Reporting the Big World
In the summer of 1951, Neal Ascherson, not yet twenty years old, enlisted in the Royal Marines. Following the Second World War, the United Kingdom had introduced a new National Service Act; in the early fifties, this often meant fighting in Korea, or battling an uprising against colonial rule in British Malaya, where Ascherson was deployed. As part of the counterinsurgency, British forces committed extrajudicial killings and used Agent Orange, providing a model for America’s “pacification” campaign in Vietnam.
Ascherson, who was born in Edinburgh to an officer in the Royal Navy, considered himself lucky to avoid service in Korea, where he lost several friends. But the experience in Malaya was still formative. “I was just amazed,” he told me earlier this year. “The brute inequality, the exploitation, the unfairness of it. And that’s apart from the racialism.” Ascherson was sitting in a small second-floor office in his home in North London, wearing several layers and a scarf. Bookshelves crammed with historical tomes lined two of the walls, as did boxes of old letters and photographs; on his desk was a program for the memorial service of his friend and fellow-Scot Tom Nairn, a political theorist who did groundbreaking work on nationalism and the archaic nature of the British state. Ascherson’s Caledonian accent has become less pronounced over the years, as his voice has softened and his speech has slowed. (He will turn ninety-four in October.) When I asked how some recent doctors’ visits had gone, he told me that health worries were now part of the texture of his daily life.
But his memory, of a long career as a reporter around the globe, with turns as an essayist, a historian, a novelist, and a political activist, remains almost eerily lucid. Every time I thought I had stumped him by bringing up some obscure story or incident from his past—lugging the notorious spy Kim Philby’s typewriter around the office when they both worked for the Observer in the early nineteen-sixties; crossing the Berlin Wall to hear Nikita Khrushchev speak; getting groped by an M.I.6 officer who was trying to recruit him—I realized that the quizzical look on his face was merely because I had not spoken loudly enough. Ascherson still regularly produces lengthy pieces for The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and has been one of the most prolific contributors to each publication. “He’s probably the last living person who has been writing essays continuously for the paper since it started,” Jean McNicol, a co-editor of the L.R.B., which launched in 1979, told me. (The same holds true for the N.Y.R.B., which was founded even earlier, in 1963.)
Ascherson shares the house with his wife, the writer Isabel Hilton; they have two children, and Ascherson has two more from an earlier marriage. A cat entered the room, craving acknowledgment, but Ascherson seemed more interested in discussing Malaya, and his return to the U.K. in 1952, when he began studying history at Cambridge. One evening, Ascherson recalled, he joined a group of students at the residence of Eric Hobsbawm, the legendary Marxist historian, who was then in his thirties. Ascherson had on a medal that he had been awarded for his military service. “You should be ashamed to wear that,” Hobsbawm told him. Ascherson, embarrassed and upset—partly because he knew that Hobsbawm was right—tore off the medal and never wore it again. Decades later, Ascherson found out that one of the other students present that night was Daniel Ellsberg, the future RAND Corporation analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers. (Ellsberg had been “so shocked” by Hobsbawm’s outburst, according to Hobsbawm’s biographer, Richard Evans, that he “remembered it for the rest of his life.”) Hobsbawm would later declare that Ascherson was “possibly the most brilliant student I ever had. I didn’t really teach him much, I just let him get on with it.”
Shortly after the Hobsbawm encounter, Ascherson began publishing short fiction about his Malaya experience. An early story, written for a Cambridge publication called Chequer—one of whose editors was Karl Miller, the founder of the L.R.B.—follows a young British lieutenant as he escorts a captured female Chinese insurgent in the hopes of locating an enemy camp. (The Malayan Emergency, as it was called by the British, was led by ethnic-Chinese workers, who made up forty per cent of the population.) But the lieutenant begins to wonder what distinguishes him from her: they are, he thinks, “both almost children, both in arms for intangible slogans.” The story has an atmosphere of colonial torpor and sexual hypocrisy—the odor of “jungle and sweat”; the lieutenant’s revulsion after sleeping with the prisoner—that recalls early Orwell. When I sent Ascherson a copy of the story, he replied, “Some squashy sentiment, too many adjs, but some good bits. My first write: over a whole night in 1953.”
