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)
February
“‘The great challenge facing the storyteller and the historian alike is to get inside people’s heads . . . to make some informed estimate of their motives and intentions,’ wrote Michael Frayn discussing Copenhagen, his play about the physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. ‘And this is precisely where recorded and recordable history cannot reach. Even when all the external evidence has been mastered, the only way into the protagonists’ heads is through the imagination.’” (Arthur I. Miller in the Spectator, January 24)
“This prompts reflections on the ‘unresolved trauma’ of slavery supposedly haunting the Black psyche – claims that sound, to my ear, a touch far-fetched. Much has been made of this ‘epigenetic trauma’ lately. I remain unconvinced. Most of us are descended from peasants and proles, whose lives were proverbially nasty, brutish and short. Practically every human on the planet, then, should be in line for counselling and back pay.” (Pratinav Anil, in review of Reparations, by Neil Biggar, and The Big Payback, by Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder, in TLS, January 23)
“Cheque-writing, then, is not atonement. It risks elite capture, corrodes solidarity, and offers the sedative of moral closure. The real task, as Sudhir Hazareesingh, Margot Finn and the better historians suggest, is reparative history: placing slavery in public memory without either self-congratulation or self-flagellation. That requires research grants, not reparations cheques.” (Pratinav Anil, in review of Reparations, by Neil Biggar, and The Big Payback, by Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder, in TLS, January 23)
“But to be clear: ‘networks’ in this sense are not real. Religious beliefs and practices are not packets of DNA or electrons. They do not propagate themselves. Every ‘node’ in these ‘networks’ is a human being, that is, the most irreducibly complex phenomenon in existence. Writing history of any kind – in fact, thinking about human beings at all – requires a heroic, insolent degree of oversimplification. Which is fine: as long as we remember that that is what we are doing and don’t get entranced by the metaphors with which we do it.” (Alec Ryrie, in review of David N. Hempton’s Christianity at the Crossroads: The Global Church from the Print Revolution to the Digital Era, in History Today, December 2025)
“Election interference, sabotage and sponsorship of anti-Communist guerrillas were the domain of the Office of Policy-Coordination, the ‘cowboys’ to the OSO’s [Office of Special Operations’] ‘librarians’.” (Christian Lorentzen, on James Angleton and the CIA, in review of True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen by Lance Richardson, in LRB, February 5)
“As for Harold Laski, who never supported him as Labour leader, Attlee later wrote that he was ‘a brilliant chap, but he talked too much . . . He wanted to be a public figure and an éminence grise at the same time. You can’t be both. I gave him a try as an éminence grise, but he started making speeches at the week-ends. I had to get rid of him.” (from Gill Bennett’s The Zinoviev Letter, p 157)
“Austerity was a moral, political, intellectual, and humanitarian failure, possibly the single worst and most socially destructive economic idea perpetrated on the world so far this century.” (Trevor Jackson, in NYRB, February 26)
“That opacity is another kind of accountability sink: you didn’t lose your job because we made a decision; you lost your job because of credit rigidities from short-term interest rate adjustments targeting the nonaccelerating inflation rate of employment.” (Trevor Jackson, in NYRB, February 26)
“When Stalin pledged free elections at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 he meant to keep his word, more or less.” (from Spying Through a Glass Darkly, by David Alvarez & 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, economic status, religion, ethnicity, gender – that might influence a foreign policy maker, and it is very difficult to determine the relevant influence of any of these factors.” .” (from Spying Through a Glass Darkly, by David Alvarez & Eduard Mark, pp 281-282)
“Sometimes revolutions deliver a second-best result: although Leninism never evolved into genuine socialism, it did industrialise a hitherto agrarian Russia.” (Richard Bourke, in review of Dan Edelsten’s The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin and Donald Sassoon’s Revolutions: A New History, in Literary Review, February)
“It is possible to conjecture, without a statistical survey, that the large majority of self-identifying Christians still perceive and feel comfortable with a traditional God – a humanoid with human emotions and ambitions, gender and personality – a man, perhaps a little like Harold Macmillan, sitting comfortably on a throne in a chamber of cumulonimbus somewhere above us.” (Peter Burden, in letter to Prospect, March)
