Timothy Garton Ash has spent a lifetime writing about Europe. As a young journalist reporting on the spot, he chronicled brilliantly the collapse of Communism in central and eastern Europe. In later years, as an academic, he has broadened his scope to cover the character, history and fate of the continent as a whole. He has been garlanded for his output of a dozen books, even winning the Charlemagne Prize, the highest award anyone can receive for their contribution to European unity, short of being made an ‘honorary citizen of Europe’. 

Garton Ash’s new book – the curiously titled Europe in 7½ Chapters – is pithy but ambitious. It seeks to offer an overview, for the general reader, of what he calls ‘the world’s smallest and largest, oldest and newest, most united and most divided continent’. The juxtaposition of, and tension between, European opposites is the unifying thread that holds the book together, unpacked in a series of seven quick-fire chapters that cover not only the history and politics of Europe over multiple centuries, but its geography and culture, and the ‘imagined Europe’ that people have repeatedly attempted to project on to the continent.

Although Garton Ash recently retired as a professor at Oxford, this is not an academic book – far from it. He seeks to convey, with an admirable lightness of touch, the distilled wisdom of decades of reading and thinking, without becoming enmeshed in showy erudition or heavy footnotes. His book