Homelands is a stunning blend of contemporary history reportage and memoir by our greatest
writer about European affairs. Drawing on half a century of interviews and experience
Homelands tells the story of Europe in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries -
how having emerged from its wartime hell in 1945 it slowly recovered and rebuilt liberated
and united to come close to the ideal of a Europe 'whole free and at peace'. And then
faltered. Humane expert and deeply felt Homelands is full of encounters conversations and
anecdote. It is also highly personal: Timothy Garton Ash has spent a lifetime studying and
thinking about Europe and this book is full of life itself from his father's experience on
D-Day to his teenage French exchange to interviewing Polish dockers Albanian guerillas and
angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris as well as advising prime ministers
chancellors and presidents in the UK Europe and the US. Homelands is both a singular history
of a period of unprecedented progress and a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong
all the way from the financial crisis of 2008 to the war in Ukraine. It culminates in an urgent
call to the citizens of this great old continent to understand and defend what we have
collectively achieved. Timothy Garton Ash was 17 when Britain joined the European Community and
64 when Britain left it. In the intervening years he has lived and breathed European politics
witnessing some of the most dramatic scenes in its history interviewing many of its key
players and analysing how life has evolved for ordinary Europeans across the breadth of the
continent. He is Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford and a columnist for
the Guardian. He has won many prizes and plaudits for his journalism and books including The
File his riveting autobiographical account of investigating the contents of his Stasi file
after the fall of East Germany.
