Historian Timothy Garton Ash is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book, Free World: Why a Crisis of the West Reveals the Opportunity of Our Time, will be published this fall.
Poems of Robert Browning (Houghton Mifflin, $18). The English poet to whom I always return. He engages wonderfully with different times and places, especially in Latin Europe, but the truths extracted are universal. “Love Among the Ruins” should be read at least once a month by those impressed by worldly glory.
Essays by Thomas Babington Macaulay (IndyPublish.com, $98). Macaulay’s historical, political, and literary essays are models of style and treasure caves of learning. And he can be gloriously rude.
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Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (Harvest, $13). The gold standard for writing about a foreign crisis. Anything written on Vietnam, Bosnia, or Iraq has to be measured against it. Orwell fought in the trenches for the republican side, and was shot through the neck. Yet he came back and wrote an account that reserved its fiercest criticism for his own team, the left.
Redgauntlet by Walter Scott (Penguin, $11). Scott wrote a fair amount of tosh, but his finest historical novels, such as Redgauntlet, have tremendous energy, scale, and drama. Here, he invents a third Jacobite rising against Britain’s House of Hanover. Like Browning, he is brilliant at commingling the personal and the political.
Gedichte (Poems) by Goethe (out of print). Does anyone read him now? Goethe breathes a spirit of Enlightenment humanism that is the best of the West. And he puts the best words in the best order.
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