Recent Commonplace Entries

March

“Many British and American officers in the Balkans were simply incapable of objective analysis. Their crude, classicist-orientalist educations left them with a skewed worldview that infantilized the people they were supposed to be providing intelligence on. Strangely, much better intelligence was coming from a handful of Australians who possessed a fraction of the formal education, but none of the bias.” (from Edmund Goldrick’s Anzac Guerrillas, p 269)

“However, chronological continuity is essential, and it is up to professional historians to ensure that it is established and preserved. Missing historical narratives simply have to be constructed by someone – the black holes in our collective past simply have to be filled. Yet in this age of ‘trending’ topics and instant gratification, such historiographical housekeeping is likely to be neglected unless undertaken by such emeriti as the present writer, with their careers behind them and with time on their hands, and also with a fervent desire to see history not just nurtured and written, but well written, well published, and professionally curated.”  (Dr Adrian O’Sullivan, in Joe Spencer’s Ratcatchers: British Security Intelligence in Occupied Persia)

“Verification is required of the researcher on a multitude of points – from getting an author’s first name correct to proving that a document is both genuine and authentic. *

* The two adjectives may seem synonymous but they are not: that is genuine which is not forged, and that is authentic which truthfully reports on its ostensible subject. Thus an art critic might write an account of an exhibition he had never visited; his manuscript would be genuine but not authentic. Conversely, an authentic report of an event by X might be copied by a forger and passed off as the original. It would then be authentic but not genuine.” (from Chapter 5 of The Modern Researcher by Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff)

“During more than a hundred years . . . every [English] man has felt entire confidence that the state would protect him in the possession of what had been earned by his diligence and hoarded by his self-denial. Under the benignant influence of peace and liberty, science has flourished and has been applied to practical purposes on a scale never before known. The consequence is that a change to which the history of the old world furnishes no parallel has taken place in our country.” (Lord Macaulay in History of England from the Accession of James Second, 1:261, quoted by Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff in The Modern Researcher, p 189)

“In October last year​ 2.17 million people, 507,000 of them children, were in contact with mental health services in England. In 2023-24, 958,000 children, 8 per cent of the twelve million children in England, had an active referral to the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Services. In 2013-14 this figure was 157,000. Some see in this huge increase evidence of welcome attention being paid to previously disregarded problems, or they believe it demonstrates the destabilising effects of late capitalism or the irresponsible actions of social media companies. Others argue that it is an effect of attitudinal shifts or policy changes that prompt people to push for diagnoses they don’t need.” (Paul Tayor, in review of Suzanne O’Sullivan’s The Age of Diagnosis, in LRB, March 5)

“No history, however bent on emphasizing collective decisions, can manage to get rid of the disturbing presence of individuals: they are simply there.” (Arnaldo Momigliano, according to Benjamin Nathans in TLS, March 6)

“Kings and generals do not trip over pebbles. But when they do, history is inclined to imagine a treacherous hand placing that pebble in their path.” (from The Battle of Arnhem, by Cornelis Bauer, p 81)

“If you want to hurt a reporter, ignore him. If you really want to hurt him, indicate that you’re unaware of his work.” (Lloyd Blankfein, from Streetwise: Getting To And Through Goldman Sacks, cited by Lionel Barber in his review in the Spectator, March 14)

“In every calm and reasonable person there is a hidden second person scared witless about death.” (Philip Roth, according to Simon Ings, in the Spectator, March 14)

“It [1776] also saw one of the whiniest publications in history, a tedious sob story called the Declaration of Independence, in which a collection of colonial real-estate speculators, no longer at risk from the Spanish or French, confected a litany of spurious grievances they claimed to have suffered at the hands of the British Crown largely to advance their own narrow financial ambitions.” (Rory Sutherland, in the Spectator, March 14)

“‘Microchimerism’ is an umbrella term now used for low-level genetic diversity within an organism owing to DNA from others. (Genetic diversity due to mutation in an organism’s own DNA is ‘mosaicism’.)” (Gregory Radick, in review of Lise Barnéoud’s Living Cells, in TLS, March 20)