Category Archives: Personal

My March reading was dominated by four books concerning the decade that interests me the most – the 1930s. First was Edmund Wilson’s To The Finland Station. This item had been on my prescribed reading-list when I went up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1965, set by my Russian don (a priest at Merton). I never read it, and the Fontana paperback has travelled with me ever since. If I had read it then, it might have helped with my analysis of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, and Dostoyevsky’s Devils, but it was hardly essential. Wilson gives a leisurely and insightful account of the development of socialist thought – written before Trotsky’s assassination in 1940 – and it seems that it would be difficult for anyone to be taken in by Marx’s nonsense on reading this work. But many were – including, for a while, such future vigorous opponents as Hugh Trevor-Roper, and, apparently, Pope Benedict XVI, who indicated recently that Marx’s economics indeed had validity at one time. Next was Deadly Illusions, the uncovering of the deceptions and crimes of the KGB spyhandler Alexander Orlov, by John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, using the archival sources of the KGB from the 1990s. Orlov, wakening to Stalin’s terror, never deserted his Bolshevist beliefs, and artfully deceived the CIA and FBI after escaping to the West in 1938, and, officially defecting some 14 years later. This is an extraordinary book, and its references to the unnamed members of the Oxford Ring that rivaled Orlov’s famous Cambridge Ring have recently been updated by identifications in the British press. Lord Halifax’s memoirs, Fullness of Days, showed the dying culture of the aristocrat/politician who tried to come to grips with Hitler and Mussolini, and whose view of the good life revolved round the Church and the racing calendar. It was exactly that type of life that J. B. Priestley railed against, as was shown in his second volume of memoirs, Rain at Godshill. I recall my father having a copy of J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment With Time, that so absorbed Priestley. I could make no headway with it, barely in my teens, but I do recall listening to, and being mesmerized by, Priestley’s An Inspector Calls on the radio in the late 1950s. Priestley was the eternal searcher, full of paradoxes and contradictions, with an inquisitive mind and a limpid writing-style that reflected his earnest thoughts. With an evident chip on his shoulder, and rather vaguely identifying the malaise of the 1930s, he never really found the Truth he was looking for, but these memoirs, full of common-sense and accurate observation, summarize the generic puzzlement and confusion that seemed to rule the average intellectual in the 1930s. A rich assortment of quotations from these works appears in my 2012 Commonplace Book. (Extracts from Priestley’s first volume of memoirs, Midnight on the Desert, appear in my 2004 Commonplace Book, under December.)                                    (March 31, 2012)

In a New York Times article this month about Ron Paul, the libertarian candidate in the Republican presidential primaries, the following statement appeared: “It was ‘The Road to Serfdom’ by Friedrich Hayek that became the ur-text of Mr. Paul’s emerging ideology, introducing him to Austrian economics and its Manichaean choice between laissez-faire capitalism and a government-run economy destined for disaster. (Mainstream economists have long dismissed the Austrian school, but it retains a devoted following among libertarians and some conservatives.)” This provoked my thinking about what ‘mainstream economics’ was. To begin with, Hayek did not write in Manichaean terms. He saw a significant role for central government, and was far from believing that there was a simple choice between the Good of private enterprise and the Evil of statist control of economic resources. On the other hand, the Times’s notion of ‘mainstream’ anything is notoriously left of center, and I imagined that the reporter was probably taking his cue from the newspaper’s eccentric but highly self-regarding columnist, Paul Krugman. Krugman, who expresses a constant nostalgia for Roosevelt and the New Deal, regularly promotes and classifies as ‘Keynesian’ the very unKeynesian notion of adding to a deficit of $16 billion in order to defy ‘austerity’ and encourage consumer spending. Moreover, the Times’Public Editor, Arthur S. Brisbane, has had to respond to critics of the paper who (rightly) accused it of not giving enough attention to Ron Paul in its coverage of the Republican candidates. Richard Stevenson, the Times’ political editor, rather sniffily told Mr. Brisbane in December: “Not all candidates are created equal. We do not feel compelled to treat every candidate with the same intensity or seriousness as we do others.”  Ron Paul is clearly not ‘mainstream’ enough in the Times’s eyes: it has essentially prejudged the candidates on behalf of its readers.

