Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Tony Judt is often touted as one of the great historians of the later twentieth century. Yet really his writings are, with one exception, not the stuff that world reputations are made on The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century or Socialism in Provence 1871–1914: A Study in the Origins […]

Tony Judt’s Postwar (2005) is one of the most important history books of the last generation. However, the book that runs to over eight hundred pages has a strange lacuna. It lacks notes and it lacks bibliography. Judt was quite open about this lack of reference apparatus and explains it in his introduction (in a […]

Invisible books are, as long time readers of this blog will know, books that have never existed save in the imagination. Beach has offered, over the years, many such invisible titles, most dreamt up or taken from books (where there are shelves and shelves of these non-existent volumes). However, a new sub-category of invisible book […]

Tony Judt wrote twelve fine history books* before his untimely death in 2010, one of them ‘the unmatched and perhaps unmatchable’ (Snyder) Postwar (2005). When he died, after a courageous fight with an impossible illness, eulogiums rained down. But there was a minority opinion that Judt was something less than a new Gibbon. Dylan Riley wrote […]

Here is a nice passage from Tony Judt’s Postwar (2005), a wonderful book if you’ve not yet had a chance. Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world. Most of what it has to offer is discomforting, even disruptive – which is why it is not always politically […]