Mr Garton Ash, you feel, was well advised to stick to his day job.

ECONOMIST: Cold-war spies

Then Joseph Garton, Madison-area restaurant owner, bought it, imploring people who cherished Ten Chimneys to save it.

NPR: The 'Fabulous Lunts,' Alive at Ten Chimneys

Mr Garton Ash chose not to work directly for the good guys.

ECONOMIST: Cold-war spies

Timothy Garton Ash writes, in The Guardian, that "five years of anxious uncertainty" over the UK's position in the EU will now ensue.

BBC: Commentators' verdicts on David Cameron's EU speech

Questions like those are at the heart of a new book by Timothy Garton Ash, a British historian of Eastern Europe, describing a nine-month stay during 1980 in what was then East Berlin.

ECONOMIST: Cold-war spies

Although some Britons, such as Mr Garton Ash, take the threat of a recurrence of war in Europe seriously, the British have generally approached the Union in a very different spirit from the French and Germans.

ECONOMIST: Peace in our time