The Magic Lantern

The Magic Lantern is one of those rare books that capture history in the making, written by an author who was witness to some of the most remarkable moments that marked the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe.



Timothy Garton Ash was there in Warsaw, on 4 June, when the communist government was humiliated by Solidarity in the first semi-free elections since the Second World War. He was there in Budapest, twelve days later, when Imre Nagy - thirty-one years after his execution - was finally given his proper funeral. He was there in Berlin, as the Wall opened. And most remarkable of all, he was there in Prague, in the back rooms of the Magic Lantern theatre, with Václav Havel and the members of Civic Forum, as they made their 'Velvet Revolution'.



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.



In the future, there will probably be streets in Warsaw, Prague and Budapest bearing the name of Timothy Garton Ash



A wonderful combination of first-class reporting, brilliant political analysis and reflection.



[Garton Ash's] own involvement in these events, intellectual and emotional, is of such intensity that he can speak... from the inside as well as from the outside. Yet the sense of historic dimension... is never lost. And the quality of the writing places it clearly in the category of good literature.



Along with the historian's long view, Garton Ash has an eye and an ear for the telling detail.