“... Watched from a safe distance, Arthur Koestler’s life was like a Catherine-wheel breaking free from its stake. Leaping and spinning and scattering crowds, emitting fountains of alarming flares and sparks as it bounded in and out of public squares and unexpected back gardens, flinging dazzling light into dim minds, Koestler’s career left scorch marks and illuminations across the 20th century ...”

“... On​ a Berlin street corner, just off Friedrichstrasse, there is a faded bronze plaque set into the wall. ‘Here on 18 March 1848, barricade fighters defended themselves against the troops of the Second Royal Regiment of Prussia who, hours later, refused orders to resume the attack.’ Then come three lines of verse: ‘Es kommt dazu trotz alledem/Dass rings der Mensch die Bruderhand/dem Menschen reicht trotz alledem ...”

“... It was​ the spring of 1990, and the train from Warsaw to Vilnius had crossed the frontier. The carriage had been lifted off European rails onto the broad-gauge Russian chassis, and the fresh green forests of what was still Soviet Lithuania were flowing past the windows. I had not been in the Soviet Union for a few years – not since the advent of Gorbachev and perestroika ...”

“... The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir but a pregnant widow. Between the death of one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by; a long night of chaos and desolation will pass. Those resonant, vatic words come from Alexander Herzen, the Russian democratic exile, and he wrote them shortly after the failure of the 1848 Revolutions in Europe ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The table is full, the wall is painted, the space is filled with voices!’ Zurab was talking. We were in a Mexican-Japanese restaurant in Tbilisi, ending a heavy night. Bottles and dishes crowded the table; the diners were even gaudier than the décor; over the blast of the band came the voice of Georgia’s richest brewer yelling at his bodyguards ...”

“... I once went to see him at the New Statesman, behind his desk, and he said to me: ‘Hello, Neal. I’d offer you a cigar. But I’ve only got eight left.’What I’ve written here is mostly about the young Karl, whom I knew at the start of more than sixty years of friendship. He could take the huff in a way which lasted for decades, but his loyalty to ...”

“... to live under atrocious conditions. The story of Dimitri’s family probably sounds familiar to Neal Ascherson, who must have encountered dozens of similar cases when researching his book. There are cities, towns and villages in the hinterland of the Black Sea and to its west on the Aegean where much of the population can boast of such ...”

“... 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 adopted our BBC faces in Poets’ Corner, looking at the memorials and marble busts on the walls. I noticed Ascherson was taking his time over an inscription to the poet Thomas Campbell, and some words of Campbell’s began to echo somewhere in my head, two lines from The Pleasures of Hope ...”

“... and the argument moves off from the dubious ‘politics of spectacle’ into the world Ascherson so insistently dissects, the one in which most people are without power, where social participation is not a right but a privilege. But then, by using the phrase as title, he implicitly turns part of the attack on himself and his kind. This isn’t ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell ...”

“... defied its verdict? Nothing’s impossible in Scotland now – except a return to the status quo. Neal Ascherson The​ ‘No’s have it, and nothing will change. It was reported on 24 September that ‘Downing Street had been inching towards joining the military effort against Isis, but the prime minister had acted cautiously because he knew that ...”

“... Isabel Hilton, who covers Latin America for the Sunday Times, dug round the Bolivian period, while Neal Ascherson, an old German hand, accumulated the material about Barbie’s youth in Trier, the ancient city on the Mosel whose venerated rabbi, Adolf Altmann, was further insulted after his death by Barbie’s surely malicious borrowing of that surname ...”

“... 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 emigrant intellectuals who pepper Scottish history as ‘red Scots’: ‘cosmopolitan, self-avowedly “enlightened” and, given a chance, authoritarian, expanding into and exploiting greater and more bountiful fields than their own country could provide ...”

“... they are among: the reptile itself never alters either in shape or substance.’ The hero of Neal Ascherson’s magnificent novel is one of these complicated amphibians. He comes to Greenock a hundred years after Galt entered the town’s New Cemetery (now called the Old Cemetery) and he thinks of Greenock sometimes as home and at other times as a ...”