Reporting the Big World

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.”