In my last post I promised I would detail some of the more evident flaws in Tony Judt�s otherwise impressive achievement, Postwar. First, and perhaps it is just chauvinistic chippiness, but I wondered whether Albania having more index entries than Ireland is significant in what it reveals about the mindset of English-born academics of a certain age. Second, the approach to the annotations is bafflingly selective. For example, on one page there are two quotations from the ever-quotable John Maynard Keynes, one sourced, the other not. Why?Third and most significantly, the book�s bibliography is not provided in the actual printed volume, but has to be accessed, irritatingly, from an online PDF file (http://www.nyu.edu/pages/remarque/PostwarBibliography.pdf). In his preface, Judt explains this decision was taken �[t]o avoid adding to what is already a very long book addressed to a general readership.� This is patronizing as it assumes that the general reader is a) willing to take the author�s claims on faith and b)unwilling to explore themes raised in the text. (Plus what’s an extra 30-odd pages when the total comes in at 878?)Finally, as the blind spot regarding Ireland might suggest, Judt sometimes in these pages comes across more like an exasperated Daily Mail columnist than the Europhile his undertaking would seem to require. For example, his cursory treatment of structuralism and postmodern thinking is almost wholly unilluminating, stone-kicking English empiricism at its most obdurate.And yet the book remains an unparalleled guide (probably) for someone hoping to get an idea of the events that have shaped the most important continent (is that culturally insensitive claim?) over the past 50-plus years. It�s refreshing in its revisionism�which now seems to involve validating the contemporary impression (So the Marshall Plan was actually vital, and that Eastern Block communism�contrary to recent effusions of Ostalgie— was not just shabby, but repressive and not infrequently murderous). It�s also a goldmine of facts (did you know that 11,000 Portuguese died fighting in the country’s various African colonies during the 1960s and 1970s�representing a mortality rate significantly higher, as a share of population, than that suffered by the U.S. Army in Vietnam?) These stats are supplemented by a wealth of shrewd quotes, one of which came back to me today. Referring to the relative mediocrity of Austria�s postwar political class, one diplomatic wag compared the country to a �an opera sung by the understudies.� But to read dismal reports like this one, such a remark seems painfully apposite to my homeland.