Timothy Garton Ash's Reading List

"Absolutely not. You can find notions of free speech not just in Ancient Greece—where a massive amount of what we think of as free speech and democracy comes from—but, interestingly, in ancient Chinese texts, in ancient Indian texts, in the edicts of the Emperor Ashoka. It’s really important to say that the idea has been around forever, and not just in western culture. But in the modern western world, you start in the 17th century with the English Revolution, with John Milton, then with the Enlightenment—English, French, Scottish, and American. Then you go, on the one hand, to the First Amendment in the U.S., which is obviously a classic statement of free speech, and in England, to John Stuart Mill. In my view, Mill is one of those mildly irritating authors like Tocqueville, who say so much so well that it’s difficult to say it better. Actually, when I say On Liberty , I mean above all chapter two of On Liberty , “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion” which says so much, so brilliantly, so eloquently… We where? We in the West, we in Britain? Which country are we talking about? That’s a rather good question. The answer is interestingly complicated, because, of course, a question of free speech is also a question about power relations, who is in a position to speak freely? The ideal of free speech is an ideal of equality, where everyone is free to speak freely. Now of course, the world of Victorian Britain didn’t have that. Did the servants have freedom of speech? Did women have freedom of speech? Did colonised people in the British Empire have effective freedom of speech? Certainly not. So in that sense, we have more, because more people have more right to speak freely—and more ability, because so many of us have a smartphone or a computer. “The mark of a free society is that we restrain ourselves” On the other hand, I think Mill would be extremely worried by some of the taboos we see today, the sense that we have to tiptoe around all sorts of really difficult subjects. I don’t think he would have been keen at all on hate speech laws, because one of the key things he said—and where I am very much a Millian—is that the mark of a free society is that we restrain ourselves. The state is not the father telling you, like a child, what you can do and what you can’t do, and putting you in the corner. Mature, adult citizens make their own choices, and we choose what I call ‘robust civility.’ That’s exactly what he thinks, but he insists very strongly that it shouldn’t be imposed by law. Yes, and that the criteria should not be mere offence—he’s very good on that. But his central statement is about seeking the truth. What he says is very original, which is that many false statements may contain a grain of truth, and even an utterly false statement challenges us to restate our position. It’s therefore a way to keep the good sword of truth sharp, if you’re constantly confronting it with other arguments. He talks about the ‘deep slumber’ of a decided opinion, of received wisdom. That’s at the heart of what he’s trying to argue—the argument from seeking the truth. He also has this wonderful passage where he says that we’re so much shaped by the world we’re in that the same causes which make someone a churchman in London would have made him a Buddhist or Confucian in Peking. That’s so profoundly true. We’re so shaped by the environment, that you need that contrary, idiosyncratic opinion to shake it up. This is Mill’s ‘harm principle’—that I should be free to say or do anything, so long as it does not do harm to others. That’s core to modern liberalism, the basic framework. Then the argument becomes, ‘What harms other people?’ So take the torrent of horrible stuff—rubbish, abuse, hate speech—which is flowing through the internet. As I say in the book, the internet is the largest sewer in human history, and the sewerage is all waiting to spill out of your smart phone. The question is, what’s genuinely harmful in that? Now, that’s very difficult to work out because, as with so much else with free speech, context is all. If I started ranting to you about Tutsis in Rwanda here, sitting at a table in north Oxford, it would be stupid, but it wouldn’t have harmful effects. In the context of Rwanda in 1994, people got killed as a result. Nonetheless, it’s immensely clarifying to start with the question about harm, and it’s harm , not mere offence. One of the diseases of our time is that people are saying, ‘You shouldn’t say that!’—just because it’s merely offensive to somebody. It’s what I call the offensiveness veto. You almost get to the point where just one person has to stand up and say, ‘I’m offended’ for a speaker to be disinvited from a university. Yes. This is a simple distinction, but I think it’s a really, really important one to bring into the debate. At the moment, we have this cauldron we call ‘hate speech.’ Within that is really, really dangerous stuff, which ends up with people being killed or silenced, as well as just very offensive stuff, or rubbish, or stupidity. What you have to do is take apart the ingredients of this stew and say which parts we need the state to go after. The state should go after what I call ‘dangerous speech’—something that is intended and likely to lead to physical violence or serious psychological harm. Hate speech as such—hateful speech—I say we have to counter in civil society, by calling people out on it in everyday life. People say something stupid about Muslims, you call them out on it. People make a stupid racist joke, you call them out on it, either online or in real life. “What we’re all trying to do is to teach our children to navigate the high seas of the internet” But no. 1, in principle it shouldn’t be the state having to organise all that, because then we’re children back in nursery school. No. 2, because there is so much more speech as a result of the internet—just oceans of it—the state is totally incapable of policing all of that. So the state should focus on the really dangerous stuff. For dangerous speech, people endlessly quote Oliver Wendell Holmes: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” That’s a pretty silly thing to do, but Mill’s example is much better. He says that it was fine to criticise corn dealers—who were the, I don’t know, investment bankers of his day—but if someone is inciting an angry mob to violence outside the corn merchant’s house, that’s a different matter. It’s a very simple image, but it gets you started on what we mean by dangerous speech as opposed to hate speech. Absolutely. But, at the same time, that’s why you’ve got ten simple principles. The metaphor that runs through my book is a metaphor of navigation. Michel Foucault quotes an ancient Greek philosopher, saying that we should teach free speech like navigation. It’s a wonderful image. What we’re all trying to do is to teach our children to navigate the high seas of the internet. These are very high and often quite rough seas. You’ve got to start with a few basic principles of navigation—so you have your Pole star in the north—and then go into the detail. But that’s okay, because one of the things we all do is to ignore it. I think that part of the necessary resilience is just ignoring this stuff. The example I give in the book is YouTube, which has promoted a channel called ‘No Hate Speech’ and actually, the comments on this channel are an anthology of hate speech. It starts with, “Hitler had the right idea,” and goes on down. If you find the page, it’s absolutely wonderful stuff."

"I absolutely love this book, firstly because it’s a beautifully written and very funny short book, and secondly because I think humour is unbelievably important as a way we use free speech to live with diversity. The Today programme, on BBC Radio 4, is full of mild ethnic joshing between the English, the Welsh, and the Scots. That’s the sign of a really healthy society, when you’ve got to the point that you can joke about it. In my book I quote something terribly interesting, which is that in Senegal, which is a very diverse society, there are actually rituals of inter-ethnic joking. Everybody does jokes, and then, when they’re asked, ‘Why is it that people get on quite well with their neighbours?’ a large proportion of them say, ‘Because of these joking rituals.’ What Amoz Oz says is, ‘I have never met a fanatic who has a sense of humour, or someone with a sense of humour who is a fanatic.’ And therefore, he says, he wants to manufacture humour pills and have them distributed free around the Middle East. I think that’s just such a great insight. Yes, but what’s so wonderful about the book, is it’s showing how dialogue, debate, free interaction, is one of the best ways of dealing with that. I quote in my book this wonderful song by Nina Simone, “I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to be Free” with the key line, ‘I wish you could know what it means to be me,’ and that’s it. There are two sides: you know what it means to be me , so it’s both the speaker and the listener. The way we live with difference is first of all by understanding where the other person is coming from. There’s a Quaker saying which is perhaps a little bit idealistic but nonetheless rather beautiful, which is, ‘An enemy is a friend whose story you haven’t heard.’ Now, obviously that’s not true everywhere in all circumstances. If you’re facing the SS, you have to reach for your gun. Nonetheless, there’s a deep truth in there. “There’s a Quaker saying: An enemy is a friend whose story you haven’t heard.” The idea that you can manage a multicultural society, a society with people from everywhere speaking all languages, all faiths, all belief systems, by telling everybody to shut up seems to me profoundly superficial and illusory. The way you do it is by getting people to speak about their differences, even very difficult subjects, but in a context of robust civility. And humour is a great lubricant. Oz has this wonderful passage where he quotes A Life of Brian , where the crowd chants, “We are all individuals, we are all individuals,” in unison, and then one person says, “I’m not, I’m not,” and they all try and shut him up. But he is one of those people, because he is this solitary voice. He’s one of those people holding out against an incredibly powerful consensus. He’s absolutely for a two-state solution, peace now, although I suspect now he thinks it’s probably a hopeless cause. I think there’s a more subtle point there. Free speech is not just about the laws you have, good or bad. It’s about the whole structure of communication. We’ve got into a situation now in the UK where it privileges the voices that shout. Partly that’s because we have the tabloids we have—the Eurosceptic press have been selling this really deceptive and mendacious narrative but selling it very powerfully. It’s also because of the echo chamber effect from the internet. Then you have the fact that the internet has simply cut the feet from under the business model of most newspapers. Therefore all newspapers are fighting for their life. They’re drowning. What do you do when you’re drowning? You wave and shout.So they’re all waving and shouting, ‘Come over here, give us your clicks!’ (and the advertising revenue that comes with those). So we have a media landscape which—apart from the BBC, which becomes even more important—privileges the shouting voice. If it bleeds, it leads, if it roars, it scores. Funnily enough, I have had this experience with my own Guardian column. I’ve been writing a Guardian column for 15 years or so. The clicks you get sometimes are just amazing. Guardian online has a monthly audience of 40 million, so a recent one I did had a quarter of a million views. It’s fantastic. “We’ve got into a situation now where it privileges the voices that shout” But over that time I’ve noticed—and the comment page editor was acknowledging this the other day—that because you have to get the clicks, the editor is always looking for the piece which is shouting, and the sub is always looking for the sensational headline. So I think it’s more a point about the media landscape and the unintended consequence of the internet than the ability of the fanatical voice to win out over the reasonable one."

"This is a most incredible story. Aryeh Neier is himself a Holocaust survivor. His family, who were Jewish, got out of Germany pretty much at the last minute. In the late 1970s he was running the ACLU— the American Civil Liberties Union—and decided to defend the right of a bunch of neo-Nazis to march through a town called Skokie, where a very large number of Holocaust survivors lived. You can imagine this was massively controversial. He got hate mail, many people resigned from the ACLU. This book tells the story of that. What I find particularly moving is the first chapter, when he explains why he does it, and he says—I paraphrase—‘It’s not in spite of being Jewish, it’s precisely because I’m a Jewish Holocaust survivor that I know that free speech and the law is the defence of the weak against the strong. And if I ask that for myself, I have to ask it also for others, and so that’s why I’m defending my enemy.’ “How would I have behaved if I’d been an East German? Would I have been a dissident or a collaborator?” So it’s not just a very coherent and powerful argument, it’s a very moving argument coming from the guy who’s writing it—and he went on, by the way, to be a terrific international human rights activist. He headed George Soros’s Open Society Foundation for many, many years. He has practised what he preached. But this is such a defining moment, and I remember my friend Christopher Hitchens saying to me that the Skokie case was one of the things that made him want to move to the United States. Those were the days when the United States really stood as a beacon for free speech and civil liberties. You have to take the question in two parts. Part number one is the kind of question I asked myself when I was writing about my Stasi file which is how would I have behaved if I’d been an East German? Would I have been a dissident or a collaborator? I don’t know the answer to that question, how I would have behaved. Part two is, in principle, do I think he was right? Absolutely I think he was right. A perfectly legitimate choice. You disagree with this profoundly, that’s fine. This is Milton, it’s Mill, it’s Aryeh Neier. In the famous formula, we must defend the thought we hate, not just the thoughts we like. I mean, in contemporary terms, I remember Theresa May, when she was Home Secretary, once saying, ‘The internet platforms must ban this Islamist stuff, because these people have disgusting views.’ Well, free speech is not about banning disgusting views. It’s about going after them when they’re really dangerous. It’s about arguing with them. But the idea that just because they seem ‘disgusting’ to Theresa May is sufficient reason for them to be taken down by the internet platforms suggests she really hasn’t got the basic idea of free speech. And I hope she will soon have the leisure to do so. It very much has. One characteristic of this connected world is that we now have a global public sphere provided by a few private companies. There’s the notion of ‘POPS’—Privately Owned Public Spaces. Increasingly we’re getting our news from Facebook, not just exchanging family photos. So they have to face up to the fact that they have some public responsibilities. Then the question is, so how should they do that? What should be the rules of the game? One has to acknowledge that women and people from minorities do get massively harassed and bullied on Facebook and on Twitter and that’s a serious problem. They do have to provide us with the tools to defend ourselves. “Free speech is not about banning disgusting views. It’s about going after them when they’re really dangerous” That’s how I would put it, that I should be able to decide the level of privacy I want. You see, free speech is the right of both the speaker and the listener. I should be free to say what I want or not. The listener should be free to hear what he or she wants or not. So I should be able to block people on Twitter. Now the problem arises—when I was talking to a human rights activist just a couple of days ago in Montreal, she was saying she got 16,000 tweets in a couple of days attacking her on one issue. Well, she can’t spend the day blocking 10,000 accounts. So there are problems of scale, but the principle is very simple. I should be able to decide. Education is incredibly important here. Going back to the navigation metaphor, we really are like people who are steering paddle boats around the lake and suddenly we’re on the high seas. That involves knowing about how you protect your privacy online, how you report really bad stuff, how to keep it away, how to find the good stuff, how to distinguish fake news from true news, but also how you engage with people. I quote in the book a technique, which I love, called ‘constructive controversy.’ I saw this in action in an academy school in east Oxford. Let’s take a controversial subject, the burka say. What’s your position on this? Ahmed argues for this position, and Joe argues for that position. That’s fine. Then you say, ‘Okay, now you have to swap and you have to make the opposite case.’ When that happens, you almost see a sort of light bulb going on in their eyes as they see, ‘Yes, I can imagine what it would be like to see it from their point of view.’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The question of effective counter-speech on the internet is something I’m working on now. How do you do it? How do you actually make it work? Anonymity is a big problem. I call it Janus Anonymous. On the one hand the death threats and the hate speech is coming from anonymous. On the other hand, if you’re a dissident in Iran, or in an oppressive religious community, anonymity is a lifeline for you."

"The reason I chose this is that so much of the literature on free speech is either law or philosophy or politics. Here is a writer, a very fine writer, going at it through literature, and what is literature about if not free speech? How we use language, how we interact. What’s so interesting about it is that he looks at the mental state of being offended, and he looks at it with examples from Dostoevsky and Dickens and elsewhere. He says the state of being offended is always the mark of someone who’s unsure of their own position, it’s a mark of weakness. It’s the mark of the bully and the buffoon, and I think that’s a very powerful insight. In saying, ‘I am offended,’ you’re revealing something about yourself. “The state of being offended is the mark of someone who’s unsure of their own position” If I extend that story and think about South Africa, I don’t think Nelson Mandela ever took offence—although heaven knows he had reason to be offended by the treatment he was receiving. He maintained his dignity. His position was, ‘You’re the people who are being diminished by this, you’re the people who are losing your dignity, not me.’ This goes against the grain of much contemporary western society, as one sees it in universities and elsewhere, which is almost incitement to take offence. People are being encouraged to take offence at anything they find slightly offensive. Even, for example, Germaine Greer being invited to lecture at a university: ‘I take offence because of her views on trans people.’ Free speech is also about what kind of people do we want to be? What kind of people do we want our children to be? Do we want them to follow the example of Mandela, or Václav Havel or Aung San Suu Kyi as role models and say, ‘While you’re trying to humiliate and degrade me, you’re humiliating and degrading yourself.’ Or is your role model the person who’s going to say, ‘I’m offended, I’m offended, I’m offended.’ But also, language, literature. Again, Amos Oz and Coetzee are about the same thing. How do we use this defining human gift, which is language—no one else in the animal kingdom has it—to negotiate our differences without coming to blows? That’s essentially what it’s about."

