Reply #5: His bio from Wiki [View All]

After studying Modern History at Oxford, his research into the German Resistance to Hitler took him to Berlin, where he lived, in both the western and eastern halves of the divided city, for several years. From there, he started to travel widely behind the Iron Curtain. Throughout the 1980s, he reported and analysed the emancipation of Central Europe from communism in contributions to the New York Review of Books, The Independent, The Times and the Spectator. He was Foreign Editor of the Spectator, editorial writer on Central European affairs for the The Times, and a columnist on foreign affairs for The Independent. In 1986-87 he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC. Since 1990, he has been a Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, where he now directs the European Studies Centre and is Gerd Bucerius Senior Research Fellow in Contemporary History. He became a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, in 2000. A frequent lecturer, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts and a Corresponding Fellow of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.

His honours include the David Watt Memorial Prize, Commentator of the Year in the ‘What the Papers Say’ annual awards for 1989, the Premio Napoli, the Imre Nagy Memorial Plaque, the Hoffmann von Fallersleben Prize for political writing, the Order of Merit from Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic, and the British CMG. In 2005, he featured in a list of 100 top global public intellectuals chosen by the journals Prospect and Foreign Policy, and in Time magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people. He was recently awarded the George Orwell Prize for political writing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Garton_Ash