But there is another culprit – Wikipedia. Its entry for ‘the Austrian School’ states: “The Austrian School’s views are outside of mainstream economics, and mainstream economists are generally critical of their methodology”. In the entry for Mainstream Economics, the author explains that “Mainstream economics is a loose term used to refer to widely-accepted economics as taught in prominent universities”, and that “the term came into common use in the late 20th century. It appears in the seminal textbook Economics of 1948, by Samuelson and Nordhaus.” Furthermore, “present-day mainstream economics stems from the neoclassical synthesis, which was the post–World War II merger of Keynesian macroeconomics and neoclassical microeconomics”. Mainstream economics is thus the comfortable theory of current dominant and influential economists, no matter how questionable their opinions might be. Anyone who ventures to question their orthodoxies should be wary.

Well might the Austrian school challenge these ‘truths’. These are the truths of the liberal consensus – belief in large, activist government and an expensive welfare state, a suspicion of markets and the individual decisions that drive them, too vigorous a reliance on mathematical models  that have no relevance in a global economy, and a blind trust in the availability of wealth to fund their programs that would make Ayn Rand cringe. All in all this is the socialism of the 21^st century that self-confidently and smugly points out that ‘capitalism doesn’t work’. But capitalism is not really an ism:  it has no ideology, is not a ‘system’. Certainly it is not a system of government – a categorization mistake made continually by professional historians who ought to know better, when they compare the Western democracies to totalitarian states. And it is of course essentially unstable, subject to creative destruction. It fails to ‘work’ only in the sense that those who practise it cannot predictably provide enough wealth (or employment) to satisfy the hungers of their respective governments. Today’s crises of national budget deficits in the Western democracies are characterized by bloated government bureaucracies (including such phenomena as ‘government jobs for life’ in Greece, and inflation-proof pensions); out-of-control entitlements, with career politicians handing out other people’s money to those who placed them in power, or as aid out of some earnest moral conviction; attempts to stabilize ‘systems’ that are essentially disorderly, accompanied by misguided regulation and inappropriate interference in markets, all frequently abetted by ‘crony’ relationships between public and private sectors. In Europe, of course, such phenomena are intensified by quixotic strivings for economic union without political integration. But wealth is not something waiting to be re-distributed: it has to be re-created every year, every week, and every day. And the main creators of the wealth that these countries want to distribute or consume are now to be found overseas. When the history of the crisis of the early part of this century comes to be written it will not be of the failure of capitalism and the Austrian school, but of leftist welfarism, romantic aspirations for European unity, and ‘mainstream’ economic thinking.                                                                                                                                                                                                   (February 29, 2012)

The phrase ‘in our DNA’ has replaced ‘community’ as my Number One linguistic bugbear. A few years ago, people might have said that something was ‘in their blood’, as a weak metaphor for a) a somewhat dubious show of behaviour that they were unable or reluctant to eliminate (such as cock-fighting or fox-hunting), or b) a practice in which they took some tribal and differentiable pride in (such as folk-dancing or idol-worship). And sometimes these emotions of self-esteem and sheepishness merged. Of course, a devotion to such practices is not inherited: it is a purely cultural phenomenon. After the Double Helix was decoded, however, the phrase ‘in our blood’ was gradually replaced by ‘in our DNA’, giving such claims an utterly spurious but more impressive-sounding scientific cachet. For example, Silicon Valley firms boast about certain principles or commitments of their business model that are ‘in their DNA’, as if they were something that will inevitably endure.

