"“Postwar” is first-rate political, economic, and social history. The only sections that are unworthy of the author’s talents are the brief ventures into intellectual history, and the proverbial British prudishness about abstract ideas may have something to do with this. As a reference to the philosopher Jacques Derrida as “the literary critic Jacques Derrida” suggests, Judt has no patience for Continental thought, whose prominence, such as it was, he tends to attribute to a combination of fashionableness and ambition."