TONY JUDT

“We probably face a world that is divided much more horizontally than vertically. We have a class of world travellers - as the medievals might have called them, 'clerks' - who speak Latin, or English, and feel at home in Tokyo, New York or Singapore. Underneath are the 'villains', the serfs, who don't speak English, who don't travel - beyond the occasional cheap vacation flight abroad - and who are still very much in a national, local cultural world. They are as much separated from their own airport people as from serfs of other countries.”

It is the gaps between cultures that concern Judt most, and especially the division between America and Europe.

One aspect of that rift is their attitude to Israel. On October 3, Judt was due to give a talk to an independent think- tank, called Network 20/20 about the “Israel lobby” in the US. The event was being held at the Polish Consulate in New York. Hours before he was scheduled to stand up, the consulate cancelled the talk, under pressure, Judt alleged, from influential Jewish groups in New York such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee.

The cancellation brought outraged support from a roster of Judt's fellow academics and intellectuals. They said there had been an attempt to intimidate and shut down free debate - seeming to prove the point that Judt had wanted to make. A 114-signature letter was written to Abraham Foxman, the prominent national director of the Anti-Defamation League, and published in The New York Review of Books. But it is still not clear who telephoned whom, when, and to apply what sort of pressure during the incident, which The New York Observer called “l'affaire Judt”.

Judt says he doesn't lie awake at night worrying about his critics. But, still, he seems to me to carry a sense of anger and despondency about him. He admits that although he likes many Americans, he does not altogether like America. “Tom Friedman is talking through his hat. The world is not flat at all. The world is shaped still in many ways as it was in my generation by culture, by the place you grew up, by the assumptions you make about the place of religion in public life, about the relative importance of the state and the individual.”

As the breach with Europe widens - “Now we are passing through a period of America's simultaneous withdrawal and resentment at the world,” he says - he knows for sure which side he wants to be on.

“I am tempted at least twice a day to go back to Europe,” he says.