A university spokesman in the US confirmed yesterday that Tony Judt, a highly praised and controversial historian who wrote with sharp persistence about the changing world at large and the dying world within the disease that paralysed him, has died at his home in New York City.

Mr Judt, a native of London who in recent years was a professor of European studies at New York University, was 62. His death was caused by complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

A Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2006 for his nearly 900-page history of modern Europe, Postwar, Mr Judt was diagnosed two years later with ALS, which attacks nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord and destroys the ability to move and speak.

Although confined like “a modern-day mummy,” his thinking was unimpaired, as Mr Judt demonstrated in 2010 through a series of personal essays for The New York Review of Books.