Neal Ascherson

Afew​ months after the end of the Second World War, Stephen Spender returned to Germany. His plan was to contact German intellectuals. This was not very fruitful: most were dead or in exile, and Ernst Jünger, whom he did meet, evaded his invitation to show unqualified guilt for the Nazi past. But then Spender was asked to reopen libraries in the British zone of occupation, having first...

Like sturgeons​ and swans in medieval England, public information began as royal property. Today, we understand more vividly than ever before that information is also a commodity: I have it, you don’t; if you want it, you must pay me for it; if you don’t, I will use your lack of it to control you. Against this, and very reluctantly, a public ‘right to know’ has been...

I first met Jonathan’s knees. This was because Cambridge sofas in the 1950s had broken springs. Once they had buoyed up culture heroes like Rupert Brooke, John Cornford or Guy Burgess.

‘It’s a​ disgusting case – her face lights up whenever that animated little deformity so much as turns to her.’ This was Diana Manners, writing to her fiancé, Duff Cooper, in 1919. ‘Her’ was Venetia Montagu, the light of Herbert Asquith’s life when he was prime minister, but now sharing a Paris hotel room with a small, grinning Canadian...

There is a fine Scots word for the sale of the contents of a house, farm or factory: a ‘displenishment’. We have certainly witnessed the displenishment of Great Britain. James Hamilton-Paterson’s grief, his sense of injury and loss, is eloquent. But, speaking for myself, I can’t share that ‘brand’ nostalgia. I would trade a hundred Hillman Imps or a dozen Bristol Britannias for one Man from the Ministry, standing outside an ‘advance factory’ waving an Industrial Development Certificate. He didn’t stand around in a wasteland of nail-bars and food banks, squeaking that ‘Britain is open for business!’ He planned the business, planted it where it was needed and gave it a launching push with public money.