Timothy Garton Ash is the author of eight books of political writing - 'history of the present' - which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last three decades. He is Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford, where he is Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony's College, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and his weekly column for the Guardian is widely syndicated across Europe, Asia and the Americas. He has received many awards for his writing, including the Somerset Maugham Award and the Orwell Prize.