Truth is another country

“Literature is created on both sides of the frontier that divides fact from fiction, and it is crossed by writers quite casually. But, argues Timothy Garton Ash, this is a border that should be defended.”

For much of my life, I have worked on frontiers. Night, fog, armed guards, tension. Walk just a few paces down the snow-covered Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, through a musty East German checkpoint, and you move from a world called west to a world called east. Nothing changes and everything changes. Or a sandbagged border post between Milosevic’s Serbia and liberated Kosovo: fresh-faced Canadian soldiers pass you tenderly from one darkness to another. But also - and sometimes almost as tense - the frontiers between politics and culture, between continental Europe and the Anglosphere, between academia and journalism, left and right, history and reportage.