"In this completely transformed world of the internet, you have so many different subjects. It’s not just law and philosophy and literature, it’s also computers and it’s also very much about business. Tim Wu is an American ‘cyberlawyer’—a new category of human being—and a rather brilliant one. He’s the guy who coined the term ‘net neutrality,’ which we all use now. The focus is on information businesses. He says that these are a new kind of business, he says, and that one thing we simply didn’t know 20 years ago is that the network effects on the internet are so powerful that within a very short period of time we have private superpowers—these absolutely massive information empires which have fantastic concentrations of power. If Facebook were a country, it would be the largest country on Earth, with 1.9 billion going on to 2 billion regular monthly users. “If Facebook were a country, it would be the largest country on Earth” The American constitutional tradition, including the First Amendment, is brilliant at controlling public power. It’s very good at taking on President Donald Trump. It’s amazing how well it’s responded to Trump. But it’s very bad at controlling private power, and the challenge now is as much about private power—Facebook, Google, and Twitter—as it is about public power. I love the way he explores at the intersection of law, politics, engineering and business, how these information empires have developed, and then the question is how should you try to create checks and balances? It’s a very difficult question and there’s no simple answer to it. We’ve now got to the stage where they’re so big and so rich and have such cash powers that when some very clever Brits develop something called DeepMind, so they buy DeepMind. Or someone clever develops something called WhatsApp, so they buy WhatsApp. They can buy up the competition. I think there has to be a series of answers of which part is definitely anti-trust. These are near-monopolies. I know because I spend a lot of time talking to people high up in these companies—because I spend three months a year in Stanford and therefore Silicon Valley —that’s what they’re really frightened of, because of their dominant position, particularly in Europe. But also, if you take Facebook’s news feed, they could swing an election. If they really slanted everything that came across on news feeds to favour the Republicans or the Democrats, they could probably swing that election. So actually you have to think of them, as a kind of media power with some sort of media responsibility. On the other hand, I don’t want to see that being done to Google Search, because Google Search is exactly what it says on the tin, and should be what it says on the tin, a place where I can find everything that’s out there according to some criteria of relevance. Understand that being a news feed, i.e. a news platform, a media platform, is one thing, being a search engine is another. We have to take these things apart, and then say to ourselves, ‘What is it we really want to ask them?’ And be careful what you wish for, because what’s happened with this famous European court ruling on the right to be forgotten is that now, in effect, Google is exercising a kind of arbitrary censorship, taking down hundreds of thousands, even millions, of links in ways which are not transparent, not accountable, not appealable. It’s interesting. This book is from 2010. That was seen as rather an original thing to say then. In 2017, people think, ‘my god, what do you mean, they’re so wonderful?’ The perception has changed, but if you go back to the 1990s, it really was, ‘The internet will set you free.’ It was this cyber-libertarian poppycock that you find with every new technology, including printing. It’s hailed as a thing that will set people free, and, at the same time, you always have the catastrophists who say it’ll be the end of human civilisation as we know it. Of course the truth is that it’s neither heaven nor hell. “I think one of the really important things that we need to do at the moment is to try and get our act together as liberals” But he’s very interesting in his analysis about complex things. There are serious reasons to be worried about some of the stuff they’re doing, but I don’t think the answer to it is to bring in a law against everything, which, particularly in Germany, is what is being proposed at the moment. I spend a lot of time in Germany, and the debate is ‘big, bad American private superpowers’ versus ‘good, virtuous German and European public powers.’ I don’t think that’s the answer actually. We’ll end up over-regulating them and destroying some of the good things that they do. Anti-trust is a really important place for regulation. But with a lot of this stuff—like what do we want them to do on news feeds, or what do we want them to do about hate speech, and so on—you’ll get much farther, in my experience, with a kind of constructive engagement with these companies, because they’re desperately trying to work out what to do. If you look at the world from the Googleplex, or Facebook headquarters, these amazing—I don’t know if you’ve ever been to them, but they make Washington look slightly dowdy—you’re looking round the world and you’re getting competing demands from every side. Everyone is asking something of you, but every demand is different. Even NGOs—free speech NGOs want you to take down less content, women’s rights and minority rights