Florence GaubDirector of the research division at the NATO Defense College
Fiction
I found Anna Karenina abandoned in an AirBnB and decided to read it again twenty-five years after the first time around. Loving it as much as then.
Politics
Richard Fisher’s The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time. As I get older I’m more and more interested in the very big questions of being.
Podcast, film, or music
I’m unpacking boxes from my move to Rome to the sound of 70s Italo Pop.
Guilty pleasure
Reviewing the draft of my upcoming book The Future: A Manual—out in September in German, and in English in 2024.
Andrei KolesnikovSenior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Fiction
A real discovery for me was Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, which is without exaggeration a great classic novel of the twenty-first century with terrific writing manner and style—and an excellent translation into Russian. It was recommended to me by my friend Irina Yasina, who has been heroically fighting multiple sclerosis for many years—we often exchange book recommendations.
Politics
Recently the daughter of Alexander Bovin, a cult Soviet-era international commentator—and a favorite speechwriter for Leonid Brezhnev, who was expelled from his circle for his free thinking—was lending books from his personal library. Since the late Soviet period and the early post-Soviet reforms are part of my academic interests, I collected from this library rare copies of memoirs of late-Soviet government advisors (for instance, the ambassador to West Germany Valentin Falin), and this was a most interesting read. The first and partially second volumes of Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin appeared in Russian translation—and this is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand something about Russian history.
Podcast, film, or music
Since the emotional state is monstrous because of the war, one way to combat depression is diving into the past. For me, among other things, it’s the Soviet, balancing-on-the-verge-of-prohibition movies of the 1960s. The best films—for me, at least—by the Georgian director Otar Iosseliani were made back then, and I recently watched (for the hundredth time...) his film Listopad (Falling Leaves) from 1966.
For the same emotional reasons, and for my hobby of collecting antiquated books and magazines, I also like leafing through old issues of Ogonyok magazine (the Soviet equivalent of Life): On those pages all is well, the world is stable, the struggle for peace is succeeding, and Soviet athletes are winning everything. It is especially good to dive into this world with American whiskey, since the Scottish malt has reached the price of jewellery here (I still live in Moscow, following the maxim of my favorite philosopher, Merab Mamardashvili: “Why should I leave? Let those who prevent us from living normally leave”).
Caroline de GruyterEuropean affairs correspondent for NRC Handelsblad
Fiction
I have just read Tomás Nevinson, the last novel of the great Spanish novelist Javier Marías who died from Covid-19 last year. I tried to read it as slowly as possible, so the treat would last. But as with all his other novels, this is impossible. No one ever wrote so beautifully about human ambiguity as Marías.
Non-fiction
The Ghostwriters: Lawyers and the Politics Behind the Judicial Construction of Europe by Tommaso Pavone. A fascinating, little-known story about a few pioneering lawyers who provoked lawsuits in the early days of European integration in order to force national legal systems to implement European law. The nicest part of the story is the fun they had doing this. Without them, Europe would look different now.
Podcast
Le Nouvel Esprit Public hosted by Philippe Meyer. Every week or so, a panel of well-read public intellectuals turns two or three subjects around, and around, and around, in a most civilized manner. A long, always interesting, and highly recommendable alternative to the Politicos of this world.
Podcast, film, or music
I am sooo last century, nothing to mention here except, yes, The Diplomat. Surprised to see an ambassador flying by private plane. I am still on episode 4, however.
Jan TechauDirector, Germany at The Eurasia Group
Fiction
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. What makes a proper human? With AI learning fast and singularity looming, this question takes on a whole set of new meanings. Ishiguro, who doesn’t have a Nobel under his belt for no reason, gives a very delicate, finely layered, and genuinely heartbreaking answer in this novel of the near future.
Politics
Jeremi Suri’s Civil War by Other Means. Suri, a historian at the University of Texas, shows how the divisions that rip apart America today are the long-tail product of fateful decisions in the post–Civil War reconstruction era. A trip to the deep roots of darkness.
Podcast, film, or music
Scott & Lila. Scott from Chicago and Lila from Paris meet in Berlin and fall in love busking on Warschauer Straße. This jazzy singer-songwriter duo is on the brink of their breakthrough—and they are wonderful.