But such claims are nonsense. DNA may pass on biological tendencies – such as a susceptibility to certain diseases, or a general aptitude for athletic activity, but anyone who was transplanted from one country to another at an early age will confirm how hollow the pretense is that cultural traits are passed on genetically. The day on which I started to write this piece, an article appeared in the New York Times about an adopted child who did not discover that she had been adopted until she was an adult in her 40s.  She had “always believed that she had inherited her looks and mannerisms from her father, and that her appreciation for tradition and old-fashioned gentility stemmed from her parents’ Southern roots” – until the secret came out. In the January 2012 edition of the magazine Prospect, the biographer of Margaret Thatcher rolled out the following mumbo-jumbo: “Like her or loathe her, Margaret Thatcher is in the DNA of everyone in Britain over the age of 35.” What neo-Lamarckian claptrap! Margaret Thatcher may have got under many peoples’ skins, but there is no way that she entered their DNA. Abuse of the term just weakens any argument.

As for my January reading, it turned out that Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live or A Life of Montaigne, which I read at the end of last year, was an excellent hors-d’oeuvre to The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt (the Shakespearean scholar who wrote the excellent Will of the World), which puts the re-discovery of an original copy of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things by an obscure medieval papal officer in a rich historical context. Also stimulating was Adam Sisman’s biography of that flawed genius, scourge of mysticism, and crispest of debunkers of Marxist historians, Hugh Trevor-Roper, which for some reason was retitled An Honourable Englishman in the US.  In his essay “Macaulay and the Glorious Revolution”, Trevor-Roper wrote: “The crown of  a man’s career is his biography”. This work does great justice to such an aphorism. Please see a new Commonplace folder started for 2012.                                                                                                                                                                                        (January 31, 2012)

We spent the whole of December away. After two weeks in Maui, we stayed two more in Santa Clara, CA, with our son and daughter-in-law, and their two-month old daughter, Ashley. So just some Commonplace entries added to close out the year. Happy New Year to all my readers!                                                       (December 31, 2011)

The first letter of mine that the New York Times accepted for publication was in November 2000. Both amused and irritated by the coverage of the network TV stations of the presidential election, and their premature calling of the result, I suggested that United Nations observers should be sent in next time. (See:http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/09/opinion/l-for-a-divided-america-a-momentous-night-the-fateful-retraction-112135.html?scp=9&sq=tony%20percy&st=cse. )  Since then, I have written dozens of letters. A couple have appeared in the Science Section (for example, see  http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/04/science/l-randomness-and-evolution-613045.html?scp=7&sq=tony%20percy&st=cse,  and I have recently discovered that a couple were also posted on the NYT website (see:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/opinion/lweb16brooks.html?scp=11&sq=tony%20percy&st=cse     and  http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/mailbag-debating-british-anti-semitism/?scp=13&sq=tony%20percy&st=cse.                                                                                                                                                                                                   This month, I was successful again, joining in the debate on the Healthcare legislation, and the coming review of its constitutionality by the Supreme Court: (see:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/sunday-dialogue-judging-the-health-law.html?scp=1&sq=judging%20health%20law&st=cse . My letter was tightly compressed for reasons of space, so I have written up a longer article that amalgamates the points I have been making to NYT journalists for some time, and should clarify my opinions, lest any observer should imagine I am a heartless misanthrope. It is viewable here: The Individual Mandate.

My November reading was dominated by three books by female writers. The memoirs of Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire, Wait for Me!, were a delight, showing that even among so many weird sisters, she has always had her feet planted firmly on the ground. Sylvia Nasar’s Grand Pursuit, claiming to trace the path of economic genius, was competent and overall well-written, but ultimately bloodless, with the author also appearing to lose steam and interest towards the end of her work, leaving us gasping for insights on the phenomenon of China and European sovereign debt among the woes of the euro. And how she could choose to spend so much time on those two dupes of Communism, Beatrice Webb and Joan Robinson, in a work claiming to describe economic genius, was simply inexcusable. My conclusion? That economists continue in vain with attempts to model what is definitely not a ‘system’, but something inherently capricious, unpredictable and chaotic, and that politicians try to calibrate it on the assumptions of a selected group of those dissenting economists. On the other hand, Sarah Bakewell’s celebration of Montaigne, How To Live, or A Life of Montaigne was sure-footed, captivating, original, insightful, and amusing. In addition, prompted by reading reviews of John Lewis Gaddis’s biography of George Kennan (An American Life), I turned to Kennan himself, and hisMemoirs 1925-1950. These are a little laborious, but full of mostly shrewd and prescient insights (why was his advice on de-Nazification forgotten when the similar de-Ba’athization policies were pursued in Iraq?), alongside one or two naïve observations on Communism. Excerpts from all appear in this month’s Commonplace entries.                                                                                                                                                                         (November 30, 2011)