want you to take down more content, so what the hell are you going to do? I think one of the really important things that we need to do at the moment is to try and get our act together as liberals, in the broader sense within civil society, and say what are the four or five most important things we want Facebook to do, or Google to do, or Twitter to do? I don’t think there are enough people, because we now suddenly are in this world where you have giant public superpowers, China, America, Europe, and giant private superpowers, but all these relatively small non-governmental organisations that are slightly fragmented and diverse. That makes for creativity and originality and so on, but it doesn’t make for scale. If you’re trying to get attention from Facebook or Google, or indeed from China or the United States, you need a certain scale. That’s a real problem, actually. Also, I think one has to distinguish between these various platforms. I love Twitter because it’s an explicitly public platform. It is explicitly for public debate. It’s a brilliant way of having public debate. If someone says something really outrageous, stupid, deeply offensive, they get called out on it straight away. I posted some fake news myself. Someone did a montage of two photos from parliament, the House of Commons. One showed a completely empty chamber, when apparently they were debating social care or something terribly important for millions of people. The other showed a packed chamber, when they were allegedly debating MPs’ pay. I tweeted this. Within five minutes, I had three people come back at me back saying this was fake news, and that the picture of the full chamber was actually them debating student fees, not MPs’ pay. That’s a great example of where social media can actually be used to refute fake news. You’ve got it in one. In my book I quote some really good studies which show that there’s much more hate speech on Facebook than on Twitter for that very simple reason, that you’re supposed to be friends. So people don’t call each other out, even if they should. Whereas on Twitter—I think the study was in Kenya, where people were saying really nasty things about other tribes or ethnic groups—they were being called out. So you should go on Twitter. You must be on Twitter? And so am I. @fromTGA . I love it."

"This is the point. The fact that the father of history was, in a way, a historian of the present, of very recent times. He is the father of us all. I read it when I was at school and he’s really the first one who goes around with his eyes and ears and notebook open, recording all these fantastic stories and trying to put it all together to work out what happened and why. Then, famously, he says: ‘I am obliged to record the things I am told, but I am certainly not required to believe them.’ He is the first person who does this business of saying, ‘Well this is what the Persians say about it and this is what the Greeks say about it, so let’s try and work out what’s the truth in between.’ I think they could expect to learn a lot about the ancient world, the Greeks and, to a lesser extent, the Persians, but they could also learn a fair amount about how history happens – the interplay of individuals, personalities and larger forces like economics, geography, technology and, of course, chance. It’s all there in Herodotus, along, it has to be said, with a lot of fantastical details, like ants the size of dogs, flying snakes and stuff like that. It’s also a lot of fun and there’s vigour in the prose. Well, as I say, I think the passage where he is weighing up the Greek and Persian accounts for the origins of what the Greeks call the Persian Wars, that really is what we are still doing 2,500 years later."

"Yes, the greatest historical essayist in the English language, in my view. This Everyman edition is two volumes of his essays from The Edinburgh Review , which, as you know, was The New York Review of Books of its time, or maybe I should turn that the other way round. It had long critical review essays of the kind people are still writing. Although Macaulay was a teeny bit dismissive of his own work in the genre they are actually models of their kind, full of wonderful insight. The essay on Frederick the Great in volume two will just have you rolling in the aisles. Well, you know that Frederick the Great as a young man had this dalliance with Voltaire, and Frederick the Great showed Voltaire his poems, at which Voltaire famously said: ‘See what a quantity of his dirty laundry the King has sent me to wash.’ Voltaire offered advice on the conduct of diplomacy of which Frederick the Great was equally contemptuous. The essays are just full of wonderful detail of that kind. A lot of them are actually biographical. One of the other things I love about it is that quite a lot of my work is on the frontier between literature and politics, and Macaulay is absolutely there. He writes a wonderful essay on Milton. Well, Milton is Milton. He was deeply engaged in politics, but on the other hand you have Pitt, who was a writing and magnificently speaking politician; John Bunyan, a highly political writer – he’s got Machiavelli in there. It’s often what we might now call public intellectuals. But if you did a search you probably wouldn’t find Macaulay being mentioned more than once a month these days, but he’s an absolute master of the genre and I think many people are still in his debt without quite knowing it."

