Recent Commonplace Entries

December

“And like other major social institutions, marriage is not some arbitrary cultural construct like a bank holiday. Rather, it rests on genetically shaped behaviours that evolution has written into the human genome because of their survival value. Suppress or subvert these behaviours and you risk consequences.” (Nichoals Wade, in Spectator, November 29)

“Despite his, successive Great Awakenings, between the early 18^th and later 20^th centuries, prove that good puritan genes have been passed down through generations of American culture, manifesting in a fondness for unabashed public piety and the invocation of divine providence.” (Malcolm Gaskill, in review of A Common Grave: Being Catholic in English America, in LRB, December 4)

“The book also emphasised that the true task of the historian is to distinguish the dynamic from the static, the aberration from the trend. It is impossible to convey the excitement of that approach back in 1964.” (Geoffrey Parker on Braudel’s The Mediterranean, in History Today, November)

“In 1974 Tom Handy described to a SOOHP [Senior Officers Oral History Program] interviewer a conversation he had heard between Dykes and Bedell Smith over the draft minutes of one Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting:

Bedell Smith: ‘This sounds just fine; in fact it’s wonderful. There isn’t but one thing wrong with it.’

Dykes: ‘What’s that?”

Bedell Smith: ‘Hell, this isn’t what he said!’

Dykes: ‘I know damn well it isn’t, but it’s what he should have said. You see, these soldiers won’t object if somebody writes down what he should have said.’” (from Andrew Roberts’s Masters and Commanders, p 95)

“Old men forget, but old statesmen forget selectively.” (from Andrew Roberts’s Masters and Commanders, p 240)

“The Foreign Secretary [Eden] said that Roosevelt had asked him whether ‘he thought that Russia would want to “Communise” Europe after the war’, and he replied that ‘he did not think so, and that he thought one of the best way of avoiding this was that we should do what we could to keep on good terms with Russia’.” (from Andrew Roberts’s Masters and Commanders, p 356)

“Lenin’s solution [to the problem of ‘housework being the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do’] was not a more equitable allocation of domestic duties, but the state provision of nurseries, canteens and laundries that would liberate women from ‘that petty, stultifying, unproductive work’”. (Wendy Slater, in review of Julia Ioffe’s Motherland, in TLS, December 12)

“Pope was a satirist to his toenails, and a satirist must believe that whatever is is wrong.” (John Carey, in The Unexpected Professor, p 116)

“’Tell me, Anthony, about Roger Makins. You like him? Is he good?’

Eden: ‘Yes, I think he is very able. But the Prof. [Frederick Lindemann, Viscount Cherwell] here knows all about him.’

Prof.: ‘He passed into the F.O. at the top of the list after a brilliant first at Oxford. He is a Fellow of All Souls.’

Eden (smiling): ‘And he’s sensible in spite of that.” (from Lord Moran’s Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1945-1960, p 80, on December 30, 1951)

“A man in his eightieth year does not want to do things.” (Winston Churchill, from Lord Moran’s Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1945-1960, p 238, onDecember 30, 1953)

“And yet in this war no one, I suppose, thinks of a general as a military genius dictating the course of events by his craft. It is what Marshall was, and not what he did, that lingers in the mind – his goodness seemed to put ambition out of countenance.” (from Lord Moran’s Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1945-1960, p 283, on June 25, 1954)

“If Hitler had no blue print for conquest . . . then to follow Taylor’s reasoning, how much weight should we attach to Khrushchev’s claim that he will bury capitalism? If Hitler was only acting under the pressure of events to secure for Germany only what was right and just, may not Khrushchev be taken as merely a Russian version of the Geran model?” (Louis Morton, in World Politics, XIV, 392, quoted by C. Robert Cole in Critics of the Taylor View of History, from The Origins of the Second World War, edited by Esmonde M. Robertson)