Neal Ascherson > Quotes

“To be defeated, but not to give in, is victory.

- Jósef Piłsudski”
― Neal Ascherson, Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero

“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

“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

“By the middle twentieth century, few European nation-states had not at one time or another figured themselves as 'the outpost of Western Christian civilisation': France, imperial Germany, the Habsburg Reich, Poland with its self-image as przedmurze (bastion), even tsarist Russia. Each of these nation-state myths identified "barbarism" as the condition or ethic of their immediate eastward neighbour: for the French, the Germans were barbarous, for the Germans it was the Slavs, for the Poles the Russians, for the Russians the Mongol and Turkic peoples of Central Asia and eventually the Chinese.”
― Neal Ascherson, Black Sea

“The disjuncture from politics, on the other hand, springs from something which concerns all these poets: the shattered nature of Scottish consciousness, which isn't a low flat floor of peasant culture on which all stand together but a wild junk-yard of high culture fragments, English imports, oral traditions of 'the Scots commons' and proletarian 'socialist realism' from the thirties.”
― Neal Ascherson, Seven Poets: Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith, George Mackay Brown, Robert Garioch, Sorley MacLean, Edwin Morgan

“At the end of most streets of Edinburgh's Old Town rises the crimson wall of Salisbury Craigs, a lesson in the unimaginable forces and lapses of time which have gone to shape the world. The Craigs are a basalt intrusion, a fossil tide of volcanic rock which surged through the foundations of a dead volcano some 200 million years ago. Geology and paleontology, with their revelations of deep time and alien life-forms, towered up wherever 19th century Scots turned their eyes. the 'testimony of the rocks' threatened their moral universe, its narrative incompatible with a creation myth or even a creator... Old Edinburgh is shaped like a gigantic lecture theatre with the end wall covered by a chart of the earth's origins.”
― Neal Ascherson, Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland

“As soon as it occurred to our ancestors that government might be about happiness rather than obedience, it was seen that punishment under the law must be designed to achieve something good, rather than balance something evil.”
― Neal Ascherson

“I was tidying old papers when I came across a faded "1979" folder. Remember what a bad year that was for those who believed in a self-governing Scotland? In March, a referendum for a "Scottish Assembly", its terms skewed to ensure failure. Then a General Election which slaughtered the SNP down to a mere two MPs and brought Mrs. Thatcher to power. End of a dream?

Two things fell out of the folder. One was a giant paper rosette, all blood-red tartan and ribbons, inscribed "Have yourself a Dreich Decade!" The rosette came from irrepressible Murray Grigor, whose films and happenings still teach Scots to find self-confidence through self-mockery. Get a grip, he seemed to be saying, and you can turn these dreich 1980s into what they did in fact become - the most intense eruption of Scottish literature, drama, painting and history publication for a hundred years.

The other thing was a note from Tom Nairn. It began: "Dear Neal, the incorrigible optimist strikes again...”
― Neal Ascherson