13 Quotes by Neal Ascherson

To be defeated, but not to give in, is victory.- Jósef Piłsudski

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.

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.

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.

On the Black Sea, my father saw it begin. And on the Black Sea, seventy years on, I saw the beginning of its end.

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.

Who invented political tolerance? The English invented it, it’s something which has taken roots with some difficulty in Scottish politics.

I think England has been in the long-term damaged by Britishness.

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