I have made a mid-month posting – an essay dedicated to Ashley Percy titled ‘An American Odyssey’. It can be viewed here. (November 21, 2011)

On October 19, Sylvia and I became grandparents. Our son James’s wife Lien gave birth to Ashley Elizabeth in Santa Clara, California. All three are doing great, and we look forward to visiting them in December.

I was not inconsiderably miffed to read, in an article in the New York Times about the seriously ill Christopher Hitchens, that the journalist and public intellectual ‘had recently come up with some new ideas about his hero, George Orwell, for example – among them that Orwell might have had Asperger’s – and he said he ought to include them in a revised edition of his 2002 book “Why Orwell Matters”’. Regular readers of this site will be familiar with my 2005 article (sadly unpublished: see Orwell’s Clock) that made this tentative but original diagnosis, shortly after to be echoed in Professor Michael Fitzgerald’s book “The Genesis of Artistic Creativity”. I had attempted to contact Mr. Hitchens a few years ago, bringing his attention to a copy of my article, as I shared his obvious enthusiasm for Orwell, but I never heard back from him. While I can understand how he could overlook my contributions to the field, I was surprised that he had not seen Professor Fitzgerald’s volume. I thus sent an email to the NYT reporter, Charles McGrath, and also attempted a posting on the Daily Hitchens website. I was gratified to see that the blog editor had published my message (at  http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7073647307948118016&postID=5467002031484202634&isPopup=true   ) We shall watch to see what happens next.

Another echo of something I wrote earlier was provided by the historian Juliet Gardiner, in the magazine Prospect of October 2011. She wrote: “The spectre of the 1930s still hovers over Britain. A decade in which politicians were found incapable of dealing with crushing economic and social problems, including intractable unemployment; an international situation where ‘liberal intervention’ was constantly contested and seen to bring a slew of unwelcome commitments; a people largely out of love with their government, suspicious of the impotence and contumely of politicians. The parallels seem stark.” This would appear to reinforce my message in “A Recent Mirror”, a short piece that won a prize in aHistory Book Club competition, which can be seen here.      And the comparisons with the 1930s appear to be being taken up by other observers. In the New York Times of October 15, Joe Nocera wrote a column titled “The 1930s Sure Sound Familiar”, which can be seen at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/opinion/nocera-the-1930s-sure-sound-familiar.html?_r=1&ref=opinion , drawing upon Frederick Lewis Allen’s “Since Yesterday”, and making the same point.

I am continually surprised at the quality and number of new books being published about World War II. On this site I recently wrote about Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands”: this month I read another fine example – Michael Burleigh’s “Moral Combat”. Burleigh shows a deep understanding of the dynamics of the conflicts and inhumanities of the war, unafraid to offer his opinion, but reluctant to moralize superficially. His lessons are fairly simple, among which I would emphasize the following: that it is clear that there were evil agents at large in the war, and that monstrous acts were perpetrated at all levels; that evil is more easily recognizable than good; that the evils of Communism have been understated in relation to those of Nazism; that certain inhumane actions (such as the bombing of Dresden) were justified in the pursuit of the greater goal; that no one who has not been put in the position of such dilemmas as resisting evil when the lives of hostages were at stake can easily pontificate on such questions; and that the Law of Unintended Consequences is always at work during apparently ‘moral’ campaigns. Burleigh for the most part avoids attributing collective guilt, indicating, correctly, that evil works through an accumulation of individual human choices. For that reason I was surprised when a wishy-washy twenty-first century liberal conscience on one occasion pierced his cool analysis. In Chapter 17 he writes: “More recent episodes of Western amorality are far more contemptible than the choices made by wartime Allied governments.” Amorality ascribed to such an entity as  ‘the West’? Surely not that simple.