That year, Ascherson, still at Cambridge, learned that Lee Meng, a leading Chinese Communist guerrilla, had been sentenced to hang after being captured in Malaya by British forces. During his deployment, Ascherson had heard a story, perhaps apocryphal, that Lee—who was thought to have planned or carried out a number of spectacular attacks on the British—had once come across a soldier or two bathing naked in a stream, and had refused to kill them because they were unarmed. He took the train to London to convey this story to Lee’s lawyers, hoping it could be used to spare her. “It wasn’t much use to them,” Ascherson told me. Still, it was a decision that took remarkable confidence and integrity for a young former marine at the height of the Cold War. (Lee’s sentence was eventually commuted for unrelated reasons; British Malaya achieved independence in 1957, and became part of Malaysia in 1963.)
Ascherson may not have known it, but he was establishing the pattern of his career, and indeed his life: an engagement with the world driven by conscience and curiosity, and a relentless desire to get it all down on paper, in one form or another. Ascherson has too often thrived as a straight reporter to fit the typical conception of a “public intellectual,” but his surprisingly positive judgment on the conservative historian (and notorious Scot-hater) Hugh Trevor-Roper could equally be applied to himself: “Trevor-Roper’s natural distance was the long essay in a historical journal, the lead book review, the lecture series polished up for publication, the heavyweight foreign-page reporting in the Observer or the Sunday Times.” Trevor-Roper, however, had trouble finishing his books; Ascherson has written books on a range of subjects, including the Polish Solidarity movement of the nineteen-eighties, the Black Sea, and Scottish identity. (Ascherson’s first novel, “The Death of the Fronsac,” was published in 2017, when he was eighty-four.)
Above all, Ascherson has sought, in his words, to be a “journalist who tried to report the big world.” His achievement has been to write honestly and forcefully about the tragedies and grim realities of the twentieth century—whether from the still ruined landscapes of East Germany or from Pinochet’s post-coup Chile—while never losing hope that different futures were possible, within Europe and beyond. “He’s certainly somewhat more of a romantic nationalist than I am,” Timothy Garton Ash, who got to know Ascherson in Poland in the early eighties, told me. “But in a way he’s doing something rather wonderful, which is to go back to the spirit of 1848.” Ascherson has written of that year, when monarchies across Europe faced uprisings predicated on versions of nationalism that were more liberatory than reactionary, as a series of “blinding moments of revolutionary ecstasy when impenetrable barriers turn out to be cardboard stage sets, when all humanity is revealed as brothers and sisters.”
But, if Ascherson embodies something of the spirit of 1848, his work also more directly reflects his own era, marked as it was by decolonization, the forcible division of Europe, the rebirth and eventual unification of Germany, and the long legacies of Nazism, Stalinism, and the British Empire. Ascherson’s writing about those inheritances offers insights into our own Trumpian, post-Brexit world of rising demagoguery and angry nationalism. “His work is full of the forces of technology, crises in democracy, totalitarianism, the bomb, existentialism,” the writer Andrew O’Hagan told me. “All of them are operating on Neal’s intelligence. He seems almost like a figure out of Saul Bellow, a man who’s in a kind of wonderfully responsive intellectual and emotional crisis at the center of twentieth-century pressures.”
Ascherson’s great subject has always been “the Continent,” and the people who battled to forge its identity during his lifetime. “Europe was a huge, dark place ‘over there,’ ” he wrote, in 2023, as part of a reflection on his childhood in the nineteen-forties, which he spent in industrial towns across Scotland and England. “The German bombers that shook our house came from Europe, and so did awful, half-comprehended stories about war crimes and hunger. Later, after the war, I heard the old British fascist Oswald Mosley trying to revive his fortunes by preaching a ‘United Europe’ free of Communists and nonwhite immigrants.”
But, during the war, “a different light” broke though, when the headmaster of his first school read out a poem that had made its way across the Channel: Paul Éluard’s “Liberté.” “Stunned, I dreamed of a Resistance Europe, its peoples united in heroic conspiracy against Nazi occupation,” he recalled. Ascherson has always admired the welfare states that emerged in Western Europe in the decades after 1945, but he has equally bemoaned that “Resistance Europe”—a place where radical new societies could be born out of the strength of the people who banded together to fight fascism—“sank under the floods of Stalinism and Cold War mobilisation.”
