From Job and Camus to Akhmatova and Levi, Michael Ignatieff shows how we look to each other to recover hope and resilience.

How do we console each other and ourselves in an age of unbelief? In On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times, author and academic Michael Ignatieff shows how humans in extremity have looked to each other to recover hope and resilience.

From Job and Camus to Anna Akhmatova and Primo Levi, he brings stories from across the centuries into the present. A unique career has seen him serve as Canada’s Leader of the Opposition as Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party predecessor, hold senior academic posts at Cambridge, Harvard and Central European University and write 20 books including The Ordinary Virtues and Isaiah Berlin: A Life. Don’t miss this rare UK event with one of the great thinkers and writers of our time.

This talk will be held as the annual George Webber Memorial Event in memory of the founder of the Jewish Book Council under whose auspices Jewish Book Week was established 70 years ago.

Michael Ignatieff is a writer, historian and former politician. He has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, the University of Toronto and Harvard and is currently university professor at Central European University in Vienna. His books, which have been translated into twelve languages, include Blood and Belonging, Isaiah Berlin: a life, The Needs of Strangers, The Russian Album and The Ordinary Virtues.

David Herman was a TV producer for twenty years, working with Jeremy Isaacs and Melvyn Bragg among others, and has been a freelance writer for the past fifteen years writing 700 articles for a number of leading magazines and newspapers including The New Statesman, Prospect, The Guardian and The Independent. He is chief fiction reviewer at the Jewish Chronicle.