The Writer without Blinders One of the things that marks your work as a chronicler of events is the beauty of your writing, if I may say so. Certainly, I was deeply influenced, for example, by George Orwell, or by the more literary British historians like Macaulay, and pay enormous attention to style, and I do believe that good historical or political writing is a branch of literature. I certainly regard it as an art. It's terribly important to relate colorful detail, human detail, individual detail to the larger patterns, to have both elements.
Much journalism lacks the latter and much scholarship lacks the former.
But at the same time, unlike a classic newspaperman on a deadline for whom, once a story is written, it's over, it's done, I was very consciously looking for the larger historical significance of what I was writing about. And I remained with Central Europe throughout the 1980s, looking for the larger historical development. All of the above. By the way, East Germany, curiously enough, was very good at this. Whole West German institutes were devoted to failing to understand the East German economy.