Age of ideas

Sam Leith on Tony Judt’s rigorous, posthumously published examination of the great intellectual debates of the last century

When the historian and essayist Tony Judt died in 2010 of motor neurone disease, among the books he had planned was an intellectual history of 20th-century social thought. As the disease robbed him of the ability to write, his friend Timothy Snyder proposed making this book — out of the edited transcripts of a long conversation they would conduct over several weeks in 2009.

The book-as-conversation is, as Snyder points out in his foreword, a rather Eastern-European artefact. That’s apt to its content: Snyder is a historian of the region. Judt has his Jewish family roots there, and became deeply interested during his mid career in the under-explored complexities of the Eastern European 20th century. Among the thrilling things about Judt — who worked in Cambridge, Paris, Berkeley and New York — is his lack of parochialism.