Ascherson’s path to becoming one of the preëminent voices on Europe, in what he recently referred to as “the long interval between George Patton’s tanks and Vladimir Putin’s,” began with him leaving it. After he graduated from Cambridge, he travelled to Uganda, then a British protectorate, in the footsteps of his best friend from school, a Ugandan named Erisa Kironde. At the time, the Ugandan National Congress, the country’s first political party, was “drafting constitutions and sending them up to the colonial office,” Ascherson told me, beaming at the memory. “And so I joined in. I became the propaganda secretary.” Uganda then had a large population of Indian immigrants, who had been brought over by the British at the end of the nineteenth century to help construct railways, and who eventually established more economic autonomy and power than Black Ugandans. “If you were not white and went into a printing shop, all of which were owned by Indians, and said, ‘Can you print this poster, please? It says “UGANDA INDEPENDENT IMMEDIATELY,” ’ they would stare out in horror and then ring the police,” Ascherson said. “But if I went in, as a white man, they’d do it, of course.” He returned to the U.K. after almost a year, but his interest in Africa continued; he later wrote a witty and harrowing book on the horrors of Congo under King Leopold, and reported from South Africa in the eighties, during the twilight of apartheid.
Ascherson told me that, when he got back from Uganda, he nurtured some delusions about becoming the greatest novelist of his generation. He also wanted to travel widely, and figured, a little naïvely, that journalism might be a way to do both, because “writing was writing.” He got a job at the Guardian, where he was soon dispatched to France to cover Charles de Gaulle’s return to power, in 1958, amid the Algerian War. But as Michael Frayn, one of Ascherson’s oldest friends, told me, “He eventually left the paper because their approach to decolonization was insufficiently radical.”
By 1960, Ascherson had joined the Observer, which was known for its criticism of the British government’s conduct in the Middle East and elsewhere. He was offered a posting in Germany, a prospect he found hugely disappointing. “I thought, Oh, no,” he told me. He had grown up “pretty anti-German,” and he didn’t speak the language. Still, he admitted, it was “a hell of a chance.”
At first, Ascherson was based in Bonn, the capital of the Federal Republic, where postwar Germans had, perhaps understandably, embraced a dull and conservative status quo. Ascherson helped persuade the Observer to move its bureau to a divided Berlin, which was then the locus of the Cold War, and which, compared with Bonn, was “tremendously exciting,” in part because he would regularly cross into East Germany to report. The job also entailed covering the rest of Central Europe, which led to frequent assignments in Poland, to which he developed an attachment rivalled only by his connection to Scotland.
Ascherson’s politics at the time were quite left-leaning; he told me, “I often voted Labour, gritted teeth. But, having seen so much of Post-Stalinist Communism in Eastern Europe, I couldn’t bring myself to join a Communist Party.” Especially exciting to him was the German student movement, which combined support for liberation across the non-Western world with attacks on what the students considered the suffocating (and still insufficiently de-Nazified) Federal Republic. Their revolt was kicked off by the killing of a demonstrator at a rally protesting the authoritarianism of the visiting Shah of Iran, in June, 1967, and then accelerated when a right-wing fanatic shot and seriously injured the left-wing activist Rudi Dutschke, the following April. “I was rather swept up in all that,” Ascherson told me. “I remember going to an enormous demonstration against the emergency laws, which were being passed in the Bonn Parliament, and a train was hired and packed with people waving red flags out of the windows. It was kind of ridiculous, really, looking back at it. There was an elected train commissar who was in charge, and then each compartment in the train elected its leader as well, and then debated important issues.” Before long, at the height of France’s own student protests, in 1968, Ascherson was lecturing at the Sorbonne on post-Stalinist revolutionary ideas and tactics.
“You were doing all this while reporting?” I asked.
“Well, yes,” he responded. “There’ve been one or two moments in my life in which I’ve been supposed to be an objective correspondent and at the same time getting personally very much involved in what I was reporting on.” In 1969, Ascherson allowed Dutschke to stay with him in London while he was recovering from the assassination attempt, and eventually arranged his passage to Ireland.
In the seventies, Ascherson continued to invest his political commitments with as much energy as his reporting. He became one of the founding members of the Scottish Labour Party, which advocated for more autonomy from London. “This greatly distressed my editor, Eric Mackay, of the Scotsman, who said, ‘I personally could trust you to be objective, but a lot of other people won’t, and you’re doing damage to the reputation of this paper,’ ” Ascherson said. “Eventually, he permitted me to carry on. He didn’t demand that I leave the Party, and said I could still go on writing, which was pretty big of him.” Garton Ash, another reporter who covered Eastern Europe without shying away from his own opinions, told me he thought Orwell was one of Ascherson’s models: “For Neal, it’s ‘I’m not going to pretend to be Olympian or objective like someone from the BBC or the New York Times, or a certain Anglo-American school of journalism. I’m going to tell you exactly where I stand. I’m on the side of the Polish dissidents. I’m on the side of 1968. I’m on the side of the Scottish nationalists.”
