Facts are Subversive

'Timothy Garton Ash holds a mirror that magnifies... He writes masterfully and with compassion' - Neal Ascherson, Observer For more than thirty years, Timothy Garton Ash has traveled among truth tellers and political charlatans to record, with scalpel-sharp precision, what he has found. Facts are Subversive, which collects his writings since the millennium, addresses some of the crucial questions of our time: what happens to people who have endured long dictatorships when they try to found a democratic state? How can freedom from tyranny be won? How are free expression, equality before the law and equal rights for men and women sustained in a society of different faiths and ethnicities? This is history of the present on a scale by turns panoramic and human: urgent, exhilarating and necessary.

Timothy Garton Ash is the author of eight books of political writing - 'history of the present' - which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last three decades. He is Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford, where he is Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony's College, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and his weekly column for the Guardian is widely syndicated across Europe, Asia and the Americas. He has received many awards for his writing, including the Somerset Maugham Award and the Orwell Prize.