“... in 2018 when she was accused of having been, in the 1970s, a spy for the Bulgarian secret service (Neal Ascherson discussed the story in the LRB of 19 July 2018). I believe Kristeva when she says she wasn’t a spy, and her biographer Alice Jardine offers a good if not entirely conclusive argument for this belief: ‘If she had been forced to do such a ...”

“... Lockhart Plot’. Reilly is a secondary character in Jonathan Schneer’s The Lockhart Plot; Neal Ascherson, reviewing the book in the LRB (5 November 2020), describes him as an ‘ungraspable rogue’. Schneer gives a detailed account of the plot and its failure. In brief, it turned on subverting the regiments of Latvian soldiers who were ...”

“... practitioners are the three Anglo-musketeers regularly featured in the New York Review of Books: Neal Ascherson and Timothy Garton Ash (spurs won in Eastern Europe) and Ian Buruma (in East Asia). United by common liberal convictions, the trio are otherwise quite distinct. Garton Ash, a generation younger than ...”

“... The case for continuity is strongest in relation to constitutional law. It doesn’t follow, as Neal Ascherson suggested in the LRB of 1 April, that because the UK has no written constitution ‘it has no law of state,’ with the result that ‘nobody knows who is ultimately in charge.’ It’s the crown that is in charge, functioning through three ...”

“... Gale, Alan Ross, Eric Newby, Katharine Whitehorn, Michael Frayn, Gavin Young, Mark Frankland and Neal Ascherson were among the names Astor hired and promoted, resisting what he saw as ‘the general tendency towards brightness at the expense of intelligence, which follows fairly inevitably from the general office concern at the circulation advances made ...”

“... political devolution to the peripheral nations. These ‘no-men of England’, as an article by Neal Ascherson in the Scotsman called them, rallied dissenting Labour MPs behind their anti-devolution campaign, fearful of a strengthened developmental agenda on the other side of the border and resentful about higher spending on Scotland. Northern sceptics ...”

“... of people to stand by their woman. Those who wrote about her included Ian Gilmour, W.G. Runciman, Neal Ascherson, Christopher Hitchens, R.W. Johnson, Ross McKibbin, E.P. Thompson, Tam Dalyell and Peter Clarke. What they wrote seemed excellent to me, with Runciman bearing the palm for aphoristic conciseness. In embarking on a review, also in 1989, of Hugo ...”

“... went on in the Third Reich. Something of this fervour for a perfect world seems to have seized Mr Neal Ascherson when he complained that after his release from Spandau Speer had made himself the scapegoat for his people. Speer used to say that a Bonze such as himself did not know of the crimes of the Nazis but could have known had he tried. By using this ...”

“... for the Emergency Rescue Committee that she and others had been funding (an organisation which, as Neal Ascherson recently explained, did much more than the Americans had asked of it but much less than it wanted to before Vichy dismantled it).* When Hirschman did look back, it was to concede that the sharp things he’d said about quitting in Exit, Voice ...”

“... as a civilisation, and he can do this only if he first convinces himself. My Observer colleague Neal Ascherson – present in this anthology with an exemplary piece on Ken Livingstone – once observed that the task of the literary editor is to ruin the next generation of writers. In diverting them from what they think they should be doing to what he ...”

“... 1950 to 1963) he seemed destined, towards the world of international journalism. The first was Neal Ascherson, two years ahead of him at Eton, a formidable intelligence, who went to Cambridge and subsequently became a distinguished reporter on Eastern European affairs and an influential left-wing thinker. The second was myself, though I believe that ...”

“... is not some pedigree lineage. This is a mongrel tradition!’ These words – according to Neal Ascherson, who described the event in Stone Voices (2002) – ignited the crowd, and are now held up as evidence of a proudly ‘civic’ nationalism that thrives on inclusion.Yet as Lloyd’s own case shows, there is nothing particularly Scottish about ...”

“... as were the rewards for international business and the crown. In The King Incorporated (1963), Neal Ascherson recorded that between 1896 and 1906, Leopold cleared a personal profit in his ‘domaine de la couronne’ of nearly £3 million – perhaps £500 million in today’s money – from his own businesses and franchise fees. It was largely on ...”

“... in Charles Wheeler’s Radio 4 series on National Service, a discussion with, among others, Neal Ascherson, Michael Mates and Arnold Wesker. Though my own experiences (basic training in the Infantry, then the Joint Services Russian Course) were hardly typical, I find myself more in agreement with Wesker and indeed Michael Mates than I do with ...”

“... wish for our friends; but existence is believing We know for whom we mourn and who is grieving. Neal Ascherson London In a telephone poll last week, readers of the Cambridge Evening News voted decisively against any military action aimed at those responsible for the attacks on the USA. A readership better known for its implacable hatred of joyriders on ...”