An Analysis of Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945

Tony Judt decided to write Postwar in 1989, the year the collapse of the Soviet Union provided European history with a rare example of a clearly-signposted ‘end of an era’.

It's scarcely surprising, then, that the great virtue of Judt's book is the clarity and the breadth of its account of postwar Europe. His book coalesces around one central theme: the idea that the whole of the history of this period can be explained as an unravelling of the consequences of World War II. A bold claim, but...