The time has come for a brilliant young historian—at home in many languages; capable of empathizing both with powerholders and with so-called ordinary people; a writer of distinction; tenured, but with few teaching obligations; well-funded for extensive research on several continents; Stakhanovite in work habits; monastic in private life—to start writing this necessary, almost impossible masterpiece: a kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk of modern history.(I was thinking it would probably be Garton Ash himself.)
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
What credentials should the historian of 1989 have?
Timothy Garton Ash knows:
