Recent Commonplace Entries

June

“Bryce’s book offered a comprehensive analysis of American political institutions, including state legislatures and political parties, and was founded on much reading and many interviews with Americans (Stefan Collini once suggested that his ‘genius largely consisted in an infinite capacity for taking trains’).” (Jonathan Parry, in review of H. S. Jones’s Liberal Worlds: James Bryce and the Democratic Intellect, in LRB, June 4)

“Bede may have ascribed Scythian status to the Picts in line with the fashion for classicising ethnic origins (Trojan origins were particularly popular, variously ascribed to the Britons, Romans, Germans and later the Turks). But it is just about possible that a memory of migration from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe survived among some of the Celtic tribes known as Picts.” (from letter by Hassan Damluji in LRB, June 4)

“One must be a born master in the art of letters to convey successfully a correct idea of the horror that hangs over present day Russia, the horror that lurks beneath the battlements of the Kremlin and reigns within the walls of the O.G.P.U., where every stone, every brick, is sodden with blood and tears.” (from Chapter 1 of The Methods of the OGPU, by Vladimir Brunovsky, published in 1931)

“The brain is not hard-wired, as was once thought, and after acute brain injury it can reorganise neural circuits through remodelling of its hundred trillion synapses, the electrochemical connections between each neuron.” (A. J. Lees, in review of Orlando Swayne’s How to Use a Fork: Stories of Mending the Broken Brain, in Literary Review, June)

?? “We rejoice in a human victory and take sides during real human rivalry, feel for human singers when they pour their hearts out. The reasons for this are locked deep inside our evolutionary history as a species. Most anthropologists agree that music evolved as a kind of social adhesive, an adaptation which helped bind us together into groups as soon as our primate ancestors got too numerous for the kinds of physical grooming which keeps chimpanzees and gorillas together.” (Max Horder in Spectator World, June 22)