This was recommended to me by my father many years ago, and I was glad, fortunately, to come across a copy in a charity shop recently. Tony Judt was an eminent historian who died around the time of the work's publication. He had an incurable motor neurone disease, rendered physically inactive but still mentally active. He dictated the series of vignettes (20 short essays) that comprise this volume. Awake at night, he used the mental idea of a "memory chalet" (based on a real-world chalet in which he stayed as a child) to order the ideas behind each essay. Born after the war and with a Jewish background, then educated later at Cambridge, there was a lot with which I could identify. Judt constructs a plausible image of the waning grandeur of the UK combined with the corresponding rise of the US (although he seems to despair about both Bush and Blair). Judt is to the point, brisk and mordant, even if all his arguments are based on solid foundations. His observations about academia, culture and Jewishness are equally fair. I also like the relationship Judt has with Switzerland (and his observations on the country). He closes the work describing Winteregg as "the happiest place in the world". N/R.
By Tony Judt