Neal Ascherson

Most of the institutions around us seem to have infancies – or at least paths of evolution along which they staggered in order to become what they are today. Representative democracy, a civil service, even contemporary war descend to us through strange-looking ancestors: the executioners of kings, the treasurer keeping the royal gold under his bed, the marquis riding with his tenantry...

On his way to the shore, the patriarch mounted a rock, a flat-topped outcrop of Greenland granite. The people of Ilulissat, who had been standing silently along the skyline above us, made their way down and gathered round him until the flat summit was packed and children clung to their parents’ legs to avoid being pushed down the rock’s sheer sides. He began to speak to them, words in English and Greek translated into Greenlandic. When he had finished, they began to sing to him, Inuit words set to old Moravian mission harmonies.

What you felt on seeing the Berlin Wall depended greatly on the Berlin you had seen before. Frederick Taylor first visited Berlin as a schoolboy in 1965, when the Wall had already been up for some years. He presumably thought of other normal, undivided cities he knew, and was horrified. And anyone who had known Berlin before the Second World War was horrified in the same way. For me, it was different. I had first seen Berlin in the 1950s, when it was divided, but only by ideology, and when one could still walk incredulously between two worlds. Here were the lights and the cars and the shops. Then the notice: ‘You Are Now Leaving the American Sector.’ And then suddenly the lights became darkness, the streets were deserted, the ruins were masked by gigantic red banners stirring in the icy wind from the east.

For the last six months, a Scot reading the London papers, or watching London-made political TV shows, could only conclude that a sharp dislike of Scots and Scotland is spreading across South Britain. The reports suggest a bout of Scotophobia without parallel since the violently anti-Scottish mood of the English mob in Lord Bute’s day.

The ignorance and nastiness of some of this...