Scottish journalist and author (1932- )
Well, if there is a spectrum between ethnic and civic forms of nationalism, which is a rather schematic way of looking at it, all nationalism contains elements of both, but Scotland is very far on the civic end of the spectrum. That is partly because nobody has ever been stupid enough to say that Scotland is an ethnicity in a genetic sense. A kingdom of Scotland existed long before anybody talked of a Scottish people. So that is one thing we have been spared.
NEAL ASCHERSON
interview, Scottish Review of Books
Vampires, incidentally, do exist, even if Vlad was not one of them. I well remember the Hamburg Vampire in the middle 1960s. He climbed into a flat and drank the blood of a young woman, who asserted that before he came through the window she had felt a deadly chill and become unable to move. The skeptical police took her off to the hospital, where the Vampire was actually caught halfway up the creepers on the wall, on his way to have one more for the road. He ended up in a mental clinic. The victim and the police officer in the case ended up telling their story in convincing detail on German television.
NEAL ASCHERSON
"Dracula in Britain", Games with Shadows
When Tony Benn became a minister in the 1960s -- and I think this must be apocryphal -- he had a huge map of Britain hung upside down in his office, so the channel was at the top and Scotland was at the bottom and, apparently, he said, "This is how we need to look at this country, with the money and the power draining by force of gravity out of the south east." That was a great idea. I rather liked him for that. I don't know if it's actually true or not.
NEAL ASCHERSON
interview, "Velvet and Stone", Bella Caledonia, Oct. 10, 2011
English stupidity is an organism so primitive that it is apparently impossible to kill off. It reminds me of Physarum Polycephalum, the gigantic slime mould recently bred by scientists at Bonn. Bright yellow and about two millimetres thick, this monocellular creature--neither plant nor animal--grew to a size of 10 square yards before the scientists took fright and froze it. It can smell its favourite food, and move towards it at a speed of up to two centimetres an hour. This favourite food is porridge.
NEAL ASCHERSON
"The Spreading Slime", Games with Shadows
On the Black Sea, my father saw it begin. And on the Black Sea, seventy years on, I saw the beginning of its end.
NEAL ASCHERSON
opening lines, Black Sea
Only yesterday, the intellectual enemy was held to be grubby products of the polytechnics, inhabiting the social work departments of provincial cities, typing out their hatred in grotty little houses crowded with snotty, neglected children, and in general constituting a threat to the "civilised heritage." But now the Right has adopted the envy-fantasies of the old Left. This is the language of -- say -- a Labour militant during the first Wilson government, imagining disloyal capitalists trotting to their clubs, swooshing about in Bentleys and drinking champagne without taking their top-hats off.
NEAL ASCHERSON
"The Spreading Slime", Games with Shadows
History--the product, not the raw material--is a bottle with a label. For many years now, the emphasis of historical discussion has been laid upon the label (its iconography, its target-group of customers) and upon the interesting problems of manufacturing bottle-glass. The contents, on the other hand, are tasted in a knowing, perfunctory way and then spat out again. Only amateurs swallow them.
NEAL ASCHERSON
Black Sea
For the past 15 years or so, British governments have tried to persuade the rest of us that the best judges of the national interest are ... businessmen. This may be a ridiculous statement, but--ominously--fewer and fewer people laugh at it.
NEAL ASCHERSON
attributed, Quotes about Economy and Economics
The very word "change" has changed. When I was young--and not just because I was young--we looked forward with confident impatience to change. Planned, controlled, beneficent change would continue to clear slums, sweep up the remains of empire, raise living and educational standards, tidy away--firmly but kindly--the last aboriginals who still raved about martial glory or the pride of wealth. Now, as it seems to me, change is set almost exclusively in the minor key, change seen overwhelmingly as loss.
NEAL ASCHERSON
"Chords of Identity in a Minor Key", Games with Shadows
I think England has been in the long-term damaged by Britishness.
NEAL ASCHERSON
"Is Britishness a generous thing, or has it damaged England?", Open Democracy, Jan. 17, 2012
I am always fascinated when people talk about "the forging of a nation." Most nations are forgeries, perpetrated in the last century or so.
NEAL ASCHERSON
Games with Shadows
To be defeated, but not to give in, is victory.
NEAL ASCHERSON
Wojtek the Bear
I went into journalism in a grandiose way. I thought maybe I'd do a little journalism whilst I write the great novel of all time you see -- one has to keep oneself afloat.
NEAL ASCHERSON
interview, Scottish Review of Books
All human populations are in some sense immigrants. All hostility between different cultures in one place has an aspect of the classic immigrant grudge against the next boatload approaching the shore. To defend one's home and fields and ancestral graves against invasion seems a right. But to claim unique possession -- to compound the fact of settlement with the aspect of a landscape into an abstract of eternal and immutable ownership -- is a joke.
NEAL ASCHERSON
Black Sea
It was a real revolution. But with one missing feature. That is the feeling in a people that "We have done it once, and if the new lot let us down, we can do it again!" It was that proud, menacing confidence which made the French revolution special. But it's not around in 21st-century Europe. After 1989, the people handed over liberty to the experts. Will they ever want it back?
NEAL ASCHERSON
"1989: how it ended", Open Democracy, Nov. 4, 2009
In Moscow, dim and green under the summer rain, columns of armour were waiting in the side-roads off the long avenue from Vnukovo airport. Tanks from the Taman Division stood beneath the dripping trees around Moscow University with their field kitchens and command trucks. This was not a new sight to me: the Soviet tanks had rested like that beneath the trees of the parks in Prague, late in another August twenty-three years before. Now they had invaded and crushed one more country -- their own.
NEAL ASCHERSON
Black Sea
The way that words mutate reminds me of fashions in music. The word--the note--is a constant. But the setting and chord in which it occurs alters with the mood of a nation from major to minor, from the assertive to the mournful and foreboding.
NEAL ASCHERSON
"Chords of Identity in a Minor Key", Games with Shadows
There are many kinds of revelation. But the most powerful is the vision which transcends the mental boundary between life and non-life, and Scotland is a place where this sort of revelation often approaches. Staring into a Scottish landscape, I have often asked myself why--in spite of all appearances--bracken, rocks, man and sea are at some level one.
NEAL ASCHERSON
Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland
But the people did get it. They had lost something -- not exactly their fear, but their patience. Suddenly it seemed unbearable to go on accepting these systems, these portly little idiots in their blue suits, for another year, and then for another day, another hour. That special sort of impatience is the power-surge of revolution.
NEAL ASCHERSON
"1989: how it ended", Open Democracy, Nov. 4, 2009
I'm always interested in debunking myths if they are untrue. But it's also important to identify myths and how they function, what value they may have.
NEAL ASCHERSON
interview, Scottish Review of Books