Amiable and academic personal history

• Published date: 18 March 2023

Garton Ash reaches back a little farther though, to the second World War, partly out of narrative necessity and also to encompass his father's experience as an officer in the Royal Artillery, with which he took part in the postwar occupation of Germany

The younger Garton Ash begins his book with an intriguing visit to the Lower Saxony town of Westen, where his father was photographed playing cricket with other soldiers, and speaks to a handful of locals who are old enough to remember the end of the war.

Homelands runs the gamut of Europe in his lifetime, from the anti-communist resistance in the Eastern Bloc to the Ukraine war, via the establishment of the European Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the Euro zone crisis, the horror of migrants' deaths in the Mediterranean, and Brexit.

Garton Ash is that rarest of Britons - a multilingual intellectual as much at home on the Continent as in the UK. He counts the homelands of the book's title as his own, even if Brexit deprived him, as a British national, of the free movement he once enjoyed (he wryly notes that travelling the continent in recent years has for him been reminiscent of his early years of foreign travel, where visas and checkpoints were the norm).

Those early travels took him to places that were improbably exotic during the cold war - East Berlin, Poland, Czechoslovakia - first as a student and later as a journalist, during his time as European editor of the Spectator. The Stasi thought he was a spy and ran a comprehensive dossier on him, about which Garton Ash later wrote a book, The File. He says he was approached in the 1970s to work for MI6, but turned down the offer.

Nonetheless, his journalistic work behind the Iron Curtain was avowedly partisan, with little distance maintained from pro-democracy groups. Given the circumstances of the time, it would be a bit punctilious to describe such activity as unethical but many reporters might flinch at the descriptions of being a courier of messages from the West to Solidarity leaders. All this was moot by the end of the 1980s, when Garton Ash had moved out of journalism and into academia.

Garton Ash is a clear-headed chronicler of the continent. A...