People and books

At the NYRB, Timothy Garton Ash remembers Tony Judt:

Tony had a couple of characteristic gestures. There was a motion of the hand, as if cooling it down after touching a hot saucepan or shaking off water. This denoted that something was silly, toe-curling, inauthentic. And there was a sideways inclination of the head, accompanied by a quick, wry lifting of one end of the mouth and a twinkle in the eye. This had multiple applications, ranging from satire and self-deprecation to an attitude that might inadequately be verbalized as c’est la vie. As motor neuron disease (ALS) relentlessly immobilized him, he could no longer make these characteristic gestures; but somehow he still managed to convey them with his eyes.

Rootless cosmopolitans

Via Adam Shatz, Tony Judt's 2004 essay on Edward Said.

Darkness falls

Tony Judt has died; here is a link to his stunning piece "Night".

Making sense

At New York Magazine, Wesley Yang on Tony Judt.

"Sous les pavés la plage"

A striking bit from Tony Judt's latest installment of short memoirs in the New York Review of Books (subscription required):

Without question, the 1960s were a good time to be young. Everything appeared to be changing at unprecedented speed and the world seemed to be dominated by young people (a statistically verifiable observation). On the other hand, at least in England, change could be deceptive. As students we vociferously opposed the Labour government's support for Lyndon Johnson's war in Vietnam. I recall at least one such protest in Cambridge, following a talk there by Denis Healey, the defense minister of the time. We chased his car out of the town—a friend of mine, now married to the EU high commissioner for foreign affairs, leaped onto the hood and hammered furiously at the windows.

It was only as Healey sped away that we realized how late it was—college dinner would start in a few minutes and we did not want to miss it. Heading back into town, I found myself trotting alongside a uniformed policeman assigned to monitor the crowd. We looked at each other. "How do you think the demonstration went?" I asked him. Taking the question in stride—finding in it nothing extraordinary—he replied: "Oh I think it went quite well, Sir."

Amazon wars

Amazon gives in to Macmillan (not before dismaying many authors and readers by its choice to stop selling all Macmillan books on its site on Friday); worthwhile earlier analysis by Caleb Crain and Charlie Stross.

On a sadder note: more on Tony Judt and ALS in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Guardian.