Timothy Garton Ash Interviewed by Richard Ovenden

Historian Professor Timothy Garton Ash mixes history and memoir and reportage as he tells how Europe slowly recovered from World War II, came close to the ideal of a united, peaceful and free continent and then faltered.

Garton Ash speaks from a lifetime of studying Europe and includes his own and others’ experiences in the story, ranging from his father’s memories of D-Day, to interviews with Polish dockers, Albanian guerrillas and angry Parisian teenagers. He looks at what went wrong in Europe, from the 2008 financial crash to the war in Ukraine, and urges the citizens of Europe to understand and defend what they have achieved.

Garton Ash is professor of European studies at the University of Oxford and a columnist for the Guardian. He has won many prizes for his writing, including the prestigious Chgarlemagne Prize, and met many of the leading players in European politics of the last few decades. Here he talks to Bodley’s Librarian Richard Ovenden. The event will be introduced by Frederick Studemann, literary editor of FT Weekend

This event is part of the festival’s Voices of Europe programme.

An FT Weekend at the Bodleian event.