Ascherson’s sympathy for Scottish nationalism, however, has not always been warmly received, even by a generation of Scottish writers who view him with something approaching devotion. Andrew O’Hagan wrote a devastating review of “Stone Voices,” Ascherson’s book, published in 2002, on their shared homeland, accusing Ascherson of relying on ancient myths and self-pity to tell its story: “Neal Ascherson has been through many long nights with this heart-scorching beast of a nation, yet, in spite of what he knows, he most often manages to play the part of the good father, coddling Scotland into a state of temporary sleep with the singing of old lullabies.” When I asked O’Hagan about the piece, he told me, “Neal’s more than respectable when it comes to trying to look at Poland and Scotland on the international scene as places with independent characters, with good, strong arguments for self-governance.” But, he continued, “I think he’s never been completely without romance. And I think that that was where my argument with him began.”
I asked O’Hagan if Ascherson ever responded to the review. “He wrote me a very elegant note,” O’Hagan said. “He told me he admired the piece but didn’t understand why it had to be so strident. And that is typical of the man, a real encapsulation of his talent and his decency as a human being. So many of us learned how to calm down in our writing from Neal, and learned how to pay attention to the world minute by minute and image by image.” O’Hagan also told me he has since become more sympathetic to Ascherson’s position on Scottish independence, which was the subject of a 2014 referendum. The referendum failed, but, in a post-Brexit world, even Scottish leftists such as O’Hagan, who tended to view nationalism with a jaundiced eye, found themselves coming around to an independent Scotland if it meant remaining a part of Europe.
Ascherson spent much of the late seventies and early eighties in Poland. While there, he reported his book on Solidarity, the trade-union movement that challenged Polish Communism so forcefully that the government declared martial law. The book was criticized by some reviewers, notably the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, for assuming that, in Ascherson’s words, “Polish Communism could, in spite of its past failures, find within itself the power to create a new synthesis of socialism and democracy.” (Ascherson was personally aware of those failures: in 1967, he was beaten up and had his nose broken by the Polish Security Service after meeting a group of student dissidents.) His hopes for Poland were never realized, of course, but the decade did end with something that Ascherson found equally exciting: permission from Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet President, for Poland and other satellite states in Eastern Europe to chart their own courses.
Some of these states, including Ascherson’s beloved Poland, hastily transitioned to market economies, sorely disappointing him. But he continued writing and reporting on the region, publishing a quirky, beautiful book on the history of the peoples over the past millennia who have lived near the Black Sea, and becoming even more prolific as a long essayist, especially at the L.R.B., which was edited by his old Cambridge friend Miller until 1992. “Karl thought of Neal as his best writer,” Miller’s widow, Jane, told me.
Reading Ascherson’s finest essays today, so many of them on the big European personalities—de Gaulle, Brandt, Thatcher—is still invigorating, even for those of us too young to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is in part because, whether owing to shrinking foreign-news budgets or to a reluctance to have individual correspondents expound on such a broad array of topics and countries, careers like Ascherson’s barely exist anymore. There are very few wandering polymaths filling the news pages with vivid dispatches that blend reporting and opinion, while also filing long literary essays on the works of eminent writers, such as Primo Levi, Chinua Achebe, Günter Grass, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Ascherson even spent a decade editing an archeology journal, which he founded.
The best of Ascherson’s writing manages to capture both large themes and sensory detail with passion and acuity. “A state can suddenly vanish, leaving familiar streets under new flags,” one of my favorite of his essays, about divided Germany, begins. Ascherson continues:
Ascherson’s own writing, in fact, contains a trace of Staatsduft—a certain whiff of an era when Europe had a very different place in the world. Adorno thought that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz; Ascherson is fond of saying that one should never refer to “European civilization” after Auschwitz. “The phrase has been taken to mean that high art has a connection to morality—that Beethoven instills benevolence, and Mozart and Mantegna spread mercy,” he explained, in 2002. “Something, it was believed, rubbed off. Exposure to art could melt hard hearts, or turn away the sword. And even though the history of Europe between 1939 and 1945 should have exploded this assumption forever, it persists.”
