Charles Neal Ascherson (born 5 October 1932) is a
Scottish journalist and writer. He has been described by
Radio Prague as "one of Britain's leading experts on central and eastern Europe".[1] Ascherson is the author of several books on the history of Poland and Ukraine. His work has appeared in The Guardian and The New York Review of Books.
Background
Ascherson was born in
Edinburgh on 5 October 1932,[2] son of a Naval officer of Jewish ancestry and a mother from a London family of
Scottish descent; his elder half-sister (by his father's first marriage) was the artist
Pamela Ascherson.[3] He was awarded a scholarship to
Eton.[4] Before going to university, he did his
National Service as an officer in the
Royal Marines, serving from July 1951[5] to September 1952,[6] and seeing combat in
Malaya.[4] He then attended
King's College, Cambridge, where he read
history.[4] The
Marxist historian
Eric Hobsbawm was his supervisor at Cambridge and described Ascherson as "perhaps the most brilliant student I ever had. I didn't really teach him much, I just let him get on with it."[2]
Ascherson has occasionally been actively involved in politics. In 1976, while working as the Scottish political correspondent for The Scotsman, he joined the newly-founded
Scottish Labour Party (SLP), a breakaway faction which was led out of the UK
Labour Party by the MP
Jim Sillars following disagreements over the party's policy on
Scottish devolution. Ascherson, like Sillars an enthusiastic supporter of maximalist 'Home Rule', provided much favourable coverage of the new party, but the SLP was riven by internal dissension and was wound up after the
1979 general election.[7][8] Twenty years later, in the
first election for the
Scottish Parliament, he stood as the
Liberal Democrat candidate in the
West Renfrewshire constituency but was not successful.[9] Ascherson supported the "Yes" (pro-independence) campaign in the
2014 Scottish independence referendum.[10]
Neal Ascherson's first wife was journalist
Corinna Adam; the couple first met at Cambridge University and married in 1958. They had two daughters together before separating in 1974. The couple divorced in 1982.[16] Corinna Ascherson, also a journalist, died in March 2012.[16][17]
In 1984, he married his second wife, journalist
Isabel Hilton.[2] The couple currently live in London and have two children.
Ascherson, Neal (2017). Death of the Fronsac: A Novel.
ISBN978-1786694379.
"A Mess of Tiny Principalities" (review of
Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019, 504 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVI, no. 20 (19 December 2019), pp. 66–68.
^Jackson, Ben, The Case for Scottish Independence: A History of Nationalist Political Thought in Modern Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 101.
^Drucker, H. M., Breakaway: The Scottish Labour Party (Edinburgh: EUSPB, 1978), pp. 104, 108.