Recent Commonplace Entries

October

“This generational selfishness runs deeper than mere historical revisionism. Today’s activists and academics seem incapable of allowing historical figures to exist on their own terms. Everything must be filtered through the lens of contemporary grievance and struggle.” (John Mac Ghlionn, in review of Nicholas Boggs’s Baldwin: A Love Story, in The Spectator World, September 15)

“As historians have long recognized, what ‘actually happened’ in the past is no more significant than what different people at different times believe to have happened. Why do they evolve—or invent—new versions of the past, and how are these alternative narratives created and marketed to the public? Are historical witnesses to be believed simply because they were ‘there’?” (Neal Ascherson, in review of Chris Heath’s No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust, in NYRB, October 9)

“I think there’s also value in being confronted, over and over, with just how little is knowable. Every barren search felt like a useful rebuke…. The truth has holes in it, and the more we cover them up, the less real the world becomes.” (Chris Heath, in No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust, cited by Neal Ascherson in review in NYRB, October 9)

“Which means we can say this about Jimmy Kimmel: he made a technically true statement which employed pragmatic implication to advance a false proposition, while also falsely implying his opponents were uniquely prone to unevidenced assertions. Whether that is a suspension-worthy offence is debatable. But at least we have turned a combustible culture war flashpoint into something quite boring. And that, for philosophy, is a job well done.” (Regina Rini, in TLS, October 3)

“There they clashed over the principles of foreign policy. Thatcher had confidently declared that nuclear weapons were needed to defend ‘Western values’. Powell responded: ‘No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a communist government.’ After this startling riposte the two went at it. ‘Nonsense, Enoch. If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values.’ ‘No, prime minister, values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time. They can neither be fought for nor destroyed.’ Thatcher was reported to be ‘utterly baffled’ by this response.” (from David Runciman’s review of Tom McTague’s Between the Waves, in LRB, October 9)

“Never a communist, he felt emotional solidarity with the Soviet Union as an ally and was indignant if anybody criticised Soviet actions (‘Oh, the Poles!’). Sisman doesn’t ask the question, but it would be interesting to know if Briggs had anything to do with the other intelligence workers (often non-communists) who were so scandalised that Ultra data was withheld from the Red Army that they secretly supplied it themselves.” (Neal Ascherson, in review of Adam Sisman’s The Indefatigable Asa Briggs, in LRB, October 9)

“There are many intelligence officers and government officials, in all regimes, who prefer to keep their role and decisions secret, and thrive on secrecy in order to protect their careers and way of life. It guarantees their income, their status and their pensions. Secrecy is everything to them and far too often it is not for any motives of ‘national security’. In this desire to cover things up, they are too frequently encouraged – and joined – by their politic lamsters.” (John Hughes-Wilson, in Introduction to On Intelligence: The History of Espionage and the Secret World)

“Although in liberal democracies we tend not to literally shoot the messengers, bearers of unwelcome news can quickly become unpopular and find themselves sidelined and overlooked. The temptation is there for intelligence agencies therefore to pander to the preconception and whims of their masters. In their turn, decision makers all too often try and trim and even ignore intelligence that does not coincide with their priorities.” (John Hughes-Wilson, in On Intelligence: The History of Espionage and the Secret World, p 50)

“There is no doubt that many of the MI5 staff had the racist and supremacist attitudes that were common in Britain in the twentieth century.” (Paul Lashmar, in Spies, Spin, and the Fourth Estate, p 259)

“The British have developed a capacity for exceptionalism born of the supremacist nature of the Empire. We simply justify repressive actions against those whose actions we do not think are part of the normal by ‘othering’ them, whether they are ‘natives’, suffragettes, trade unionists, people of colour, lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT), Catholics, Jews or Muslims. These instincts sit uneasily next to the enlightened aspirations of British culture that include democracy, tolerance and aiding those in distress.” (Paul Lashmar, in Spies, Spin, and the Fourth Estate, p 266)

“In the wrong hands, GCHQ can make the Stasi in East Germany look like a surveillance cottage industry.” (Paul Lashmar, in Spies, Spin, and the Fourth Estate, p 268)

“Whether Europe’s news networks fostered such a sense of incipient transnational ‘community’ is open to doubt. As our contemporary experience of social media has demonstrated all too clearly, being connected to a shared international network does not necessarily conduce to a sense of membership of a community – often the reverse.” (John Adamson, in review of Joad Raymond Wren’s The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early Modern Europe, in Literary Review, October)

“After the war, having sent so many dissidents to the gallows, Reckzeh escaped to East Germany and resumed his career as a doctor. He died peacefully aged eight-two in 1996, but not before he betrayed his own daughter to the Stasi.” (Mark Cornwall, in review of Jonathan Freedland’s The Traitors Circle: The Rebels Against the Nazis and the Spy Who Betrayed Them, in Literary Review, October)

The United Species

“Now aged seventy and garlanded with countless awards and honours, he still fights for the growth of the web and its potential to unite our species.” (Bryan Appleyard, in review of Tim Berners-Lee’s This Is for Everyone, in Literary Review, October)

“‘Given a certain lapse of time,’ writes Graham Robb in this exhilarating chronicle of Britain, ‘all history is wrong, including the histories which correct the erroneous histories.’” (Nigel Andrew, in review of Graham Robb’s The Discovery of Britain: An Accidental History, in Literary Review, October)

“The Americans are a mercurial people, unduly swayed by sentiment and prejudice than by reason or even by consideration of their own long-term interests. Their Government is handicapped by an archaic constitution, sometimes to the point of impotence, and their policy is to an exceptional degree at the mercy both of electoral changes and of violent economic fluctuations, such as might bring about a neutralization of their influence in the world.” (from a Foreign Office paper of October 1946, cited by Julian Lewis in Changing Direction, p 285)

“Children detect nothing different in their own families: I can’t remember noticing anything extraordinary in our family being the only one I knew of that devoted every Sunday afternoon to amateur archaeology.” (Guy Davenport, in Finding, quoted by Wyatt Mason in NYRB, November 6)

“When Carter raised human rights issues in China, which in his Soviet-conditioned frame of mind was bound up with the right to emigrate, Deng offered to send 10 million Chinese to the US.” (from Edward Luce’s Zbig [Zbigniew Brzezinski], p 281)

“Brzezinski’s Darth Vader had morphed into Obi-Wan Kenobi.” (from Edward Luce’s Zbig [Zbigniew Brzezinski], p 430)

“What’s changed now is that migration has become a political instrument. It’s used to transform liberal societies into something different. Liberalism depends on trust, continuity, procedural respect. You can’t infinitely expand the circle and expect those conditions to persist.” (Nick Land, quoted in The Spectator World, October 27)