“... 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 ...”

“... kind of journalism: while writing about Scottish nationalism he has a go at a senior contributor, Neal Ascherson, along the way. In the same spirit Stefan Collini takes a disparaging glance at Christopher Hitchens, a former contributor well known for his repertory of disparaging glances. No hard feelings, one hopes. ‘No harm done.’ ‘No hard ...”

“... In​ Stone Voices, Neal Ascherson wrote that ‘in the two centuries after about 1760 … no country in Europe, and perhaps no country on earth until the European explosion into the interior of North America and Australia, underwent a social and physical mutation so fast and so complete’ as Scotland. The transformation from agrarian to industrial society was even faster than in England; it opened an almost incomprehensible gap between generations and left most Scots with a deep-seated distaste for further change ...”

“... college, Caius, just after the war, and after lunch, over coffee. Two undergraduates were there, Neal Ascherson and myself, and someone academically senior but disinclined to pull rank: this was Eric, lean, fair-haired, Jewish-looking, German-looking, lumber-shirted, trousers arrested by a leather belt. By his own seniors he had earlier been deprived of ...”

“... 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 While the climax, Soviet invasion, seems to have been replaced by General Jaruzelski’s quite unforeseen takeover, myth has already taken on the force of history, and two themes are now becoming established: that the ‘extremists’ in Solidarity overplayed their hands, thereby challenging the Soviet Union’s interest in a friendly Poland; and that by inducing Jaruzelski to move, Moscow invaded by proxy ...”

“... Sillars’s own Ayrshire base and members of the Scottish intelligentsia including Tom Nairn, Neal Ascherson and Hamish Henderson, as well as members of the Trotskyite International Marxist Group. Paranoid about the IMG, Sillars and his allies attempted to purge the entryists and the party fell acrimoniously apart. It left behind a distinctive policy ...”

“... horse. Take England itself, uner attack from false prophets like Hobsbawm – or ‘the journalist Neal Ascherson’, known to be forever sneering about the ‘Druids’ of the Ancien Régime and its élite values. Dancing on the grave of Old England, retorts Selbourne, ‘is a serious matter’. It might summon up plebeian demons, and Jews as well as ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... Oxford and Cambridge, ‘fairylands of ancient privilege and exclusiveness’ in the 1950s, as Neal Ascherson described them, ‘almost immune to social change, innocently convinced of their own superiority’? How shut out did Peters have to feel, to want so badly to get in? And wasn’t his whole experience proof, in fact, that his lack was as great ...”

“... who have put forward a case somewhat short of the Nationalist one: these are Tom Nairn and Neal Ascherson, both of whom are active in the organisation Common Cause – which, like Scotland United, is seeking to bring together with the Nationalists a largely leftist political movement. Their case is well-known: it depends on a series of arguments ...”

“... 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 massing on the border. ‘I don’t see any tanks,’ he replied curtly. Vintage Walesa, or a bad day: with Walesa you never knew. There were times, though, when the confidence evaporated and the two-handed victory salutes were traded in for some fireside modesty ...”

“... but their opposites: smart-set extroverts like Mark Boxer or up-to-something chameleons like Neal Ascherson – ‘his own man, utterly individual’. Perhaps the most affectionate portrait in the book is of the upper-class Scots painter Rory McEwen, a thorough-going and inventive self-inventor. Like Miller’s father, McEwen painted from nature and ...”

“... Consciously or not, Galloway configures her sister as a baleful visitant, a demonic agent of what Neal Ascherson in Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland called ‘Calvinist cultural repression’, by which ‘guilt, formless, unassuageable, darkening all pleasures with dread of what was to follow’, comes to haunt ‘the Scottish psyche’. This ...”

“... Sofia Andrukhovych, Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia Andrukhovychtranslated by Uilleam BlackerOn​  the first day, we hid in the Mins’ka metro station with our dog, Zlata ...”

“... of the people who figure in Jackson’s book were buzzing about the Sillars camp. Two of them – Neal Ascherson and Tom Nairn – are very familiar to readers of this paper. Another, the economist George Kerevan, a former member of the International Marxist Group and then a Labour councillor, went on to become an influential nationalist commentator with ...”