13 Quotes by Neal Ascherson

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.

Broadly speaking, most people lived their lives in a kind of unwilling conformity. The thing was that they were offered, as time went by, various kinds of freedom, most of which were sort of dummy freedoms somehow.

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.

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.