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“... 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 While the climax, Soviet invasion, seems to have been replaced by General Jaruzelski’s quite unforeseen takeover, myth has already taken on the force of history, and two themes are now becoming established: that the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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... re-election of his government, and that is certainly unacceptable to journalists of the centre. Neal Ascherson, happy to describe himself as a middle-of-the-road warmonger of the sort attacked by Foot, gracefully admitted that Foot has often been right in the past – which is something that should be said at the outset. He has had a very good eye for ...”

“... hated and discredited, however much liberal revisionists try to revive it? Is it possible, as Neal Ascherson puts it, for Solidarity to ‘take most of the substance of power away from the party and state bureaucracy but to leave them with the form’? In the words of Jacek Kuron, the driving force behind KOR, the Solidarity think-tank: ‘Can a ...”

“... 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 ...”