'Timothy Garton Ash is the best and most perceptive political writer of our time, and this book is a wonderful distillation of his thoughts on an extraordinary range of subjects. They were excellent as individual essays; put together like this, they shine the clearest of lights on an entire decade.' John Simpson

'During times of universal deceit', wrote George Orwell, 'telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.' For more than thirty years, Timothy Garton Ash has traveled among truth tellers and political charlatans to record, with scalpel-sharp precision, what he has found. This book, which collects his work on the first turbulent decade of this new millennium, confirms his reputation as our foremost historian of the present.

Facts are Subversive contains Garton Ash's eye-witness accounts of the fate of countries, including Serbia, Poland and Ukraine, making the transition from dictatorship to democracy, and his dispatches from places such as Egypt, Burma and Iran, where that transformation has yet to take place.

A recurring theme, of the book and the decade, is freedom and its discontents. An encounter with the drug gangs of Sao Paulo raises disturbing questions about liberal democracy; his examination of immigration and Islam in Europe challenges the clichés of multiculturalism. Often humorous mini-essays, selected from his columns in the Guardian, rub shoulders with in-depth treatments of subjects including Günter Grass, George Orwell and Isaiah Berlin. Facts are Subversive also includes Garton Ash's most recent reportage on the election of Barack Obama and its implications for the world.

The rigorous and brilliantly written essays in this book, when taken together, address some of the most important questions of our time: what happens to people who have endured long dictatorships when they try and found a democratic state?How best can freedom from tyranny be won? How are free expression, equality before the law and equal rights for men and women sustained in a society of different faiths and ethnicities? This is history of the present on a scale both panoramic and human: urgent, exhilarating and necessary.

'Garton Ash is, in the most literal sense of the term, a contemporary historian. He writes primarily as a witness to the events he is treating, and not just as an outside witness but often as an inside one as well ... yet the sense of the historic dimension of the events in question is never lost. And the quality of the writing places it clearly in the category of good literature.' George F. Kennan, New York Review of Books

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HISTORY

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'Timothy Garton Ash holds a mirror that magnifies... He writes masterfully and with compassion' - Neal Ascherson, Observer

For more than thirty years, Timothy Garton Ash has traveled among truth tellers and political charlatans to record, with scalpel-sharp precision, what he has found. Facts are Subversive, which collects his writings since the millennium, addresses some of the crucial questions of our time: what happens to people who have endured long dictatorships when they try to found a democratic state? How can freedom from tyranny be won? How are free expression, equality before the law and equal rights for men and women sustained in a society of different faiths and ethnicities?

This is history of the present on a scale by turns panoramic and human: urgent, exhilarating and necessary.