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.
The first book ended with ‘To be continued’. The second with ‘To be concluded’. But the third book of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s famous walk from the Hook of Holland to ‘Constantinople’ was never completed. He died two years ago, rewriting and correcting and adding and tweaking almost to the end. The manuscript, some versions of it handwritten, some typed...
Albert wrote to his sister Mabel from the trenches. That Mary he’d danced with, could she find out if Mary ever thought about him? Mabel considered he was too young for all that, it wasn’t proper. So she didn’t ask. But then he wrote again, so she did.
‘My insides go all jumbly when I think about Albert,’ said Mary to Mabel. So Mabel put that in her next letter...
Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
‘Refugee Blues’, W.H. Auden
Marseille is an old-fashioned town. ‘You still have a queen,’ the lady checking museum tickets remarked. ‘So why don’t you cut her throat? Kings and queens...
They always loved huge halls, the Social Democrats. They still do. Vaulted spaces taller than cathedral naves and vaster than locomotive assembly halls, mammoth sheds big enough to hold a battle-cruiser on stocks. This time I was in Augsburg, at the last SPD congress before the German federal elections on 22 September, but it was all familiar as I plodded towards the loudspeakers. The scent of bratwurst and mustard and German coffee; the aisles of lobby stalls promoting car factories, renewable energy, private health insurance or Bavarian tourism.
Anne Applebaum’s book begins with one group of women in the Polish city of Lodz and ends with another. The 45 years between the end of the Second World War and the emergence of a free, non-communist Poland separate them. But the younger women have decided to start again at the point where their elders left off – and to avoid their mistakes.
In 1945, the main railway station in...
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.
‘T he 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...
C oleridge’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...
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