Tony Judt

Born in London in 1948, Judt grew up in war-shattered Britain in a Jewish household steeped in Marxism, an experience he would later say inured him to sectarian politics. He was a man of the left who belonged to no party or ideological faction: a collection of his essays from the last twenty years, Reappraisals, includes a withering assessment of the historian and unrepentant Communist Eric Hobsbawm, and a pungent attack on American liberals who supported the Iraq War. Judt opposed that war but supported NATO intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo, not because he lacked clear principles but because, as he told the British magazineProspect recently, “I don’t believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.”