Book excerpt: Timothy Garton Ash is well known as an astute and penetrating observer of a dazzling array of subjects, not least through his many contributions to the New York Review of Books. This collection of his essays from the last decade reveals his knack for ferreting out exceptional insights into a troubled world, often on the basis of firsthand experience. Whether he is writing about how “liberalism” has become a dirty word in American political discourse, the problems of Muslim assimilation in Europe, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Günter Grass’s membership in the Waffen-SS, or the angry youth of Iran, Garton Ash combines a gimlet eye for detail with deep knowledge of the history of his chosen subjects. Running through this book is the author’s insistence that, whatever some postmodernists might claim, there are indeed facts—and we have both a political and a moral duty to establish them. By practicing what it preaches, Facts Are Subversive shows why Timothy Garton Ash is one of the world’s leading political writers. “The best and most perceptive political writer of our time . . . This book shines the clearest of lights on an entire decade.”—John Simpson “One of the most reliable and acute observers of the past present, able to report on events as a witness and, simultaneously, assess them with a coolness of judgment that almost always holds up over time.”—George Packer, New York Times Book Review “One of the most enjoyable political books you’ll read this year.”—GQ