“And yet a paradox runs through reactionary feminist thought: human nature is said to be fixed and unalterable, while also being perpetually threatened by progressive reformers bent on ‘de-sexing and disembodying us all’. If nature is truly immovable, one wonders why it requires such vigilant policing.” (James Bloodworth in Prospect, March)
“To be fair, by this point Drayson is wandering far from her area of Andalusian expertise, allowing her blithely to assure readers that Tatarstan’s ‘multiculturalism constitutes a workable social model’ for the rest of Europe! Such is the potential folly when the historical profession – medievalists included – become convinced its highest purpose is to intervene in politics.” (Nile Green, in review of Elizabeth Drayson’s Crucible of Light in TLS, February 20)
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 Taylor, 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)
April
“His mother, a Black American artist, was descended from plantation slaves, while his father, a white American paediatrician, came from a Jewish family that had fled Nazi Germany . . . Seeking to explore his Jewish identity and his father’s roots, [Alex] Karp went on to pursue a PhD in philosophy in Germany.” (Emily Jones, in review of Michael Steinberger’s The Philosopher in the Valley, in TLS, March 20)
“Historians concerned with measuring growth haven’t been generous in their recognition of women’s work (even today the UN refuses to include housework and care work in its calculations of GDP).” (Tom Johnson, in review of The Experience of Work in Early Modern England, by Jane Whittle, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb and Taylor Aucoin, in TLS, April 2)
“The book is tripartite. The first part begins in 1147, when a prince named Yuri built a fort on a hill above a river. (When the authorities unveiled a monument to Yuri in 1954, Morrison reveals, a Muscovite yelled: ‘Doesn’t look like him!’”) (Sara Wheeler, in review of Simon Morrison’s A Kingdom and a Village: A One-Thousand-Year History of Moscow, in the Spectator, March 21)
“There was something frankly wrong with Montgomery, something that only a heroically dedicated psychiatrist might ever have figured out, and it is fortunate that the Allied war effort was not hindered too greatly by whatever Freudian turmoil was taking place inside his head.” (from Alan Allport’s Advance Britannia, p 126)
“During a Labour Party debate on social security in May 1942, MP Fred Montague characterised such propositions as merely ‘obtaining dividends out of a capitalism which is moribund’.” Freudian turmoil was taking place inside his head.” (from Alan Allport’s Advance Britannia, p 149)
“The British are deeply invested in the idea of themselves as innocents. In the first volume of this history, I called it the Shire Folk myth – the idea that the British are fundamentally a gentle, ‘little’, Hobbit-like people, modest in their ambitions, full of good-humoured common sense, with a knack for amateur initiative (and a genius for ‘muddling through’), a stubborn resolve beneath their superficially mild an indolent character and, above all, a deep revulsion at violence.” (from Alan Allport’s Advance Britannia, p 179)
“History has been altogether more forgiving of Churchill’s appeasement of the Soviet dictator than of Chamberlain’s of the Nazi one. Whether that is fair or not the reader can judge, but it is perhaps worth noting that both British leaders committed much the same essential error by mistaking personal conviviality for sincerity of purpose.” (from Alan Allport’s Advance Britannia, p 397)
“Life is a brief, small and transitory phenomenon. Not at all the sort of thing one would make a fuss about if one were not personally concerned.” (Bertrand Russell, according to Alex Diggins, in the Spectator, April 4)
“Nothing is as difficult to solve than the problem of recruiting a double, especially if one has decided to prefer a patriotic man to a professional man.” (Colonel Brouillard)
The first is much better than the second, but ‘if people with high morals exist who have become doubles, it is nevertheless not a career to be recommended. It is a profession which, one way or another, always turns out badly. A job where, one way or another, nine men out of ten turn out badly. One has to be an angel in order not to dirty oneself. There are a few angels on earth. Very few are available for the special services.” (from Anne Laurens’ Betrayal at Arnhem, p 112)
“More than 50 years after the publication of Woman’s Estate, is the position of women better or worse? ‘It’s both. It was such a high moment at the end of the 1960s . . . and it was connected with the end of the concept of the end of capitalism. Now we don’t have that high, though many of us do have more choices, of course, and many of us don’t. And misogyny is still rife.’” (Juliet Mitchell speaking to Alona Ferber, from Prospect, April)