When I was last in England, I bought a remaindered copy of a privately-published biography of the prolific novelist and make-believe spy William Le Queux (“William Le Queux: Master of Mystery”, by Chris Patrick and Stephen Baister). I had come across Le Queux in my readings on espionage, but knew little about him, and had never read any of his works. The only work of his held in my local public library (Wilmington. N.C.) was in an unimpressive collection of detective stories edited by Graham Greene’s brother Hugh, “The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes”. These were trivial items, mostly, but the name of another contemporary writer anthologised by Greene caught my eye – that of Ernest Bramah. Bramah was a name I knew from an old Penguin in my father’s possession in the 1950s, “The Wallet of Kai Lung”. Again, I had not read anything by him: the Oxford DNB entry (like that of Le Queux) is rather feeble, but the Wikipedia entry led me to discover that, in 1907, he had written a dystopian novel that had influenced George Orwell. Originally titled “What Might Have Been”, it was re-issued as “The Secret of the League”, and Orwell reviewed it (along with Huxley’s “Brave New World”, London’s “The Iron Heel”, and Wells’s “Sleeper Awake”) in Tribune in July 1940. An original – but scruffy – copy of this volume will set you back over $3000, but, fortunately, it has been reprinted (with several errors) by the Specular Press in Atlanta, Georgia, and I was able to buy a copy at a reasonable price via abebooks.

“The Secret of the League” describes a revolt by a group of bourgeois/capitalists against a confiscatory Socialist government. It is not a well-written book. It is choppily constructed, has a leaky socio-economic framework (the socialists do not nationalize industries, but bleed them), offers mainly two-dimensional characterization, and its dénouement is melodramatic. Yet it has some passages of wit and insight – as I believe the extracts that I have posted in my Commonplace book will show. While earlier having regarded Bramah as ‘a rarer bird than the Phoenix – a modest literary man’, Orwell rather woodenly deplored Bramah’s attack on the proletariat. But the proles are not the villains. Bramah directs his scorn at simple-minded government ministers confiscating money to spend on entitlements while ignoring how wealth is created, yet concludes his novel in a spirit of some reconciliation and uncertainty. The Socialist practices described could well be applied to Greece today. Indeed, the book must have influenced Ayn Rand and her paean to free enterprise in “Atlas Shrugged”, written fifty years later. The main mysterious figure (who turns out to have been a naval hero) is named ‘Salt’, and the cry ‘Who is Salt?’ finds its echo in Rand’s ‘Who is John Galt?’. Rand’s life-sucking bureaucrat Wesley Mouch is the re-incarnation of the earthy but power-hungry members of the Socialist cabinet – Mulch, Guppling, Tubes and Vossit. I include passages from both Burleigh’s and Bramah’s books in this month’s Commonplace entries. (October 31, 2011)

September was highlighted by a visit to the UK to celebrate the marriage of our elder nephew, Jonathan, to Pippa. A hectic trip, but a delightful occasion on a fine day in Essex. A shorter-than-usual set of Commonplace entries this month. (October 1, 2011)