Guilty pleasure
Kyril Bonfiglioli’s The Charlie Mortdecai novels. A few years back, Penguin re-released this small set of mean-spirited, mock-hardboiled yarns from the 70s, a kind of Wodehouse with an R-rating. Tastily amoral and brutally incorrect, but so funny and, ahh, the language…
Sophia BeschFellow in the Europe Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Fiction
Perhaps moving to the United States has made me a little homesick, but I loved this unsentimental novel that traces social change in a village in Northern Germany from the 1960s to today: Mittagsstunde by Dörte Hansen.
Politics
So far this year it has to be Robert A. Caro’s non-memoir Working, a collection of personal reflections from the master of portraying political power in the United States.
Podcast, film, or music
Lana Del Rey for hot, slow summer evenings.
Guilty pleasure
Currently, all interviews where Jeremy Strong talks about his “process.”
John O’BrennanProfessor and Jean Monnet Chair of European integration at Maynooth University
Fiction
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. A huge commercial and critical success, the book takes the scalpel to an earlier era when Ireland was dominated by the Catholic Church and a very dark place for women in particular.
Politics
Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism—the great sage of the Financial Times surveys the troubled relationship between global capital and democracy. Compelling because Wolf effectively rethinks his entire approach to globalization and argues that we are in deep trouble.
Podcast, film, or music
The Rest is Politics. The combination of Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell dissects British politics with great acuity.
Guy ChazanBerlin Bureau Chief, Financial Times
Fiction
Siblings by Brigitte Reimann. A 1963 novel about a family torn apart by Germany’s divisions, written by a GDR author who deserves to be better known. It’s one of the best descriptions of a close sibling relationship I’ve ever read.
Politics
Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller. A must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of technology and geopolitics. An essential building block of our modern lives, semiconductors have now become even more important in the light of the gathering tensions over Taiwan, and Miller tells that story in an absolutely gripping—and very readable—way.
Podcast, film, or music
The Rest is History—eclectic, irreverent, and hugely entertaining.
Cornelius AdebahrNonresident fellow at Carnegie Europe
Fiction
Maror by Lavie Tidhar, an Israeli author famous for his sci-fi work but who, with this book, delivers an unflattering portrait of his country’s society, past and present. Gripping and repulsive at the same time, he recounts over four decades of recent history from the perspective of one (very) crooked policeman serving—as he sees it—the state of Israel. Crime rules, not ideology or politics.
Politics
Whoever wants to understand where Europe is coming from and where it may thus head these days will find some inspiration in Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome. Going far beyond yet another explanation of why that ancient empire fell, it takes in the history of China, South Asia, and the Middle East to drill down into why the old continent is marked by a competitive fragmentation of power unseen elsewhere in the world. “United in diversity” must have come from somewhere.
Podcast, film, or music
Tár, last year’s movie about the (fictional, it needs to be said) first female chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, Lydia Tár. Not just for the music captured all the way from rehearsal to performance, but because it’s a tale of ambition and ambiguity, and of the subconscious side of the hunger for power—in a genre that prides itself of excellence and artistic values.
Guilty pleasure
Family days at the pool…
Denis MacShaneFormer UK minister for Europe
Fiction
I am gripped by Antonio Scurati’s roman-fleuve on Mussolini. I read Volume II in French M, L’Homme de la Providence (Les Arènes/Bompiani) which won the 2022 European Book Prize. The first volume is out in English. Volume II takes us into early 1930s. Four or five more volumes to follow. It is written as a novel with invented speech and feelings but also with endless documents from the time. So I learnt so much more on Mussolini who still casts a dark shadow over today’s Italy, as the current prime minister demonstrates. Utterly readable page-turner.
Politics
We are submerged in England by books on politics too many written by daily media journalists which read like all their Westminster bubble notebooks poured into a single volume. Professor Tim Bale’s The Conservative Party After Brexit (Polity Press) stands back and looks at how the 2016 plebiscite has utterly transformed British politics for the worse.
Podcast, film, or music
Rye Lane is a wondrous, joyous rom-com about a suburb of London which is rising in fashion but still exudes extraordinary vitality thanks to a long-established Afro-Caribbean/Asian community that is reinventing Britain under our eyes. Young unknown (to me) actors just acting their hearts out with energy and joie de vivre that leaps out of the screen.
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