{"id":758602,"date":"2026-09-03T10:10:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T10:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/758602\/"},"modified":"2026-09-03T10:10:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T10:10:09","slug":"reporting-the-big-world-the-new-yorker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/758602\/","title":{"rendered":"Reporting the Big World | The New Yorker"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cpublic intellectual,\u201d but his surprisingly positive judgment on the conservative historian (and notorious Scot-hater) Hugh Trevor-Roper could equally be applied to himself: \u201cTrevor-Roper\u2019s 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.\u201d 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\u2019s first novel, \u201cThe Death of the Fronsac<\/a>,\u201d was published in 2017, when he was eighty-four.)<\/p>\n

Above all, Ascherson has sought, in his words, to be a \u201cjournalist who tried to report the big world.\u201d His achievement has been to write honestly and forcefully about the tragedies and grim realities of the twentieth century\u2014whether from the still ruined landscapes of East Germany or from Pinochet\u2019s post-coup Chile\u2014while never losing hope that different futures were possible, within Europe and beyond. \u201cHe\u2019s certainly somewhat more of a romantic nationalist than I am,\u201d Timothy Garton Ash, who got to know Ascherson in Poland in the early eighties, told me. \u201cBut in a way he\u2019s doing something rather wonderful, which is to go back to the spirit of 1848.\u201d 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 \u201cblinding moments of revolutionary ecstasy when impenetrable barriers turn out to be cardboard stage sets, when all humanity is revealed as brothers and sisters.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s writing about those inheritances offers insights into our own Trumpian, post-Brexit world of rising demagoguery and angry nationalism. \u201cHis work is full of the forces of technology, crises in democracy, totalitarianism, the bomb, existentialism,\u201d the writer Andrew O\u2019Hagan told me. \u201cAll of them are operating on Neal\u2019s intelligence. He seems almost like a figure out of Saul Bellow, a man who\u2019s in a kind of wonderfully responsive intellectual and emotional crisis at the center of twentieth-century pressures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ascherson\u2019s great subject has always been \u201cthe Continent,\u201d and the people who battled to forge its identity during his lifetime. \u201cEurope was a huge, dark place \u2018over there,\u2019\u00a0\u201d 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. \u201cThe 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 \u2018United Europe\u2019 free of Communists and nonwhite immigrants.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, during the war, \u201ca different light\u201d broke though, when the headmaster of his first school read out a poem that had made its way across the Channel: Paul \u00c9luard\u2019s \u201cLibert\u00e9.\u201d \u201cStunned, I dreamed of a Resistance Europe, its peoples united in heroic conspiracy against Nazi occupation,\u201d 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 \u201cResistance Europe\u201d\u2014a place where radical new societies could be born out of the strength of the people who banded together to fight fascism\u2014\u201csank under the floods of Stalinism and Cold War mobilisation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ascherson may not have known it, but he was establishing the pattern of his career, and indeed his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":758603,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[250472,59,57,58,50,56,54,3838,55,636,250473],"class_list":["post-758602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-essayists","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-united-kingdom-u-k","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-war","tag-war-correspondents"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=758602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758602\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/758603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=758602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=758602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=758602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}