SPRAWLING DIMENSIONS, POOR central control, gargantuan appetite, lumbering gait — Europe has every characteristic of a giant except greatness. It hasn’t been top of the beanstalk for 100 years. Its 20th-century wars were remarkable feats of self-vivisection. Recovered wealth has not brought renewed world influence.

All the new map projections make Europe look marginal. From the Pacific — the internal lake of the most dynamic economies — it looks like the edge of an enfeebled ocean. From the USA, it is the sump of inertia, from “the South” a sink of iniquity. Europe will never resume global hegemony. Its “soft” culture is too soft to have an impact, its military potential too elusive, its communities too conflictive, its disparities too divisive, its diplomacy too weak.

The failures of Europe have been failures of Europe’s historians. Since the end of the Second World War, our history has been of imperfectly escaped pasts. Totalitarianism, imperialism, nationalism have been easier to defeat than to discard. We have taken refuge in selective memories and revived them only when traumatic events are distant enough to enfold in comforting “commemorations”.

We have dodged the challenge to make the world better. Self-numbed, self-dumbed, we have replaced art with entertainment, education with information. Each reborn European “order” has arrived mewling and puking: the postwar promise, the revolutionary Utopia of the Sixties, the conservative nirvana of the Reagan-Thatcher era, the Babel built from the bricks of the Berlin Wall, the illusion of a better “postmodernity”. We have “never had it so good”; yet morally, psychically and intellectually, we are no better off. We’ve never had it so easy and we are feeble in consequence. In international affairs, we flap along like coat tails divided in Mr Bush’s dust. How should historians confront these problems? John Roberts and Martin Gilbert wrote the history of the 20th century with resolutely affected objectivity, interlining unadorned narratives with moral implications, like Confucius, who denounced tyranny merely by chronicling its deeds. Robert Conquest, less effectively, jettisoned detachment and wrote committed denunciations. Eric Hobsbawm wrote barely disguised autobiography — annals of shifting, sometimes shifty responses to the ideological contests that he had witnessed and in which he had engaged.

Tony Judt is another of the “ageing memorialists” whom he mildly lampoons in his big new book. But he belongs to a later generation. He was about 17 when — in the Larkin cliché that he unapologetically quotes — “sexual intercourse began”. So he, too, writes of the period that he misremembers, striving — as a historian should — to supply the deficiencies of memory. Postwar is a “personal narrative”, unashamedly “opinionated”, an individual’s take on his own times.

Judt never explicitly offers himself as source material — although his suppressed experiences tantalise the reader and would surely enhance the book. But he is always shadowily visible, like the narrator in a novel by Anthony Powell. The nostalgia of self-exile is almost palpable when he writes of England. Jewish fellow-feeling burdens his ruminations on the Holocaust. In self-revelatory pages on the Sixties, the naked antics of sex revolutionaries repel him. He ascribes vaguely profound significance to that decade, but the only specific effect that he mentions is the “anaesthetisation of shock”. Surprisingly he says nothing about existentialism or postmodernism (though “structuralism” gets his goat).

Like all the best historians, he rejects theory, which he thinks inimcal to his discipline. But Judt strews his narrative with refreshing, oddball perspectives. He makes a delightfully perverse case for Britain as progenitor of the European Union, and argues that defeat in the First World War benefited Germany. Television, to him, was a unifier of nations — not an organ of cultural globalisation.

Tyranny, he shows, can be useful to the professional intellectuals that it victimises. Ironically, of historians of Europe, in tone and approach, in the calculated and sometimes miscalculated provocations, Judt most resembles Norman Davies, whose work he reviled when he reviewed it.

Omissions include science, ecology, food, crime, black people, music (except for some brief but incisive passages on pop), women (except in connection with sex) and art (except in connection with funding).

Coverage of culture is selective, but Judt can be brilliant on the subject when talking about Britain. Paragraphs on Camra, for instance, and Wigan, are sublimely evocative. Perhaps he should follow the advice that he quotes from Jean Monnet and begin again, “with culture”. The biggest omission is the US — Europe’s irritatingly inseparable partner in “the West” — which makes one wonder whether modern Europe is worth writing about on its own: the picture is only ever partial. We get no footnotes: the only authority cited is that of the author’s friends.

He is weak on demography, environmentalism, Spain, the Netherlands and the Roman Catholic Church. He never justifies his choice of 1945 as a starting point, or his selection of places to include in his “Europe”. Both seem arbitrary. Yet the merits of the book outweigh the deficiencies. It is genuinely pan-European. Almost every state west of the Volga is mentioned, almost nowhere west of the Dniester, in Moldova, is seriously neglected.

Yet Judt never loses sight of the big picture or cross-cultural themes. The writing is fluent, elegant and arresting; you can take both pleasure and instruction from almost every one of the 800-odd pages. Judt is a pessimist about human nature but manages to summon up a bit of optimism about history. Europe, he thinks, is at last leaving its past behind. If he is right, it will be thanks to historians like him, who help us to confront it.

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