Auer Borea & The Kreisky Forum: Solving Problems Through Dialogue
Given the roster of leading thinkers who cross her threshold, it’s surprising how many are unfamiliar with the name of Gertraud Auer Borea d’Olmo, since 2005 the General Secretary of the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna. But she prefers it that way. “It’s not about promoting me, it is about promoting ideas,” […]
Book Review: Thinking the Twentieth Century, by Tony Judt, with Timothy Snyder
Ideas of a Troubled Century A year and a half ago, we lost Tony Judt – venerable historian, prolific essayist and indefatigable public intellectual – to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, at the age of just 62. A native Briton, Judt began as an obscure historian of the French Left before ascending to the positions of […]
Book Review: Tony Judt’s The Burden of Responsibility
The Opium of the Intellectuals Tony Judt was first and foremost a historian. And although his encyclopedic tour de force, Postwar, is likely to remain the most prominent text of his legacy, it is important to remember that for decades Judt was, rather obscurely, a historian of French intellectualism. Every first year history student learns […]
Book Review: Tony Judt’s Reappraisals
Canaries in the Mine There is a part in Tony Judt’s book Reappraisals in which he describes an exchange between British historian E. P. Thompson and the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski in the early 1970s. Thompson, according to Judt, “suggested from the safety of his leafy perch in middle England: … How dare you betray […]
Book Review: Ill Fares the Land, by Tony Judt
Delusions of Prosperity “Perhaps we should begin,” writes historian Tony Judt, “by reminding ourselves and our children that it wasn’t always like this.” That there was a time, not so long ago in America and Britain, when social decisions were made for social reasons, when the public dialogue was about the public welfare, and when […]
Tony Judt: The Un-Orthodox Jew
British historian Tony Judt has become a presence in Vienna. A permanent fellow of the Institute for the Human Sciences, he was here Jun. 13 to receive the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the best political book of 2006 (see “A History of Two Europes,” The Vienna Review Oct. 2006) and deliver an Award Lecture on […]
Book Review: Tony Judt’s Postwar
A History of Two Europes British historian Tony Judt will be in Vienna this month in honor of the August release of the German edition of Postwar, his monumental account of Europe since 1945. The scope of this extraordinary work is vast, ranging from the loss of the Portuguese colonies to corruption in Kiev, from […]
Wiki-Irony
As the late Tony Judt wrote in a New York Review of Books essay on Henry Kissinger, “‘secrecy’ [is] an inevitable component of policymaking in any sensitive area, and one for which there are appropriate and legitimate institutional structures.” Judt goes on to differentiate between secrecy, which is necessary, and deception, which is reprehensible. This […]
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