Professor Ash will talk about his most recent book Homelands: A Personal History of Europe (Yale University Press 2023, published in Estonian by Varrak 2023). Drawing on half a century of travel and experience, Homelands tells the story of Europe in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries - now, 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 anecdotes. It is also highly personal: Timothy Garton Ash has spent a lifetime studying and thinking about Europe. 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 (b. 1955) is the author of eleven books of political writing or ‘history of the present’, which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last half century. He is a Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has received numerous awards and honors, including the George Orwell Prize for political writing and the Charlemagne Prize, and has been featured on Time magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people.

 

The event will be moderated by Klen Jäärats, Director for European Union Affairs at the Government Office of Estonia.