Profile:
Full name: Charles Neal Ascherson
Area of interest: History - nationality and nationhood: expert on Poland, Central and Eastern Europe, Scotland
Journals/Organisation: The Observer | The Guardian
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Website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/nealascherson
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Biography:
About:
Education: Eton College; King's College, Cambridge: History
Career: Lieutenant in the Royal Marines during National Service in 42 Commando, Malaya, 1950/52; worked in Kampala for the Uganda National Congress, 1956/7; joined the Manchester Guardian: reporter and leader writer, 1956/58; The Scotsman: Commonwealth correspondent, 1959/60; The Observer: reporter, 1960/63 - European correspondent, 1963/75 - Scottish politics correspondent, 1975/79 - foreign writer, 1979/85 - columnist, 1985/90; Independent on Sunday: columnist, associate editor 1990/98
Current position/role: Observer columnist / reviewer, contributing as a freelance
Other roles/Main role: Visiting Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 2008-
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Video: IMDb
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Awards/Honours: Journalist of the year, 1987; James Cameron award, 1989; David Watt memorial prize, 1991; Polish Order of Merit, 1992; George Orwell award, 1993; Saltire award for literature, 1995
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Other: Stood for election for the Scottish Liberal Democrat Party in West Renfrewshire, May 1999: came fourth of six candidates. Married to Isabel Hilton
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Books & Debate:
- The King Incorporated: Leopold the Second and the Congo, 1963 (Granta Books - new ed 2001) ISBN 1862072906; The Polish August - The Self-Limiting Revolution, 1981 (Viking); The Nazi Legacy. Klaus Barbie and the International Fascist Connection, 1984 (New York Holt, Rinehart and Winston); The Struggles for Poland, 1987 (Ramdom House) ISBN 0394559975; Games With Shadows, 1988 (Radius Press ISBN 009173018X; Black Sea, 1995 (Hill and Wang) ISBN 0809015935
Latest work: Stone Voices: The search for Scotland OCLC 149110727, 2002
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Articles:
- Let Scotland be a sovereign, mature nation and England benefits too - Scots have long wanted to run their own affairs, but don't want independence. Devo max gives them that chance - 15th January 2012
- The real-life spies of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - Neal Ascherson, the Observer's correspondent in eastern Europe in the 1960s, on the furtive world of the cold war spies - 11th September 2011
- If we aspire to put the world right, we must be sure of what is wrong - From Libya to the north-east coast of Japan, we fail to protect the vulnerable due to our short-sightedness - 20th March 2011
- WikiLeaks cables are dispatches from a beleaguered America in imperial retreat - Envoys provide devastating truths, but world can admire Washington's patient mission to avert nuclear apocalypse - 4th December 2011
- The saviour of Georgia? - Caught in a diplomatic trap, the country's best hope of escape could be a young opposition leader - 29th September 2009
- It's a sin, what we've done to this place - Exhibition review: The British Museum's show upturns the notion that Babylon was mankind at its worst - 16th November 2008
- A terror campaign of love and hate - On the eve of a new film about left-wing terrorist collective The Baader-Meinhof group, Neal Ascherson - who met key members of the group in Germany at the time - reflects on the legacy of those turbulent years - 28th September 2008
- Russia has called our bluff over countries we can't defend - If the West had learnt the lessons of the past, it would now be supporting even the smallest countries' dreams of freedom - 17th August 2008
- When hope faded in the streets of the East - Forty years ago, The Observer's Neal Ascherson reported on the brutal Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring, a time when hope briefly supplanted the tyranny of communism. Returning to the city, he finds that the remarkable events have left surprisingly little mark - 20th January 2008
- Prague revisited - Forty years on, Neal Ascherson returns to Prague and recalls the anguish of a nation as Soviet forces moved into Czechoslovakia - 20th January 2008
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