gloomy mist all around the house at my 1,300 metre level. At 07.00 the light is so poor that I need the lamp to read Andrew Robert's The Story of war - a new history of the second world war. I'm also dipping into one of the early Le Carre novels - and staring Tony Judt's Reappraisals. An earlier blog referred to historian Judt's latest book (Ill fares the Land). This one is a collection of the trenchant essays he has written on various European figures such as Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, Eric Hobsbawm, Kennedy, Kissinger, Arthur Koestler and Edward Said. His theme is the role of ideas - and our forgetfulness....A wonderful writer - and his Post-war Europe remains not only one of the few treatments of this subject which includes central europe (Garton Ash is the only other historian who has done central europe justice) but the most eloquent and passionate.
So far this morning, the find has been a prolific EU Think Tank which focusses on the neglected field of the EU's democracy programme. Ive downloaded interesting papers on its strategy in Central Asia, for exampe.
