Right?”A little later, down at the local pub, an interesting scene is played out. After we have ordered our sandwiches, the woman asks for the name “Michael,” replies Garton Ash. “I always give them a different name,” he confides to me.”Do you know his real name?” I ask the woman No response. I am absolutely a classic Isaiah-Berlin-type liberal with a small “l’.And so I asked him the second half of the question again.”And your party-political allegiances?’”Well.. I.. I.. I… I don’t belong to any British political party, and that independence is very important to me as a writer.

But that “liberal” with a small “l” will give you some idea…”Charmed – but not quite charmed enough – by his coyness, I asked him straight out.”So you voted Lib Dem in the last election?”"Yes, I mean, since you ask, yes I did, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that to be – and this is an important point – that to be a liberal with a small `l’, believing as I do that individual liberty is the most important single political value, means that you have to vote Lib Dem in every British election. Nowadays that’s called journalism, and professional historians preserve their virginity by keeping 30 years of distance You should start writing history now. And the other point is that we should be more sophisticated in how we describe what people are doing when they reminisce, when they write autobiography, when they write their own history.”As I listened to him forming his sentences with such practised ease, I began to think about his own history – and about, for example, his political classification by the Stasi, which had shifted from “bourgeois-liberal” at the beginning to “conservative and reactionary” at the end. Where did his own political – and party-political – allegiances lie?”`Bourgeois-liberal’ is spot on,” he replied with some relish “I always say Ich bin ein Berliner By which I mean an Isaiah Berliner.

What you find with this experience of reading the file is that we all have this novelist in the head who is constantly rewriting the story in ways that make it more comfortable for us This is neither simply forgetting nor distortion It’s something else. There is a new book called The Mind’s Past, written by a neuroscientist, which argues that there is something in the left hemisphere of the brain called `the interpreter’ which is doing exactly this – reinterpreting fragments of experience to make a continuous narrative, to make sense of our lives.”If this is true, history needs to be written in a different way But how? I asked him The answer began with a brief historical excursus We need to go back to Thucydides, he replied. After the reunification of the two Germanies, the Stasi files were opened for all to see. Garton Ash returned to Berlin and read the file on him – all 325 pages of it – documenting his movements day by day. It induced a kind of vertigo.Who was the real Garton Ash? The “object” described with such loving attention by his informers? The man of his own memories of himself? The man as he is described in his own notebooks? How much of the self is imagined, and how much real? And how did this affect the way he subsequently thought about the writing of history?”All history hitherto has been written with a rather simplistic assumption about memory, namely that what you have to confront is either forgetting or deliberate distortion by someone putting their own spin on the story – as Trotsky did when he wrote his history of the Russian Revolution. “I myself use the trope of the spy for the reader, but I really don’t think there are any moral comparisons between dissimulation in the service of a book and dissimulation in the service of the secret police.”Perhaps not Books are such harmless things.