Neal Ascherson has worked as a journalist for more than six decades, reporting from Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, its successor states and elsewhere. He has also written more than a hundred pieces for the London Review of Books, from its seventh issue (in February 1980) to its most recent. In this episode of the LRB podcast, 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 for the Uganda National Congress to the moment he witnessed preparations for the kidnapping of Mikhail Gorbachev in Crimea but ‘missed the scoop of a lifetime’.
Read Neal Ascherson on Claud Cockburn, Gorbachev, Karl Miller, constitutions, the GDR, Tom Nairn, and many other subjects in the archive.
Neal Ascherson delivered the 2012 LRB Winter Lecture, which you can listen to here.
Watch our documentary about Eric Hobsbawm, Ascherson’s tutor, here.