Samanth Subramanian

I was assigned only parts of Postwar (or is it Post War? the double-colour scheme of the title always confused me) during a history course a couple of years ago, but I ended up reading every single page. I’d studied history before, but this was my first encounter with a style of narrative history that focused as much on the sweep of events as on accumulating evidence, in almost journalistic vein, of how these events affected regular people living regular lives. I suspect very strongly that it was that reportorial streak in Tony Judt that endeared him to me. (For the same reason, I suspect again, the little of David Kynaston I have read, I have loved.)

Postwar was a brilliant introduction to Judt, the polymathic storyteller with his vast fund of stories to tell. But it was also unrepresentative of Judt’s stature at the time. In the 2000s, Judt had already become famous (or notorious; take your pick) for his essay titled Israel: The Alternative in The New York Review of Books. (For bold declarative beginnings, nothing beats this essay: “The Middle East peace process is finished. It did not die: it was killed.”) The year I started my Master’s, Judt participated in a debate on the Israel lobby (along with Rashid Khalidi, who would be one of my professors the next year), and a link to its video was circulated avidly over email by my fellow students. Judt had also, by then, already overcome an initial Marxist tendency, although he remained, contentiously at times, a defender of the welfare state.

This, then, was no benign storyteller; this was a public intellectual wallowing happily in the great polarising debates of his time. But there’s no substitute for first impressions. I still tend to think of Judt as a storyteller, and happily for me, his final contributions to the world of literature were not polemical essays but charming little ruminations on his life for NYRB.

See, in particular, this one, on food — so representative of his simultaneous command over sociology and over the telling detail:

“I can work up a nostalgia for fish and chips, but in truth it is nothing more than a self-generated gastronomic Heritage Exercise. We hardly ever ate the stuff when I was a child. Were I ever truly to set out in Search of Past Taste I would begin with braised beef and baked turnip, followed by chicken tikka masala and pickled wollies swabbed in challah, Kingfisher beer and sweet lemon tea. As for the madeleine that would trigger the memory? Naan dunked in matzoh ball soup, served by a Yiddish-speaking waiter from Madras. We are what we ate. And I am very English.”

Naan isn’t from Madras, but we’ll let that pass. Tony Judt, we’ll miss your stories.