Facts are subversive : political writing from a decade without a name / Timothy Garton Ash.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

One of Britain's most influential and admired commentators presents his latest volume of dispatches from a troubled world. This fascinating collection includes essays from the last ten years on Islam and freedom, Orwell as an informer, the Lives of Others and Gunter Grass in the Waffen-SS. Timothy Garton Ash witnessed the fall of Milosevic in Serbia, visited Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, watched the Orange revolution in Ukraine and talked to militant mullahs in Iran, and all these are recorded here, alongside critical reflections on the future of Europe, multiculturalism and terroris, all in these last ten years. The literature of fact is a theme that runs through the whole volume. When is it legitimate to cross that heavily mined frontier between fact and fiction? How do we know when a writer (Ryszard Kapuscinski, for example, or Paul Theroux) has strayed across the line? How do we ever know what we can know, given the notorious unreliability of eyewitnesses? We all have a novelist in our heads called Memory, and (s)he starts rewriting the script the minute after something happens. Yet Tim Garton Ash maintains against every post-modernist in the world that there are facts, and that establishing them is both a political and a moral imperative. And an aesthetic one, too. 'I will bring you, ' the poet Craig Raine has written, 'the beauty of facts'.

pt. 1. Velvet revolutions, continued: The strange toppling of Slobadan Milošević ;'The country summoned me' ; Orange revolution in Ukraine ; The revolution that wasn't ; 1968 and 1989 ; 1989! ; Velvet revolution in past and future -- part 2. Europe and other headaches: Ghosts in the machine ; Are there moral foundations of European power? ; The twins' new Poland ; Exchange of empires ; Why Britain is in Europe ; Europe's new story ; National anthems ; 'O chink, where is thy wall?' ; The perfect EU member -- part 3. Islam, terror and freedom: La Alhambra ; Islam in Europe ; The invisible front line ; Against taboos ; Respect? ; Secularism or atheism? ; No if and no buts -- part 4. USA! USA! Mr. President: 9/11 -- Anti-Europeanism in America -- In defence of the fence -- Zorba the Bush ; Warsaw, Missouri ; Dancing with history ; Liberalism -- part 5. Beyond the West: Beauty and the beast in Burma ; Soldiers of the hidden Imam ; East meets West ; The brotherhood against Pharaoh ; Cities of no God ; Beyond race -- part 6. Writers and facts: The brown grass of memory -- The Stasi on our minds -- Orwell in our time -- Orwell's list -- Is 'British intellectual' an oxymoron? -- 'Ich bin ein Berliner' -- The literature of fact -- part 7. Envoi: Elephant, feet of clay ; Decivilization ; The mice in the organ.