The Memory Chalet

Witty, profound, controversial… Wonderfully written… A wellspring of enlightenment you need to spend time with – Peter Preston * Observer *
Tony Judt, had a wonderful prose style, and his little book The Memory Chalet, a collection of autobiographical essays, is beautiful and moving. Although Judt, who suffered from motor neurone disease, died earlier this year, this late work is more sustaining than sad – John Banville * Guardian, Books of the Year *
Quintessentail Judt: humane, fearless, unsparingly honest * Financial Times *
The book is simultaneously awe-inspiring and almost too painful to bear… His head, that of a great historian, political writer and charismatic intellectual, was a treasure house – Diana Athill * Literary Review *
A book to treasure… Witty, profound, contraversial * Observer *
In examining his past, Judt has managed to write what amounts to a Bildungsroman of one of the most distinctive writerly personas of the age. At the same time, he has told us something important about ourselves: about what we were and what we have become – Jonathan Derbyshire * New Statesman *
The brilliant historian Tony Judt’s posthumously published biographical essays, The Memory Chalet show what a learned, witty, subtle, and above all, civilised man we have lost * Evening Standard, Books of the Year *
A tremendously moving memorial to a first-class historian and essayist, moving from the streets of London in the threadbare Clement Attlee years to the dining rooms of New York in the 21st century. If nothing else, Judt led a compellingly colour life…Some of the most affecting passages in this book look back to Judt’s childhood, long before his academic fame and fortune. He writes beautifully about the moral and physical atmosphere of his London boyhood…This book is quintessential Judt: humane, fearless, unsparingly honest. In essay after essay the same qualities shine forth, all the more remarkable given the tragic circumstances…That he finished with such a wonderfully moving book is a mark of the man. * Financial Times *
Judt calls these charming vignettes “feuillotons” which, without being sentimental, gives them the elegiac quality of falling autumn leaves – James Urquhart * Financial Times *

Tony Judt was educated at King’s College, Cambridge and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and taught at Cambridge, Oxford, and Berkeley. He was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University and Director of the Remarque Institute, which is dedicated to the study of Europe and which he founded in 1995. The author or editor of fourteen books, Professor Judt was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, the New York Times and many other journals in Europe and the US. Professor Judt is the author of Ill Fares the Land, Reappraisals- Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, and Postwar- A History of Europe Since 1945, which was one of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2005, the winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He died in August, 2010 at the age of sixty-two.

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