to the controversy around Charlie Hebdo to a very English court case involving food writer Nigella Lawson, he proposes a framework for "civilized" conflict in a world where we are all becoming neighbors." -- Provided by publisher.