Neal Ascherson

Best history book I've read this year (and the last, as it happens). Brilliant range of references covering 3000 years and more of history. Umpteen people, peoples, and places I've never or scarcely heard of as well as some good ecoscience thrown in. E.g. the Abkhazians who I proudly thought i knew included the charming Beria, but no, he was a Mingrelian. We get deep insights into Polish nationalism (its founding poet father Minkiewicz was exiled to the Black Sea). Ovid gets a mention (knew show more he was there but he springs to life in this account). the Pontic Greeks i'd heard of but here we get their whole flourish and fade and how they nurse their traditions still. Golden Horde and Mongol, Cossack, Kazakh and Tatar ride across the pages and seem to be different names for more or less one thing.(Side shots touch on Scottish nationalism, the Gaelic revival, the invention of the knight at arms, perestroika, Near the end we learn of Harald Hardrade (know him from Stamford Bridge at the margins of English history but hey! he was a commander of mercenaries for the Byzantine emperor and rammed his way out through the chain over the Bosporus. Here and there his first hand travel experiences: meetings with sad librarians, unfunded scientists, selfless archaeologists, a museum of sycophantic tributes to Brezhnev, a disabled girl's death on a bus. The book appears structureless; not a travelogue, nor a chronology, with so much going on and most of it new to me it should have been confusing, but themes are interwoven, sometimes reappearing, sewn together with such weightless scholarshop and seamless style, I was sorry to finish it. show less

This is a thoughtful, complicated book, an amalgam of travel-writing, history, journalism, cultural studies, and all kinds of other stuff. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive history of the Black Sea region, Ascherson pursues a small set of topics that particularly interest him from the footprints they left in archaeology and classical literature right through to his own subjective experiences in Crimea, the northern Caucasus and and the Turkish Black Sea coast in the immediate show more aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We read about the complicated ecology of the sea itself and how that has been and is being studied, about the region as the most intensively-documented point of interaction between the settled urban culture of the Pontic Greeks ("civilisation") and the nomadic culture of the Scythians, Sarmatians and other "barbarian" steppe peoples. But also about how the "fanciful" stuff about Amazons in Herodotus has turned out not to be so fanciful at all ... now that archaeologists have finally bothered to ask themselves whether the warrior skeletons they found in ancient burial mounds were those of men or women. And about the wonderfully multi-culti Bosporan Kingdom, based at Panticapaeum (up the hill from modern Kerch), the real identity of the Tatars and Cossacks, and the peculiar 17th century Polish aristocratic fancy of "Sarmatian" descent. And fascinating stuff about Adam Mickiewicz in Odesa, Harold Hardrade in Micklegarth, and all sorts of other things...

If there's an underlying theme, it seems to be about how different cultures/ethnicities/languages/religions have often been able to cohabit successfully in the region for long periods, but only until their equilibrium is displaced by some set of events which allows one or more parties to believe that there's something to be gained by driving out their neighbours. More often than not, the process turns out to be horribly destructive to all parties (e.g. the Abkhazian war in the early 1990s), but somehow the knowledge of the likelihood of that kind of outcome never entirely stops humans from stirring up distrust and violence. show less

Another eminently readable work by this author, this time returning to his own homeland, Scotland, whose history, Ascherson says is like a ”huge, reeking tip of unsorted rubbish across which scavengers wander, pulling off interesting fragments which might fetch a price or come in handy”.

This is not a formal “history” of Scotland, no chronologic exploring of kings or themes, more an exploration of that mysterious “Scottishness” and the fierce pride and sense of place that finally show more led to the enactment of a British Home Rule law that created a Scottish Parliament so that “this proud country could rule its own affairs”. Ascherson does not venture too deeply into how much this ambition has been achieved or how it could be supported without the overall security and infrastructure of a parent – plus of course, like the creation of all of the new wave of “independent” countries from regional aspirations, just a little more taxes. Politically active always in the pursuit of Scotland’s “fredome” Ascherson credits two events for the final concession from Westminster – the Scots youth fascination with Mel Gibson's populist portrayal of William Wallace in “Braveheart” -” a hairy Hollywood distortion” and the death of Princess Diana. The crisis of the monarchy in England after this death led to a surprising resurging of ENGLISH nationalism. This, Ascherson argues, engendered a sympathy for Scotland’s (and Welsh) autonomy, causing a turn-over of the long, political denial that finally led to the granting of some measure of the equally long-held need for independence.

The voices of the stones the author hears are from rocks, mounts, monuments and walls of the Scottish landscapes, rocks, he says, that are as open to the Scots as the “throat of singing birds”. That land is so hard and scarred by man that “Scotland is like 'a poor woman with little flesh between her skin and bones' who carries the scars of many years' use.

Och aye, but she’s bonny still. show less

The crimes of King Leopold II of Belgium are many and horrendous. If Dante was alive and writing "The Divine Comedy" at the start of the last century, he will surely have found a place on one of the lower levels of hell for Leopold II.

Leopold II's crime was to make the Congo his personal domain, and enslave the locals to produce rubber and ivory for Leopold's private profit. The quotas placed on the locals and the punishments meted out to them for failing to reach the quotas are harrowing, show more and the fact he got away with doing this for so long is nothing short of astonishing.

Ascherson covers the history of the Congo, tied in as it was with the Scramble for Africa, the barbarity of life in the Congo and the international move to eventually condemn Leopold II to give up the world's largest personal estate. There are other books that cover this piece of history but I would start with "The King Incorporated" to get the best introduction. show less