Much of my August reading was taken up by Rebecca West’s monumental Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her extraordinary account of travels in Yugoslavia just before WWII. The volumes had lain on my bookshelf for about twenty years, after I bought a 1942 edition in a second-hand bookshop on the Charing Cross Road, and I at last resolved to bring it to the top of my reading-list. It is an amazing tour de force, sparkling with erudition and insight, but also weighed down with some plodding and ingenuous generalization and numerous vague assertions. West’s main thesis is that humanity is burdened by the Black Lamb of brutal sacrifice, exerted by a powerful and superstitions priesthood, and on the other hand, is irreversibly damaged by the cult of suffering and martyrdom in pursuit of unearthly goals, as personified by the Grey Falcon. Liberal by instinct, she uncovers the tortured histories of the Balkan communities that comprised the South Slavs in the 1930s, but her argument is torn by contradictions. She identifies the mixture of race, religion, language and culture that influences and cross-pollinates the various tribes of Yugoslavia, sympathizing with them for their suffering under various incompetent Empires, yet criticizing them for their ancient feuds and ‘race memories’. At the same time she elevates the idea of nationhood, and cultural tradition, as a pointer for future peace, as if cleanly defined nations could emerge from the ashes to which a rampant Nazi Germany (and to her, less obviously, Communist totalitarianism) is about to reduce them. Thus, while showing keen insight into the fragmentation that other writers (such as Robert Kaplan in Balkan Ghosts) have written about, she grossly understates the challenges to nationhood inherent in a backdrop of such remorseless medievalism. A rich selection of quotations – mostly admirable – appears in my Commonplace entry for the month: seeCommonplace2011.  (August 31, 2011)

In July, I read Christopher Hitchens’s memoir, Hitch-22, the paperback release of which I had been waiting for. (Sadly, Hitchens has been struck with esophageal cancer since the original hardback version was published last year. I wish him a speedy recovery.) He has for a long time been a writer I look out for: his erudition and wit have enlivened the book pages of Atlantic Monthly, and I have enjoyed his polemic god is not Great, as well as his collections of essays. A few years ago, Atlantic Monthly published a letter of mine, challenging Hitchens as to why he had not discussed Michael Straight’s assertion that P. G. Wodehouse had expressed sympathy for Hitler and Mussolini in the early 1930s, and Hitchens wrote a shrewd response in the magazine.

Hitch-22 is generally very incisive, insightful, allusive, and entertaining. Hitchens has a wonderfully broad span of interest, and a refreshingly contrarian perspective. But the author comes over as very pleased with himself. He is a big ‘friend-collector’ (although not in the class of Denis Healey: see TheFriendsofDenisHealey). He took a long time to discard his Trotskyist rompers, all the time eager to take the capitalist’s shilling, and remains a ‘socialist’ of undisclosed persuasions. He does not clearly understand what ‘fascism’ is, and his romantic exploration of his Jewish roots lacks the rigour that he brings in his analysis of other issues, showing several categorical mistakes. Like his idol, George Orwell, he seems to have a photographic memory, but, also like Orwell, he is a bit careless in not checking his quotation authorities properly. His accounts of the word-games he plays with his equally self-satisfied literary friends are cringe-making in the extreme. He takes cheap shots at names like Ayn Rand and Stanley Baldwin, without providing any analysis. (And the title he chose for his atheist treatise is absurd, as it explicitly gives the attribute of existence to an entity whose existence he denies.)

But it is in his justification of the war in Iraq that finds Hitchens at his most awkward. Since he had witnessed the horrors of Saddam Hussein’s regime at first hand, he presents the need for intervention by ‘the international community’ (yes, that meaningless cliché – another mythological entity believed in by the ingenuous) as a call for moral action. Yet this argument is rife with contradictions and unimagined complexities. In a letter last year on this subject to the historian, Correlli Barnett (with whom I am in occasional contact, though I cannot claim him as a friend), I wrote, after reading a letter of his in the Spectator that complained about the role of ‘moral obligation’ and ‘mission’ in the execution of British foreign policy:

“i) Foreign policy has to be considered within the pragmatics of economic affordability, and furtherance of national interests. Claiming that such complex issues as nation-building, and resolution of civil wars and tribal conflicts, can be reduced to unambiguous decisions about morality simply devalues the whole debate.

1. ii) If such decisions were really ‘moral’ ones, there would be no choices, no compromises to be made. If it is moral to insert ourselves into Afghanistan, say, it would presumably be immoral not to do so in Somalia or the Congo, for example. Yet the country has to choose. What is the moral guidance for such choices?

iii) The only Law that really takes effect is the Law of Unintended Consequences. For every such apparently well-intended action, there will be outcomes that have deleterious, even fatal, results on some, such as the killing of innocent schoolchildren in drone attacks. What is the morality implicit in that, if the premier goal is one made on specious grounds of morality?

