The art form that he knows best is the film, and his technique is decidedly cinematic, with the focus constantly shifting from one theme or region to another within a loosely chronological framework. A thousand pages on Europe since 1945 may seem dauntingly prolix, but the cumulative effect can be entertaining, for Judt is usually provocative and often caustic in his judgments. Postwar is Judt’s most ambitious book to date, a monumental work of synthesis in which he demonstrates considerable mastery of this most complex of continents. Like the late Edward Said, with whom he collaborated, Judt regards Israel as an “anachronism,” and predicted in 2003 that unless it abandoned its identity as a Jewish state it would cease to be a democracy “within half a decade.”

Two years ago, in the pages of the New York Review of Books, he turned his attention to Israel, claiming that progress toward peace with the Arabs had been wrecked by Israel’s “fascist” ruling class, whose vanguard of settlers would fight to the death rather than withdraw. At the latter, he heads the Remarque Institute for the study of Europe while enjoying an affluence and an influence of which European academics can only dream.Īlong with other luminaries of the mid-Atlantic liberal intelligentsia, Judt has also emerged as a prominent critic of the Bush administration and its neoconservative foreign policies. Despite his Francophilia, Judt ultimately found the academic opportunities created by American capitalism irresistible, abandoning Oxford and Cambridge for Berkeley and New York University.

Past Imperfect (1992), his study of French intellectuals from 1944 to 1956, is still the best account of their doomed love affair with Communism. After the events of Paris 1968, he was drawn into the intoxicating milieu of the French Left, which briefly flickered back into life during the Mitterrand era in the 1980’s. His own life mirrors precisely the postwar period: born in 1948, he grew up in 1950’s London, a world of “high-collared, Edwardian-era reformism” from which he retrospectively recoils, though in fact no generation in modern times enjoyed greater security or prosperity. In some respects, Tony Judt ought to be the right man for the job of writing a history of Europe since 1945.

Postwar by Tony Judt