“It doesn’t matter if you dislike the use of ‘disinterested’ to mean bored rather than impartial, or whether you insist on ‘try to’ rather than ‘try and’ or deplore the prepositional phrase (used by Shakespeare among many others) ‘between you and I’. These usages are so common that they can’t be regarded as errors: they are part of the lexis and grammar of present-day Standard English.” (Oliver Kamm, in Prospect, April)
“It [the OED] doesn’t try to tell you – prescriptively – how to use the language. If you don’t like hopefully as a sentence-adverb (‘Hopefully, I’ll see you tomorrow’), then the OED will tell you that many writers avoid this usage, but ultimately, it will leave it up to you whether you choose to use it yourself.” (John Simpson, in The Word Detective, p xi)
“The lexicographer is the historical word detective trying to identify and explain these puzzles. If you don’t find the answer now, just set it aside and wait for more information to present itself later. But if you do latch on to a clue, then pursue it until the truth is revealed.” (John Simpson, in The Word Detective, p xii)
May
“Wheeler writes that the biographer ‘must at all costs (I believe) avoid the impulse to impose coherence’, by which she means, I think, that however analytical her approach might be, motives are difficult to know and her subject’s inner life can only be hinted at.” (Julian Evans, in review of Sara Wheeler’s Jan Morris, in TLS, April 17)
“I never saw one of his operas and I’m not sure he ever saw one of my plays.” (Alan Bennett on Jonathan Miller, quoted by Nat Segnit in review of Bennett’s Enough Said in TLS, April 17)
“A further difficulty is that Homo sapiens is the only survivor in the human lineage which split away from the chimpanzee six million years ago. As recently as 100,000 years ago we shared the world with several other kinds of human being – Neanderthals, Denisovans and the like – and before that even more. Could they speak with us? We don’t know, though the human genome shows that people like us were on familiar enough terms with some of the others to produce viable offspring with them. But we’re the only humans left, so have no one else to talk to and no one with whom to compare ourselves.” (Francis Gooding, in review of Steve Mithen’s The Language Puzzle: How We Talked Our Way Out of the Stone Age, in LRB, April 23)
“Finally, Gillingham writes the volume with a fine eye for darkly humorous ironies and paradoxes. History books rarely do this; big national histories, which often seem straitjacketed by a kind of portentous nationalism, even less so.” (Benjamin Smith, in review of Paul Gillingham’s Mexico, in TLS, May 10)
You forgot the sewage problem!
“Given the scale of the nation’s challenges – rising inflation, anaemic growth, flatlining productivity, millions economically inactive, energy prices higher than anywhere in the developed world, manufacturing in decline, hospitality cripples, the wealthy and enterprising departing, the numbers on welfare accumulating, the health service consumed by another costly internal re-organisation, higher education a Ponzi scheme, food security undermined, illegal immigration uncontrolled, extremism unchecked, ant-Semitic violence escalating, the army unable to recruit properly, the navy incapable of putting warships to sea, housebuilding stalling, the property market flatlining, taxes increasing and enterprise crushed, to list just a few – it might seem frivolous to focus on personnel processes within government.” (from editorial in the Spectator, April 25)
“The almost dreamlike movement of the story is at times closer to Ishiguro or even Kafka than your standard spy thriller. The trick is to give up trying to make too much sense of what’s going on and enjoy the ride – the sentences, the wisecracks, the atmosphere. If you’re looking for the satisfactions of a tightly sprung plot, you should watch the movie of Funeral in Berlin rather than reading the book . . .” (Thomas Jones on Len Deighton, in LRB, May 7)
“‘Treason and infidelity have too much in common,’ Samson observes at one point in London Match. This is certainly true from a narrative or dramatic perspective, and John le Carré also made use of the idea. But in le Carré, the mole will turn out to be the agent having an affair with the hero’s wife, while in Deighton, the hero’s wife will herself turn out to be the mole.” (Thomas Jones on Len Deighton, in LRB, May 7)
“Imaginative reconstruction is the whole point of what historians do – joining up the dots of evidence to create a plausible picture, to draw the patterns of the past and bring them into focus.” (George Garnett in History Today, February)
