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Tony Judt"Postwar"の書評。

Judt, however, is impervious to religion, unmoved by music and rather complacent about non-French and non-political branches of art and culture. Parisian intellectual warlords and east European dissidents, though important, do not tell the whole story. Authors of syntheses must sometimes try to empathise with incongenial subjects. The attack on the late pope as a "parochial" idolater is demeaning.

One statistic speaks volumes: the Stasi employed five times as many operatives in the DDR as the Gestapo employed in the entire Reich.

What a pity, too, that Judt does not share his thoughts here on the founding of Israel - surely an important topic in "The Legacy of War". (In 2003, he courageously criticised Israel as an "anachronistic" "ethno-state", thereby earning himself a rich crop of inappropriate epithets.)