Tony Judt decided to write "Postwar" while changing trains at Vienna's West-bahnhof terminus in December 1989. One historical era was ending and another was about to begin. Mr Judt, a Londoner who was educated at Cambridge and in Paris, and who is now professor of European Studies at New York University, believes that 1989 marked the end of the legacy of the second world war. The 44 years that followed were, in a sense, an "interim age: a post-war parenthesis, the unfinished business of a conflict that ended in 1945 but whose epilogue had lasted for another half century."
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