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. However, 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 percent 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 through, 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.