1. iv) I don’t believe that you can raise a volunteer army on the basis that a soldier might have to give his (or her) life simply because a politician (and party) believes that a mission not tightly bound to the nation’s interest and survival has to be undertaken. That itself is immoral, to me.”

(Dr. Barnett agreed with all my points.) Since then, this debate should have intensified, but in fact David Cameron’s coalition has fallen into the same trap. If Colonel Qaddafi should be brought down, why not Robert Mugabe? Or Bashar al-Hassad? Or Kim Jong Il? Or any other number of murderous dictators? For if it is a moral imperative (for whom?) to intervene when a tyrant kills his own citizens, it must be immoral not to do so in circumstances elsewhere. Yet we all know that would be impossible. The challenge has to boil down to pragmatics and priorities, not estimates of moral obligation. Hitchens never discusses this aspect of the problem, and, for all the admission of his maintenance of two sets of mental books, thus falls short in his role of public intellectual.

The normal Commonplace updates posted (Commonplace2011). (July 31, 2011)

I should record that I received a courteous reply from the ODNB editors: it had been busy putting out  a new release.  A quiet month: updates to Commonplace2011 only. (June 30, 2011)

The early part of my May reading was consumed by the 97-year-old Chapman Pincher’s epic and astonishing Treachery, which for some reason was published in the USA a couple of years before its recent appearance in the UK. Pincher makes a devastating case – though based on circumstantial evidence – that Roger Hollis, the head of MI5, was indeed the Soviet spy, Elli, controlled by the GRU, and identified vaguely by Igor Gouzenko, the Soviet defector in Canada. Hollis had been semi-cleared by internal investigations, but the biographical entry in the DNB (and later republished in the ODNB) by his mentor, Dick White (who headed MI5 and MI6) is very equivocal about Hollis’s guilt or innocence. Last year, I had contacted the editors of the ODNB, suggesting, in addition to identifying suitable candidates who merited an entry in the work, that Hollis’s name should now be cleared. This recommendation was based on my reading of Christopher Andrew’s Defending the Realm, which claimed that inspection of Soviet archives had shown that the spy Leo Long was in fact ‘Elli’. On taking a fresh look at the ODNB a couple of weeks ago, I was pleased to see that Ewen Montagu (of Operation Mincemeat, and one of my recommendations) now had an entry, but also noticed that an addendum to Hollis’s entry had been made, echoing my recommendations from last year. It used the authority of Yuri Modin and Christopher Andrew, but illogically implied that since someone other than Hollis (John Cairncross) had been shown to be the Fifth Man, Hollis therefore could not have been a spy! I thus had to write to the Editors again, retracting my previous advice, and pointing out that Elli was handled by the GRU, not the KGB, who handled the Cambridge 5. (Those two organizations did not communicate closely!)  I alerted the editors to Pincher’s new book, but have not yet had the favour of an acknowledgment or reply. Maybe they are fed up with meddling amateurs such as me, but I believe they have an obligation to correct the record, and several entries could benefit from refreshment, and more objectivity. Meanwhile, I am eagerly waiting to read reviews of Pincher’s book from the UK press.     (May 31, 2011)

I took some time out to write an article critiquing a ‘progressive’ idea for taxation, after reading a preposterous letter published in the New York Times (see Eating the Seed Corn) . I should be grateful for feedback on this: I am not a professional economist (thank goodness!), but that fact may well have been a help rather than a hindrance, given some of the articles I have read from professional economists during the past year. I may, however, have overlooked some obvious and relevant perspectives or facts that those many tax accountants and economists among my regular readers may be able to point out for me

I have added Commonplace entries for April (Commonplace 2011), a new batch of Hyberbolic Contrasts (Hyperbolic Contrasts – Examples), as well as a few choice references to Rolls-Royces (Rolls Royces) (May 1, 2011)