“Although Calvino left room for the notion of truth and ‘progress’ he was nevertheless convinced that ‘positive history’ was made not by class struggle per se, but by the accidental accretion of personal motivations. There are no great ‘causes’ here. Love, hatred, vengeance: ‘That, and that alone, is history’.” (Alexander Lee, in History Today, April)
“’Historians’, she warns us, ‘never trust any source uncritically.’ This chapter makes visible the work of interpretation, encouraging readers to ask critical questions of documentary evidence. Who wrote a document? Why? And for whom? Who kept it and for what reason?’” (Emma Snmith, in review of Susan Dwyer Amussen’s What’s in a Name? How Historians Know Shakespeare Was Shakespeare, in Literary Review, May)
“In moments of organizational chart ambiguity, try simply acting like you’re in charge anyway.” (Martin Vander Weyer citing Lloyd Blankfein in Streetwise, from the Spectator, May 9)
“To call his assertions a travesty is being too kind. One throws up one’s hands in despair when a university professor peddles such ignorant twaddle.” (Richard J. Evans on Jochen Hellbeck’s World Enemy No.1, in TLS, May 15)
“Perhaps the trouble is that, for Williams as a Christian, ethics and faith are inseparable. In Judaism, we separate them. For Jews, mizvot ben adam l’haveiro (ethics) matter more in leading a good life than mizvot ben adam laMakom (engagement with the divine). You can be a good Jew without being a devout Jew. Distilled from its thousands of years of displacement and exile, the ethics of Judaism have emphasized mutual toleration between different faiths, an appreciation of the sufferings and certainties that affect all human beings, but not shared spiritual illumination; the other remains Other. (I am speaking here of Jewish diasporic culture, not of Zionism, which has degraded into intolerance. Benjamin Netanyahu may be a good Israeli, but he is not, for many, a good Jew.)” (Richard Sennett, in review of Rowan Williams’ Solidarity, in TLS, May 15)
“Recent research has tended instead to approach the nation from this or that particular angle: gender and sexuality, colonialism, indigeneity, capitalism, incarceration, the environment, and, with renewed vigor, the long struggles over race and ethnicity.” (David W. Blight, in review of Edward L. Ayres’ American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860, and Richard Slotkin’s A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America in NYRB, June 11)
“Historians should be forever alert to distinguish between a genuine culture generating a genuine nationalism, and a trumped-up nationalism generating the pretense or illusion of a culture.” David M. Potter, in The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa, in American Historical Review, July 1962, quoted by David W. Blight in review of Edward L. Ayres’ American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860, and Richard Slotkin’s A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America, in NYRB, June 11)
“But as Walter Benjamin also said, it is not books that come alive by being collected, it is the collector.” (Geoffrey Roberts, in Stalin’s Library, p 96)
“As the eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm recalled in his memoirs:
What made Marxism so irresistible was its comprehensiveness. ‘Dialectical materialism’ provided, if not a ‘theory of everything’, then at least a ‘framework of everything’, linking inorganic and organic nature with human affairs, collective and individual, and providing a guide to the nature of all interactions in a world of constant flux. ” (Geoffrey Roberts, in Stalin’s Library, p 196)
“Although he performed the task of leader of the party and the people with consummate skill and enjoyed the unreserved support of the entire Soviet people, Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation. When interviewed by the German writer, Emil Ludwig, Stalin paid glowing tribute to Lenin’s genius in transforming Russia, but of himself he simply said: ‘As for myself, I am merely a pupil of Lenin and my aim is to be a worthy pupil of his.” (Stalin’s own insertion into his Short Biography, p 89, as recorded by Geoffrey Roberts, in Stalin’s Library, p 200)
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)
July
“It is the trick of the occultist to demand the consideration of weighed and hearsay evidence on equal terms – so that he may magnify the latter at will to overbalance the non-magnifiable former.” (H. P. Lovecraft, according to Christian Collier in letter to History Today, July)
“Pots are not people; identity, ethnicity, and belonging aren’t based in one’s blood or bones; and migration, mobility and population exchange are not synonymous with invasion, war, and conquest.” (James M. Harland, in History Today, July)