"The finest model of how to write about a foreign conflict, a war or a revolution. Anyone who wants to go off and write about Egypt, Tunisia or Libya today should pack a copy of Homage to Catalonia . It’s brilliant reportage. As you know, it opens with a vignette of an Italian militiaman in the barracks in Barcelona and he only saw this guy for a few moments but it captures the excitement. There’s great descriptive writing, hard political analysis and then, what is most fantastic, at the very end he says: ‘Beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events.’ So he explicitly warns the reader about the selectivity and partisanship, which, in a way, makes it all the more credible. It’s the model of political reportage. I went to Poland 30 years ago to write about Solidarity and that’s the book I read before I went. It’s very interesting. I’ll never forget going to Sarajevo during the Bosnian war and seeing on the news-stand the front page of a local news magazine which had pictures of hunks of charred flesh lying on the street, human remains from the bombing of the Sarajevo marketplace. I was nearly physically sick. Those pictures are being taken by photographers all the time and we never see them. It’s a good example of what we don’t get – and you can argue about whether we should or not. But there’s also the way in which things are shaped into at best a narrative and at worst a laundry line of clichés."

"Despite the appalling debacle of the Hitler diaries, I think that Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Last Days of Hitler is the most superb work of contemporary history. It’s one stage on from Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia because Orwell is a reporter on the front line and Trevor-Roper is the historian who arrives the moment afterwards. He has a series of absolutely brilliant imaginative insights into what it was like to be in the court of Adolf Hitler . For example, the kind of institutional Darwinism between the different organisations and movements. Armies of boring German scholars have spent decades in the archives producing 2,000-page tomes to show that Trevor-Roper was right in this insight he got in a few months. He also had the dream situation for a contemporary historian, which is to have all your key witnesses locked up in prison, available for interrogation at any moment. Of course he did! He was sent by the British military occupation authorities to do this study, which was to try to establish that Hitler had died, and how he’d died, because we didn’t have the corpse. Actually, the Russians had removed some of the charred remains. But he had all these Nazis who were locked up. We would all give our bottom dollar to have all our key witnesses locked up. Absolutely brilliantly. His valedictory lecture at Oxford, I think it was called ‘History and Imagination’, was about how important imagination is to the historian. When you’ve got the facts straight and read all the documents, then you have to imagine yourself, almost like a novelist, into that world, and that’s what he does. I think the figure who intrigued him and on whom he is very interesting was Albert Speer. Speer was much the most cultured and educated and apparently civilised person close to Hitler, and he was very close to Hitler. I think Hugh was fascinated by this question, which also fascinates me, of how the genuinely cultured, educated person comes to be a servant of great evil. Well, I think that’s what I like about the book. It shows rather than tells. He doesn’t give you a sermon at the end; he just shows you how people were drawn in. You should. You’ll give yourself a treat."

"I think Evelyn Waugh is one of the great English novelists of the 20th century and he kept this diary intermittently. A lot of it is about the absolutely amazing quantities that he drank. He started quite early in the day. It’s a document of its time. It’s full of hugely politically incorrect and, by the end, almost self-parodic episodes but it’s also brilliant at catching the moment that life is turned into art. Let me give you an example. He goes off to witness the coronation of Haile Selassie, the event that was turned into Black Mischief, and he says: ‘Monday 3rd November, 1930. Met Polish attaché whose driver had brought him to wrong address. Lunched. Wrote description barbarous gebur. Went out to see what I could barbarous gebur. 3.30 no signs barbarity.’ That is so perfect, because it captures what an awful lot of journalists do. They go with their prejudiced expectations looking for the exotic, the oriental, the ghoulish: the barbarous gebur. They write a description of it and they go out to see if they can find traces of it – but there are no signs of barbarity. At that point you are at the fork in the road. The left path leads to veracity, the Orwellian path of historical truth where you actually have to say, ‘Well, it’s a great shame but it wasn’t so barbarous after all.’ Down the right fork is the path to the novel. I’m afraid that what happens in our own time, far too often, is that people mix the two. You’ve got it. There is a brilliant example recently exposed – a journalist wrote a series of gripping reports from Tunisia in an English paper, so they sent out a photographer to photograph the journalist on the spot. It turned out that the correspondent had never checked into the hotel or taken the flight and had written this fantastic copy from the South of France. It’s straight out of Scoop . What’s great about the Waugh diaries is that he’s so beautifully, satirically conscious of all that."