Recent Commonplace Entries

January

“‘What kills political writing’, Lippmann wrote, was the ‘absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes on what you think.”’ (Andrew O’Hagan, in review of Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography by Tom Arnold-Forster, in LRB, December 25, 2025)

“If you read Lippman’s columns in the era of ‘duck and cover’, of threatened nuclear annihilation, you find a man suddenly opposed to any sort of ‘ideological crusade’, who saw Soviet expansionism as a feature of Russiannness, as opposed to communism, a matter on which he has been proved correct.” (Andrew O’Hagan, in review of Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography by Tom Arnold-Forster, in LRB, December 25, 2025)

“These missing records must have been carefully removed, not by Amin or his brutal henchmen but by ordinary people employed by the regime as photographers, report writers, and clerks. Together they cleansed the official record, leaving historians with only the written accounts of witnesses and reporters and the fading memories of survivors. This tells us something about historiography and how some archives, like some people, repress, consciously or not, the most painful events of the past.” (Helen Epstein, in NYRB, January 15)

“The secret of happiness, it has been said, is to develop habits whose repetition we find enjoyable and whose outcomes we find satisfying.” (Stefan Collini, in Rolling it out: V. S. Pritchett’s Writing Life, from Common Reading)

“One of the most precious freedoms of the British is freedom from culture.” (Lord Goodman, then Chairman of the Arts Council, in the 1960s, according to Stefan Collini, in From Deference to Diversity, from Common Reading)

“In a sense, I thought, the more you know about people, the less you can possibly blame them for their behaviour; and their being irreproachable implies a hostility in fate or circumstance, which becomes very frightening when applied to oneself.” (from Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Beautiful Visit, p 307)

“Capitalism is everywhere, and almost everyone hates it. The left, of course, has always been against it, as it produces extreme inequality of wealth and incomes. The right, too, has come round to thinking that it dissolves social relations and hierarchies.” (Harold James, in review of Sven Beckert’s Capitalism, in TLS, December 26, 2025)

“It is therefore unwise to jump to conclusions at first sight in Counter-Intelligence work. Nevertheless, the man with great experience can often make an immediate summing-up which may appear intuitive but which is in fact based on certain signs that appear to him at once although they would probably be missed by the untrained observer. Just as an architect can sum up a set of plans, or at least gain a definite impression of them, at a glance, or an editor assesses an article by skimming over it quickly, so also can a trained interrogator derive important information from his first glimpses of a suspect. It is unwise to follow hunches blindly, but all the same hunches often lead one to the demonstrable truths.” (from Chapter XXII of Lt. Col. Oreste Pinto’s Spycatcher Omnibus)

“But in England or the United States which have enjoyed enlightened democratic government for many years, a man only becomes a Communist for personal reasons. Being unable to advance himself in free competition with his fellow-workers, he may look to ‘Der Tag’ when the Revolution will reward the faithful with leading jobs under the new State. He may be a delayed adolescent who delights in the thrills of intrigue, secret passwords and the knowledge that he is a dangerous and marked individual. He may be a social misfit wreaking his vengeance on a society which (he thinks) casts him out. He may be a sincere, wholly-thinking crank who confuses the teaching of Christianity with the rigid tyranny of the Soviet state. Whichever category he may fall into, he is a menace to the well-being of the State and should be treated as such.” (from Chapter XXIX of Lt. Col. Oreste Pinto’s Spycatcher Omnibus)

“Europe has enormous assets, vital to the fate of the world. It has educated citizens, vibrant cultures and vigorously free societies. Most of its countries have large, skilled and valued sectors for making things and developing a workforce, enviable in many ways, including people who can operate at the cutting edge of technological innovation. But it is addicted to benefits and processes that, as in parts of the US, have tipped the balance away from constructive dynamism and a professional determination to get things done.” (Philip Zelikow, in review of David Marsh’s Can Europe Survive?, in TLS, January 9)

“At its worst the principle of self-determination is a license to intervention and aggression. In any event it is a council of despair. Despite its superficial ‘democracy’ the principle of self-determination is in an exact sense deeply un-American and uncivilizing. For it rejects the civilized ideal, which is the American ideal, that comes down to us from the Roman world and has persisted in the great tradition of he West. It is the ideal of a state within which diverse people find justice and liberty under equal laws, and become a commonwealth. Self-determination, which has nothing to do with self-government but has become confused with it, is barbarous and reactionary; by sanctioning secession it invites majorities and minorities to be intransigent and irreconcilable. It is stipulated in the principle of self-determination that they need not be compatriots because they will soon be aliens. There is no end to this atomization of human society. Within the minorities who have seceded there will tend to appear other minorities who in their turn wish to secede.” (Walter Lippman, in US War Aims, quoted by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in review of Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography by Tom Arnold-Foster, in TLS, January 9)

“And sometime, guilt and innocence became relative. When people were in unnecessary possession of troublesome facts, it wasn’t crucial to ascertain that they meant to do anything with the information. Possession, after all, was nine-tenths of the law: which made it mostly legal to ensure discretion was permanent. Many senior civil servants, the Old Buffer told Crane, anticipate a K at the end of their career; but if, hypothetically, a particular senior civil servant opened the wrong file at the wrong time to learn, say, that the American air bases then in Britain held weaponry of a type not formally disclosed to the people’s elected representatives, he might look forward, instead, to an accident on an icy stretch of road. It did not matter that his loyalty was never in question. What mattered was that the secrecy was preserved intact.” (From Nick Herron’s Down Cemetery Road, p 276)

“When Stalin pledged free elections at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 he meant to keep his word, more or less.” (Eduard Mark, in Spying Through a Glass Darkly, by David Alvarez and Eduard Mark, p 177)

“The causal relationship between intelligence and decision is often the most elusive element in intelligence history. Intelligence is only one of any number of factors – personal ambition, bureaucratic and partisan politics, previous experience with a government or national leader, decision-making style, race, education, status, religion, ethnicity, gender – that might influence  foreign policy maker, and it is very difficult to determine the relative influence of any one of these factors.” (from Spying Through a Glass Darkly, by David Alvarez and Eduard Mark, p 282)

“I have never been able to understand the tendency to regard philanderers as idlers. The miner, at the end of his shift, hands over his pick and shovel to his relief, and the harassed accountant can lock up an unfinished balance sheet in a drawer until Monday morning. But a woman can neither be locked up in a drawer, nor, as a general rule, handed over to a substitute. Although the mental, physical and nervous output is often far greater than in coal-mining or accountancy, respite is uncertain and fortuitous.” (from David Footman’s Pig and Pepper, Chapter 5)

“Good company is not intellectual company, nor, as we are apt to think in our extreme youth, company in which we ourselves sparkle. For good company, that sure comfort for our failures and disappointments, is the sinking of out own personal pettiness in an overwhelming consciousness of common humanity; quickened, if possible, by a common appreciation of gin.” (from David Footman’s Pig and Pepper, Chapter 38)

“Whatever his motives may be, the role of a spy is to betray trust. A man who has volunteered, or been tapped, to commit treason cannot logically ever be trusted again. Every aspect of a spy’s relationship with his case officer, or intelligence service, stems from that basic premise.” (from William Hood’s Mole, p 45)