Tony Judt - a teacher, a historian, falling to ALS

“It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of 60 by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck.” The lucky man of whom Tony Judt wrote was Judt himself, paralysed from the neck down from amyotropic lateral sclerosis, a variant of motor neurone disease. Diagnosed in 2008,Judt died of the illness at the age of 62 in August of this year. From the onset of the disease to May 2010, when he wrote The Memory Chalet, he produced “a small political book, a public lecture, some 20 feuilletons reflecting on my life, and a considerable body of interviews directed toward a full-scale study of the 20th century.” Trapped in a body in rapid decline, Judt’s brilliant mind had never been more active.