I asked Ascherson how he was thinking about the current rise of far-right politics in Europe, and whether liberals and leftists still believe that there is something uniquely admirable about the Continent. Ascherson is deeply worried about the success of right-wing European leaders such as Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni, but is unconvinced that they represent a fascist resurgence. “The real thing, obviously, requires ultranationalism,” he told me. “Well, we have that. But it also requires the prospect of fighting and war and pride in an army. Militarism is about zero. That hasn’t reëmerged.”
I noted that this was perhaps one difference between European far-right politics and the Trumpian variety. “Well, I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “Trump certainly sends U.S. armed forces around the world, but is there a mood of rising pride in your armed forces in the United States? It’s quite an essential part of fascism. It’s ‘our nation in arms,’ our boys doing these noble things, and ICE in Minneapolis is not really the same.”
Ascherson’s comments about today’s far-right movements put me in mind of an essay he wrote recently about Richard Evans’s historical sketches of various Nazis, from Hitler on down. “It’s almost impossible now to imagine how little nations knew about one another ninety years ago and how they filled that void with every kind of cartoonish stereotype,” he wrote. “Germany, knocked senseless by military, economic, and political disaster, was especially delusive.” But, he added, “it took genuine stupidity for Nazis of normal intelligence to believe—or choose to believe—in a world Jewish conspiracy.”
Ascherson chose a life, with its focus on seeing as much of the world as possible, that functioned as a reproach to that kind of ignorance. Then again, the peripatetic existence of foreign reporting requires its own type of delusion. “What does it do to you to go to some terrible situation and get to know a few people, maybe a family, maybe a little group of three or four friends,” he said. “You’re with them for a bit in that desperate situation—darting by, dodging things. And then, well, you’ve got your passport, you’ve got your return ticket, the editor needs you back, so off you go. And that kind of reporting—it’s got to damage you, to do that. But then, a fortnight later, can you quite remember their faces?”
“Do you think it damaged you?” I asked.
“I think it must have, yes.” he responded. “You certainly feel a sense of shame about a lot of individuals—fine, brave men and girls. And what happened to them? Sometimes there’s no way to find out at all. You don’t make contact again.”
About a decade ago, Ascherson admitted that, in Malaya, he had shot and killed two mortally wounded insurgents. “One lacked part of his skull, brains spilling on the earth. The other had half his rib-cage shot away, heart and a lung hanging out. Unconscious but still moving. Without waiting to reflect, I shot them both dead,” he wrote. “Looking back, I ask myself again: did I do the right thing? Yes, I did. What else could I do—leave them there in agony? So I did the right thing, but it was also the wrong thing.” He continued, “How could I have done anything else and lived with myself? But common-sense arguments don’t blot out death.”
Recently, I tracked down another short story Ascherson had written in his college days, also about a British soldier in Malaya. “He had always been told that killing was something difficult, only to be accomplished by an implacable determination to be wicked,” Ascherson wrote. “Now he had killed somebody and it had all been quite different. It had been so easy to aim and pull the trigger, and the targets had fallen over obediently.”
I asked Ascherson whether the experience of killing the two wounded men had perhaps set him on his career path—out of a sense of atonement, perhaps, or a need to understand the larger forces that had brought him halfway around the world to kill in the first place. He dismissed the idea. “For years, that didn’t raise deep questions with me,” he said. He resented, especially after the incident with Hobsbawm and the war medal, having been used by the British state to commit “imperial injustice” in Malaya. But the killings, he said, didn’t trouble him until he “grew much older and wiser. I was quite a cold-hearted young man, I guess.” This seemed to be contradicted by everyone I spoke to about Ascherson—the word “gentle” kept coming up—but his service in Malaya was more than seven decades in the past. As Ascherson himself wrote, in a moving account of the wartime French Resistance, “All that, the emotions as much as the events, seems a very long time ago now.”
After seeing Ascherson in London, I wrote to him, mentioning that so much of his work seemed imbued with a hope belied by his own experiences, and certainly by the daily news. “Underneath all the gullibility and the capacity to hate and kill, we are a cooperative species,” he replied. “Just too easily panicked by the unfamiliar.” He then told me to go see the new documentary “Everybody to Kenmure Street,” which focusses on a local uproar in Glasgow after Home Office immigration officers detained two Sikh immigrants in 2021. Or, as he put it, “Pious Muslims and tough Glaswegians allied to punch authority in the snoot.” ♦