“He [James Bryce] would surely explain the current major conflicts in the world as the failure of the international community to restrain the governments of Russia, Israel and the US, as well as the consequence of the intellectual community retreating into careerism, introspection and managerialism, leaving public opinion in the hands of unscrupulous media barons.” (Ian Cawood, in review of H.S. Jones’s Liberal Worlds, in TLS, June 12)
“In those days our personal appearance had to conform strictly to the King’s Regulations for the Dress of the Army. One of these laid down: ‘The hair on the upper lip will not be shaved. Whiskers, if worn, will be of moderate length’. The whiskers of the Crimean era had long since disappeared, but the wearing of a moustache was de rigueur. In spite of this regulation one subaltern, named Osmaston, in my Field Artillery Brigade insisted on shaving his upper lip, and was summoned to the Adjutant’s office to answer for this offence. Osmaston explained that his moustache would only grow in patches, which made him look ridiculous. After three weeks he appeared with a moustache growing in tufts and was eventually given permission by the Colonel to shave completely, ‘owing to deformity’.” (from James Marshal-Cornwall’s Wars and Rumours of Wars, p 7)
“On 15 July [1938] my wife and I, on returning from a few days’ holiday in Cyprus, heard the sad news of the death of our 14-year-old elder daughter, Peggy, who had died after an operation for appendicitis at her school in Switzerland. On 28 July we left Cairo for two months’ home leave, the first I had taken since I came out with the Mission. We spent most of the time at Logie House, Perthshire, and enjoyed some good shooting, and much hospitality from old friends.” (from James Marshal-Cornwall’s Wars and Rumours of Wars, p 116)
“It is a difficult terrain for any historian: a realm of coyness and dissimulation, of ciphers and aliases, and of decidedly unreliable memoirs.” (Colin Kidd, in review of books on Jacobitism, in LRB, July 9)
“One of the enduring pleasures of espionage fiction lies in its resistance to certainty: readers are invited to occupy the same predicament as the protagonist, never entirely sure who’s trustworthy, whose motives are genuine, or whether apparent allies are in fact adversaries. The very best thrillers exploit this uncertainty not merely for the purposes of suspense, but for insights into the fragility of political and personal trust.” (Ian Sansom, in review of The Interpreter’s Secret by Andrew Rosenheim, in Spectator, July 4)
“It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the competing national histories written in this part of the world [mainly the Baltics] so rarely speak to one another, and have lost sight of a whole catalogue of non-Christian tribes and peoples: the Hevelli, Litici, Obotrites, Rani, Veleti, Galindians, Curonians, Samogitians, Selonians, Semigallians, Latgalians, Yotvingians, Samborides, Natangians, Warmians and many others. These were annihilated or gradually Germanized or Polonized, then absorbed into larger populations.” (Sebastian Sobecki, in review of Alexander Pluskowki’s The Black Cross, in TLS, July 10)
“While Jewish nationalism and Zionism have instrumentalized the myth of a Jewish nation that did not mix with the populations around them, the fates of many of these slaves tell another story. Women coming from the Caucasus, India, Europe and especially Nubia were sold as slaves to Egyptian Jews. Some of them obtained their freedom, converted to Judaism, married, and gave birth as Jewish mothers to Jewish children. Myths of ethnic purity, here as always, do not stand up to the scrutiny of historians.” (John Tolan, in review of Craig Perry’s Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt, in TLS, July 10)
‘At a few points, however, critical distance blends into outright rejection, as when, in a revealing aside, Whitmarsh brands the virgin birth ‘fictitious’.” (Levi Roach, in review of Tim Whitmarsh’s Rome’s Age of Revolution: Augustine, Empire and the Making of Christianity, in Literary Review, July)
“First came sacrifice, the assumption that it was completely acceptable to destroy millions of people and to reduce the living conditions of millions of others for the sake of the communist future.” (Mark B. Smith in Exit Stalin, p 103)
“The capitalist powers put Bolshevik Russia in disgrace for suing for peace with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk, breaking the terms of international debt agreements, and above all for breaking the laws of property and the hierarchies of class, and creating the world’s first socialist society.” (Mark B. Smith in Exit Stalin, p 114)
“But dramatic social mobility was central to Soviet civilization from the start, so this seemed a paradigm shift in the Brezhnev era.” (Mark B. Smith in Exit Stalin, p 170)