- Published: 1 November 2011
- ISBN: 9780099555599
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 240
- RRP: $24.99
The Memory Chalet

















- Published: 1 November 2011
- ISBN: 9780099555599
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 240
- RRP: $24.99
Tony Judt, had a wonderful prose style, and his little book The Memory Chalet, a collection of autobiographical essays, is beautiful and moving. Although Judt, who suffered from motor neurone disease, died earlier this year, this late work is more sustaining than sad
John Banville, Guardian, Books of the Year
Quintessentail Judt: humane, fearless, unsparingly honest
Financial Times
Witty, profound, controversial... Wonderfully written... A wellspring of enlightenment you need to spend time with
Peter Preston, Observer
In examining his past, Judt has managed to write what amounts to a Bildungsroman of one of the most distinctive writerly personas of the age. At the same time, he has told us something important about ourselves: about what we were and what we have become
Jonathan Derbyshire, New Statesman
The book is simultaneously awe-inspiring and almost too painful to bear... His head, that of a great historian, political writer and charismatic intellectual, was a treasure house
Diana Athill, Literary Review
A book to treasure... Witty, profound, contraversial
Observer
The brilliant historian Tony Judt's posthumously published biographical essays, The Memory Chalet show what a learned, witty, subtle, and above all, civilised man we have lost
Evening Standard, Books of the Year
A tremendously moving memorial to a first-class historian and essayist, moving from the streets of London in the threadbare Clement Attlee years to the dining rooms of New York in the 21st century. If nothing else, Judt led a compellingly colour life...Some of the most affecting passages in this book look back to Judt's childhood, long before his academic fame and fortune. He writes beautifully about the moral and physical atmosphere of his London boyhood...This book is quintessential Judt: humane, fearless, unsparingly honest. In essay after essay the same qualities shine forth, all the more remarkable given the tragic circumstances...That he finished with such a wonderfully moving book is a mark of the man.
Financial Times
Judt calls these charming vignettes "feuillotons" which, without being sentimental, gives them the elegiac quality of falling autumn leaves
James Urquhart, Financial Times