Tags: Europe | freedom | history

With justification, Timothy Garten Ash probably thinks of himself as the bad boy of Oxbridge...

Not content with the dusty historian's craft, he has carved out a small granite bust of fame as a hard traveling 'historian of the present' with muddy boots. But while this renegade Oxford historian cum war correspondent may be familiar with the acrid smell of fresh corpses and political powder kegs, he remains a mannered Liberal don who can use the word 'splendid' without irony.

Which is just as well; the profound knowledge of European history absorbed during years of cloistered study is precisely what makes Ash's corpus the paragon of 'high journalism' that it is. In this new edition of History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, our narrator weaves in and out of Balkan history lectures, private conversations with Vaclav Havel, and anti-Milosevic student demonstrations with the an assassin's eye for detail and a good professor's sense of pace.

Between dates laden seminar room sessions and memorable quotes from diplomats and dishwashers, he gives a bird's eye view of contemporary Europe that swoops down to rat level just when the picture threatens to lose focus or - worse - turn to yawns.

The re-unification of Germany, the meaning of Central Europe, the implosion of Yugoslavia, the ghosts of History and the personal demons of Havel, Walesa, Khol, Michnik, Meciar, Karadzic.

If you spliffed your way through the 1990s, Ash pulls you to his bosom and starts from the beginning, telling parts of a sinewed tale that unfolds with every daily headline, but requires a knowledge of the past to fully grasp. Ash is an apt guide, and this collection should be required reading for expats.

Especially ignorant American ones.