George Orwell, the most influential political writer of the previous century, wrote that "during times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act".
Timothy Garton Ash, Oxford and Stanford don and veteran practitioner of what he describes as the "mongrel craft" of scholarship and journalism, has spent a lifetime in pursuit of the "subversive" truth behind the significant geopolitical developments - and inflated political rhetoric - of our times.
This collection - his third - analyses the important events of an era that began with the fall of the Twin Towers, gave rise to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, experienced the ascent of non-Western powers (China, India), was faced with global warming and the crisis of capitalism, and culminated in the acclaimed election of Barack Obama as 44th president of the US. The book also contains extended essays on writer s and thinkers.
The author's search for the facts behind the headlines has taken him to the fall of Milosevic in Serbia and to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, to Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, to the laptop-wielding mullahs of Iran, to the US of Bush the Younger, and to most outposts of his beloved Europe. For the avowedly liberal and secular Garton Ash is above all a committed European - a not uncritical protagonist of the way in which Europe has become steadily freer and more diverse since the end of World War 2 and the collapse of Soviet communism.
The almost 50 chapters are divided into longer pieces that first appeared in the New York Review of Books and lighter mini-essays from the author's writings in The Guardian. They have the freshness - and absence of hindsight - of up-to-the-minute journalism, and tackle controversial issues, such as when a freedom fighter becomes a terrorist (as in Macedonia); how Europe is being Islamised; whether the war in Iraq was justified; whether Orwell was right to have given a list of crypto-communist writers to the authorities in the early days of the Cold War; and why the Stasi (the East German security police, who kept a huge file on Garton Ash) should have become the symbol of communist tyranny, rather than the KGB or the Khmer Rouge.
FACTS ARE SUBVERSIVE: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name
 By Timothy Garton Ash441 pagesAtlantic BooksR260
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The author's reflections on Brazil have a particular relevance in SA, also struggling to sustain liberal democracy in the face of extremes of inequality, poverty, social exclusion, crime, drugs, lawlessness and corruption. How do you decide, in a mixed-race society, exactly who is black, he asks rhetorically. And in a country that prides itself on the richness of its miscegenation, yet has a poor black underclass, are race-based quotas the way to go? Sound familiar?
Conservative critics of Garton Ash argue that liberals of his stripe are inclined to wishful thinking: that history does not always move in the direction of better or happier endings. Iran and Burma may not become more democratic in time, and Europe's reality may well fall far short of its aspirations. And the author himself cautions against grounding analysis upon his or anyone else's version of the facts.
Yet, as this fine book demonstrates, besides being an exceptional writer, Garton Ash is an unusually frank and credible witness to the truths of contemporary history, at a time when fact-finding and good foreign reporting are becoming rarer - and more expensive.
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