The File: A Personal History - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Timothy Garton Ash is a Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford and, like Peter Hennessy (though in a completely different field), is one of this country’s most distinguished and best known scholar-journalists. In the late 1970s and 1980s he reported from eastern Europe for the Spectator. These dispatches were published in the best-selling collections, We the People and The Uses of Adversity (which won the European Essay Prize). In 1989, he was also awarded the David Watt Memorial Prize for his commentaries on international affairs.

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In 1992, after the Berlin Wall came down, Timothy Garton Ash walked into the ministry which now looks after the records of the Stasi, the East German secret police, and asked if there was a file on him. There was – one marked ‘Romeo’. 'The File' is the story of what was in the buff-coloured binder, and of the avenues – personal, political and historical – down which Garton Ash was led by it.

“By far the wisest and most penetrating study of a communist ‘informer society’ ever written by an outsider.”
NEAL ASCHERSON, 'Independent on Sunday'

“'The File' is history on the hoof: part reportage, part memoir, often crafted more like a novel than a piece of non-fiction. It is about ‘the quieter corruption of mature totalitarianism, about official record versus personal memory … Garton Ash knows exactly which buttons to press for our illumination.”
JULIAN BARNES, 'Sunday Times'

“Excellent and fascinating … Garton Ash not only comes to terms with history – with the endless, quiet wickedness of the GDR – he embarks upon a journey back into memory, dragging up things long forgotten and finding they still have the power to move, to distress, and to enrage … An inspiring book.”
PHILIP HENSHER, 'Mail on Sunday'

“This important book … frank, erudite, disturbing”
PHILIP KNIGHTLEY, 'Independent'

“A masterpiece, a personal story of universal significance … this book is a love story which could so easily have been a litany of hate. It has found its place on that small shelf of books I would want to rescue if my house went up in flames.”
PAUL OESTREICHER, 'The Tablet'