Join us for the launch of Timothy Garton Ash's new book, Homelands: a personal history of Europe.

Drawing from the people who lived it, Homelands explores how Europe slowly recovered and rebuilt from the Second World War, and then faltered. Ash's work is filled with vivid experiences: from his father's memories of D-Day and his own surveillance at the hands of the Stasi to interviewing Albanian guerrillas in the mountains of Kosovo and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents.

Homelands is at once a social and political commentary and also a living, breathing history of a period of unprecedented progress, a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong and an urgent call to the citizens of this great old continent to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved.

Meet our speaker and chair

Timothy Garton Ash (@fromTGA) is the author of eleven books of political writing or ‘history of the present’ which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last half century. He is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books. He writes a column on international affairs in the Guardian which is widely syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Simon Glendinning (@lonanglo) is Head of the European Institute and Professor in European Philosophy at LSE. His current research interests include the question of European identity. He is the author of Europe: A Philosophical History – Beyond Modernity.

More about this event

The European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe.

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You can watch a recording of this event on YouTube.

You can listen to the podcast on SoundCloud.

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