CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: IN GOOD FAITH The only way for me to write this introduction is to separate the man from the ideas. Otherwise, I get pulled back into the man, who I loved and was married to from 1993 until his death in 2010, rather than forward into the ideas. As you read these essays, I hope that you, too, will focus on the ideas, because they are good ideas, and they were written in good faith. "In good faith" may have been Tony's favorite phrase and highest standard, and he held himself to it in everything he wrote. What he meant by it, I think, was writing that is free of calculation and maneuver, intellectual or otherwise. A clean, clear, honest account. This is a book about our age. The arc is down: from the heights of hope and possibility, with the revolutions of 1989, into the confusion, devastation, and loss of 9/11, the Iraq war, the deepening crisis in the Middle East, and-as Tony saw it-the self-defeating decline of the American republic.

As the facts changed and events unfolded, Tony found himself turned increasingly and unhappily against the current, fighting with all of his intellectual might to turn the ship of ideas, however slightly, in a different direction. The story ends abruptly, with his untimely death. This book is also, for me, a very personal book, since "our age" was also "my age" with Tony: the early essays date to the first years of our marriage and the birth of our son Daniel, and follow through our time together in Vienna, Paris, New York, the birth of Nicholas, and the growing up of our family. Our life together began, not coincidentally, with the fall of Communism in 1989: I was a graduate student at New York University, where Tony taught. In the summer of 1991, I traveled across Central Europe, and when I got back I wanted to know more. I was advised to take an independent study with Tony Judt. I did, and our romance began, over books and conversations about European politics, war, revolution, justice, art. It wasn't the usual dating arrangement: our second "course meeting" took place in a restaurant over dinner.

Tony pushed the books aside, ordered wine, and told me of his time in Prague under Communism, and then in 1989, walking through silent snow-covered squares and streets deep into the night soon after the Velvet Revolution, clearly in awe at the turn of historical fate-and the feelings that were already apparent between us. We watched movies, went to art exhibitions, ate Chinese food, he even cooked (badly). Finally-the key to our courtship-he invited me on a trip to Europe: Paris, Vienna, Budapest, a hair-raising drive over the Simplon Pass in a storm (I drove-he had migraines). We took trains, and I watched him pouring over timetables, clocking departures and arrivals like a kid in a candy store: Zermatt, Brig, Florence, Venice. It was a great romance, and it was a European romance, part of a larger romance with Europe that defined Tony's life, and his life's work. At times, I think he even thought of himself as European. But he wasn't really. Sure, he spoke French, German, Italian, Hebrew, Czech, some Spanish, but he was never "at home" in any of these places.

He was more Central European, but not exactly that either-he didn't quite have that history, except by professional engagement and family roots (Russian, Polish, Romanian, and Lithuanian Jews). He was very English, too, by habit and upbringing (he could move effortlessly between his childhood cockney and confident Oxbridge prose), but he wasn't really that either-too Jewish, too Central European. It's not that he was alienated from any of these places, although in some cases he was; it was more that he was attached to bits of all of them, which is why he couldn't let go of any of them. So perhaps it is not surprising that although we settled in New York from the start, we spent much of our life together planning to live-or living-somewhere else. We were expert packers and often joked that we would write a book together called something like "At Home in Europe: Everything You Need to Know about Schools and Real Estate." By far the best gift I ever gave to Tony was a subscription to Thomas Cooks Railway Timetable. It was only after 2001 that he really settled. This was partly because of his health: that year he was diagnosed with a serious cancer and underwent major surgery, radiation, and other draining therapies.

Partly, too, because of the WTC attack. It became increasingly difficult to travel, and the horror of the event itself, combined with his illness, had a homing effect; he wanted to be here with me and the boys. Whatever the reasons, in the years that followed he slowly became more and more, though never quite, American-ironically at the very moment when he found greatest reasons to be critical of its politics. He acquired citizenship: "Quiz me," he would say to the kids in the weeks before the test, and they would gleefully take him through the paces, no matter that he had taught American politics for years at Oxford. Around 2003 I noticed a shift in his thinking, and in his writing, from "them" to "us": "The Way We Live Now." These were also the years of the Remarque Institute, which Tony founded in 1995 and directed until his death. It was built along the same two axes that preoccupied him in his writing: bringing together Europe and America, history and contemporary politics. At the same time, he was writing Postwar (2005), a mammoth undertaking, which tested daily his physical and intellectual strength and discipline, especially as he recovered from cancer.

I remember well his exhaustion and determination as he insisted on writing the essays in this volume, too, even as he was (as he put it) "in the coal mines" of a major book about Europe. I worried at how hard he pushed himself, but in retrospect I see that he couldn't help it. As he immersed himself in Postwar , he was hearing canaries in the mines of our own time: these essays, which beg us-and especially "us" Americans-to look back on the twentieth century as we make our way in the twenty-first, were one result.         SO THIS IS A COLLECTION of essays, but it is also a collection of obsessions. Tony's obsessions. They are all here: Europe and America, Israel and the Middle East, justice, the public sphere, the state, international relations, memory and forgetting, and above all history. His caution, which reappears across these essays, that we were witnessing an "economic age" collapse into an "era of fear"* and entering "a new age of insecurity"* was a sign of just how depressed and worried he was at the direction politics was taking. He expected a lot and was a keen observer.

You will find in these essays, I think, both a clear-eyed realist-who believed in facts, events, data-and an idealist who aimed at nothing less than the well-lived life; not just for himself, but for society. I have presented the essays chronologically as well as thematically because chronology was one of his greatest obsessions. He was, after all, a historian, and he had little patience for postmodern fashions of textual fragmentation or narrative disruption, especially in historical writing. He wasn't really interested in the idea that there is no single truth (wasn't that obvious?), or the deconstruction of this or that text. The real job, he believed, was not to say what wasn't but what was -to tell a convincing and clearly written story from the available evidence, and to do it with an eye to what is right and just. Chronology was not merely a professional or literary convention, it was a prerequisite-even, when it came to history, a moral responsibility. A word about facts: I have never met anyone as committed to facts as Tony, something his children learned from the start: it is to Daniel, now nineteen, that we owe the title of this volume, which comes from a (probably apocryphal) quote from Keynes that was one of Tony's favorite mantras: "when the facts change, I change my mind-what do you do, sir?" I learned this early on about Tony, in one of those domestic situations that does so much to illuminate a man. When we were first married we bought a house in Princeton, New Jersey (his idea)-but it was more of a house in theory than in practice.

In theory, Tony wanted to live there, but in practice we were living in New York, or traveling to Europe, or on our way somewhere else. Eventually, I wanted to sell the house-it was draining us financially and frankly I had a horror of ever living there. There ensued a long and difficult discussion about what to do with the house, which turned into a debate and finally a silent and angry standoff about the emotional, historical, geographical meaning of houses and home, and why this particular one was or wasn't right for us. Arguing with Tony was a real challenge because he was a master at the dialectical switchback and could turn any point you made against you. Finally I created a spreadsheet that laid out the facts-a desperate strategic move on my part: finances, commuter train schedules, fares, total hours spent at Penn Station, the works. He studied it carefully and agreed on the spot to sell the house. No regrets, no remorse, no recriminations, no further discussion necessary. He was already on to the next plan.

To me, it was an astounding and admirable quality. It gave him a kind of clarity of thinking-he wasn't wed.