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 more than 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.
It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down. It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses. It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
James Fenton, ‘A German Requiem’
The topic of international space is like one of those monstrous catfish which used to loaf around the hot-water outfalls of the Berlin power stations. You...
They came for Comrade Prince D.S. Mirsky, ‘aristocrat of critics’, some time in the night of 2 to 3 June 1937. He lived in a high, bare room which had a fine view over Moscow. It was five floors up, with no lift, so he had plenty of time to hear them climbing towards him. Many Soviet citizens slept little that year, listening for the boots on the stairs.
They buried Z/K (prisoner)...
Throughout this book, the poet Douglas Dunn provides epigraphs and quotations. His final contribution occurs in the last section, ‘Epilogue: The Last Day’, a sort of diary of what Tom Nairn did and felt on the unforgettable rainy Thursday of 6 May 1999. It was the first polling day for the reconvened Scottish Parliament. As Nairn drove back from Fife, where he had gone to say goodbye to a dying friend, he passed through some shaggy badlands country and was reminded of Dunn’s
Most of us grew up – or were born – during the Cold War. We were formed by a quite extraordinary period, by events which did not take place rather then events which did. We never ceased to feel horror at the period’s architecture, ending in a wall of fire which we could at moments see quite plainly ahead of us. But over time we lost much of our sense of abnormality, imagining that there had been similar intervals in history when the known world had been partitioned between adversaries heavily armed but reluctant to shoot first. Perhaps the Roman Empire had known such situations; perhaps the Peace of Westphalia had ushered in such a stable confrontation. But all these reachings for precedents were abuses of the past. There has never been anything like the Cold War, and its very texture was so unfamiliar that many of the old methods of politics and military pressure twisted in the hand of their users, or produced terrifyingly unfamiliar results. In consequence, quite new maxims for diplomacy and influence had to be invented. It is only now, nearly a decade on and back in the primal soup of big and little nation-states jostling for nourishment and security, that we can recognise how weird those years really were.’
In this episode of the LRB podcast, Neal Ascherson talks to Thomas Jones about his recent piece on the journalist Claud Cockburn and about his own life and career, from his time as propaganda secretary...
Neal Ascherson delivers his 2012 LRB Winter Lecture on Europe, its pasts and possible future.
Franziska Augstein, Norbert Röttgen, Neal Ascherson and Christopher Clark discuss how Germany sees itself and how the world sees it, with Nicholas Spice.
‘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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.