The Magic Lantern

The Magic Lantern is one of those rare books that define a history moment, written by a brilliant witness who was also a participant in epochal events. Whether covering Poland's first free parliamentary elections--in which Solidarity found itself in the position of trying to limit the scope of its victory--or sitting in at the meetings of an unlikely coalition of bohemian intellectuals and Catholic clerics orchestrating the liberation of Czechoslovakia, Garton Ash writes with sympathy and power.

Timothy Garton Ash is the author of ten books of “history of the present” which have explored many facets of Europe over the last half-century. He is Professor of European Studies, University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He also writes a column on international affairs in the Guardian, which is widely syndicated, and is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, amongst other journals. His books include The File: A Personal History, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent and, most recently, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. Awards he has received for his writing include the International Charlemagne Prize and the George Orwell Prize. The Magic Lantern, originally published in 1990, has been translated into twenty languages.

Witness and History

Warsaw: The First Election

Budapest: The Last Funeral

Berlin: Wall's End

Prague: Inside the Magic Lantern

The Year of Truth

Afterword to the Vintage Edition: 
“Thirty Years On—Time for a New Liberation?”