A winter's book. Fair on Spain, thin on the south.

Postguerra took me from November to the end of February, which is longer than I give to any novel, and it was the right pace. This is not a book to hurry. Judt is doing sixty years and a whole continent and he does it chronologically, which sounds obvious and is in fact the difficult choice, because it means the argument has to be carried inside the narrative rather than announced at the front.

I did what everyone does and read the Spanish chapters first. The Transition, the pact of forgetting, the Moncloa agreements. He's fair. Better than fair. He treats it as a genuine achievement without pretending the silence was free, and he understands that the silence was a decision made by people who remembered the alternative. My father would argue with two of his paragraphs and agree with the rest, which is roughly the correct response.

Where would I push back? The south is thinner than the north. Portugal, Greece and to some extent Italy feel like they're being caught up with rather than lived in, and the further east he goes the more alive the writing becomes. He's clearly happiest in Prague and Vienna and Budapest.

Eight. The chapters on 1989 are worth the whole winter. He was there, and it shows, and he still resists the temptation to make it a story with a shape.