Neal Ascherson

This book went to press in the previous decade, in a different geological period of European history, in the almost forgotten circumstances of the late spring of 1989. When it was first sent to me, I read several sections but then put it on one side. Some obscure motive, which might have been prudence, warned me that the autumn of 1989 might not be the right moment to review a book about Eastern Europe. Now, not yet twelve months since the last of these essays was written, it becomes fascinating to read through The Uses of Adversity from cover to cover, and to measure it against the new Europe which is becoming visible beneath the torrents of change.

Some sixty years ago, when David Thomson was a boy, he suffered from a condition that badly affected his eyesight. He could see, but poorly. He read Braille and, though this was forbidden, the printed page. On two occasions, when the condition grew worse, he was condemned to spend six weeks at a time lying on his back in a darkened room. In general, all heavy physical exertion was banned. His mother sent him away from London to live with her family at Nairn, in north-eastern Scotland, on the shore of the Moray Firth. The years that he passed there built the emotional and imaginative foundations of his life.

‘In the early Sixties,’ said Grass – he was talking to an audience of Greek intellectuals in Athens, during the dictatorship of the Colonels – ‘I started doing day-to-day political work. The presumptuous élitist notion that writers are the conscience of the nation and should rise above the practical realities of politics has always gone against my grain.’’

Readers who had encountered its first volume would have known that Stephen Koss’s work on the British political press was monumental. Now it has become his monument in another, brutally unexpected sense, for Stephen Koss died suddenly soon after the completion of the second volume. The outrage felt by everyone who had known or read him had something to do with his youth, but more to do with the cutting-off of his gifts. These included an almost superhuman capacity for tracking, retrieving, devouring and assimilating information in less time and from more sources than was previously thought possible. Koss was the archive-cruncher of his age. But he had another gift, which was to make the imparting of densely-packed information stylish, readable, often mockingly witty. Because of this, Koss is always present in his own work, an energetic, high-spirited, sceptical presence who gives off pulses of his own enjoyment. The old cliché about authors living on in their books is freshened up here: Koss bounces about this second volume like a cowboy, suddenly coming into view to crack a whip or wave a hat or whoop whenever the slow-moving herd of facts threatens to come to a halt.

James Boswell created the ‘Age of Johnson’, rescuing the late 18th century, above all, for the Victorians. The Boswell industry at Yale University has given an ‘Age of Boswell’ to the 20th century. This second volume of the grand Frederick Pottle-Frank Brady biography marks the climax of that long achievement. Climax, but not end: in some country-house loft or uncleared bank vault, I would bet, lies the huge bundle which is the missing Johnson-Boswell correspondence. But that discovery, if and when it comes, can only ornament what has already been done. We know more about James Boswell than about any other human being who inhabited the earth two hundred years ago.