Neal Ascherson

Neal Ascherson was for many years a foreign correspondent for the Observer, based in Bonn, and has written several books on Central and Eastern Europe, including Black Sea and The Struggles for Poland. He is also the author of Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland and a novel, The Death of the Fronsac. He has written a hundred pieces for the LRB, starting early in 1980 with an account of being in a taxi queue with the spy Anthony Blunt, ‘fervently cheerful’ now his secret had been revealed.

Letter

Bloody Londoners

15 December 2022

Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes that no Jacobite prisoners were executed by ‘hanging, drawing and quartering’ after the 1745 rebellion (Letters, 5 January). I would refer him to Paul O’Keeffe’s recent book Culloden: Battle and Aftermath, which describes the hanging and disembowelling of Jacobites before enthusiastic crowds on London’s Kennington Common. Beheading was a privilege reserved for...
Letter

Bye Bye Britain

24 September 2020

Neal Ascherson writes: I wrote the article to ask why UK citizens outwith Scotland might want to preserve the Union. The only answer Geoff Thompson provides is that Scottish votes are needed to save England from Tory misrule. Even supposing the remnant of Scottish Labour could be revived, can he imagine Scottish electors – after a Yes vote in a referendum – clamouring to renounce their new independence...
Letter
Since the publication of my article about a forgotten European enclave, I have continued to receive inquiries from readers and other scholars asking for references and sources (LRB, 22 March). My first and best source, who convinced me that ‘Amikejo’ really had existed and was not a Polish novelist’s fantasy, was the American scholar Steven Press. He has now made his detailed research accessible...
Letter

Former Selves

2 November 2006

Neal Ascherson writes: Robert Morgan tries to prove, triumphantly, that Grass was a ‘young Nazi seeking to serve the Nazi cause’ when he was drafted into the Waffen SS. But Grass has never denied that he was a fully convinced Nazi at the age of 18. It’s exactly because he has always admitted it that his refusal to name the formation he served with is so puzzling. It’s also mistaken to imply...
Letter
The first two don’ts in Nelson Algren’s warning-for-life, which were requested by Ian Wylie (Letters, 29 October), are ‘Never play cards with a man called Doc; Never eat in a diner that offers “Mom’s Cooking".’ The third, as I heard the rules from an American journalist in Poland many years ago, was ‘Never sleep with a woman who has more problems than you.’ But did Algren invent these...

‘The subtlest​ of insults to Scotland is, it seems, to return to it,’ Neal Ascherson wrote in the Scottish political review Q in 1975. The historian Christopher Harvie described the...

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Coleridge’s​ favourite novelist, John Galt, had a gift for encapsulating disgrace under pressure, and his novels of small-town Scottish life are among the early masterpieces of British...

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Beast of a Nation: Scotland’s Self-Pity

Andrew O’Hagan, 31 October 2002

In Westminster Abbey a couple of years ago, I stood for over an hour talking to Neal Ascherson. It was one of those freezing January evenings – cold stone, long shadows – and we...

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Littoral

Misha Glenny, 9 May 1996

In the late Twenties, the paternal grandfather of Dimitri, a close friend of mine from Thessaloniki, decided to leave Novorossisk, the Russian Black Sea port. The Soviet Government had ended the...

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Intelligencer

Sylvia Lawson, 24 November 1988

The book’s title mocks the author’s own position. It comes from a newspaper column of 1985 in which he attacked what he saw as ‘the retreat from politics’ into nihilistic...

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The Rat Line

Christopher Driver, 6 December 1984

By chance, the evening I took this book to bed for the painful reading expected, I jabbed the tooth of a comb down a fingernail and cried out. As a reminder of what Klaus Barbie was about, not...

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Liking Walesa

Tim Sebastian, 15 July 1982

For nearly eighteen months Lech Walesa walked on quicksand, buoyant and for all the world supremely confident. In the summer of 1981 I asked him whether he was worried about the Soviet tanks...

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Poland’s Special Way

Keith Middlemas, 4 February 1982

In the six months since Neal Ascherson’s intricate but lucid account of the rise of Solidarity was finished, Poland’s affairs have become the latest world-heroic saga. While the...

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