A New Year, and a new Commonplace Book opened (Commonplace2011). Quite a rich and varied assortment for January. Please take a look especially at the quotations from Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands – a very impressive, though gruesome, book, that deservedly gained multiple plaudits from the critics. Now I am off to the UK for a dinner, at Whitgift School, to celebrate the Centenary of my father’s birth on February 9th. (January 31, 2011)

It was Clive James, in an essay in the indifferent collection, The Revolt of the Pendulum, who prompted me to pick up in December the memoirs of the British Labour Party politician, Dennis Healey, The Time of My Life. The book is well worth reading (though not as wonderful as James asserts), if you can glide quickly through the portions that display Healey’s affectations. Healey is the first person I have read to debunk that absurd remark from Dean Acheson about Britain ‘losing an Empire and not finding a role’, and the chapter on the hopelessness of trying to manage an economy in a democratic society should be compulsory reading for any dedicated monetarist or neo-Keynesian today. But the contradictions and oversights in Healey’s account of his life are preposterous. Like Brown (and Churchill, of course) he claimed to know nothing about economics when he became Chancellor, yet he had for twenty-five years been espousing a policy of pursuing that ‘irreversible shift of power and wealth to working people’ without an understanding of how wealth is created, or what it would mean for aesthetes like him if such a goal were achieved. He was of that generation (‘Our Age’ as Noel Annan so condescendingly wrote), which was sympathetic to socialism (and occasionally communism) out of some simplistic moral inclination, and shares with us his deluded belief that the UK was fighting the Nazis so that socialism could be built in his native land. His definition of socialism is sloppy, defined primarily by ‘consensus’, and he thus lauds (in 1989) the Japanese economy as it was managed by a multipartite consensual approach to business. Yet he admires constitutions that allow rapid decision-making, and he has the tastelessness to refer to the first two years of Margaret Thatcher’s term of office as a ‘holocaust’. He was disparaging about aristocrats and culture in his firebrand youth, but shows off his cultural accomplishments and boasts of his high-placed friends throughout the book.

Healey’s vast claims of friendship with so many persons really grabbed my attention. He identifies well over 100, most of whom are ‘close’, ‘dear’ or ‘lifelong’, and I have compiled a roster of them, which can be seen on this site at TheFriendsofDenisHealey, a kind of List of Huntingdonshire Cabmen de nos jours.  Last December, after reading Kenneth Clark’s memoirs, I remember posting here the opinion that Clark’s collection of  ‘friends’ made George Weidenfeld (of Remembering My Good Friends) look like a hermit. But Denis Healey makes Kenneth Clark look like St Simeon of Stylites.

Coincidentally, on December 26^th, an Op-Ed piece by Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford, titled You’ve Got To Have (150) Friends, appeared in the New York Times. Here Professor Dunbar drew attention to the illusion of the multiplicity of friendships that was enabled through social networks like Facebook, reminding us that ‘our circle of actual friends remains stubbornly small, limited not by technology but by human nature’. He has written a book titled How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks, and frequently lectures on the topic. I then exchanged brief email messages with Professor Dunbar (he is not a friend of mine), pointing out the contribution that memoirs – especially political memoirs – could make to his research, and expressing the hypothesis that that there might be an inverse correlation between the confidence with which one feels one’s fame is merited, and the number of friends that that person makes claim to in his or her memoirs. The professor replied – rather disappointingly – that ‘the short answer is that we haven’t looked at celebrities [sic] friendships at all.’ Get to it, prof!

In December I also read the woolliest and most pointless book on history that I have read for a long time – Robert Dallek’s The Lost Peace. Professor Dallek attempts to analyze the opportunities missed by national leaders between 1945 and 1953 to create a more peaceful world, engaging in his narrative some dubious counterfactual speculation, but not offering any inspection of structural influences that prevented such an idealistic outcome. In underplaying the ideological divide between totalitarianism and constitutional democracies (which he sloppily misrepresents in the Marxian terms of communism versus capitalism, as have so many other historians and commentators), he appears to regard the representatives of both systems as equally morally culpable. Typical of his conclusions is the following observation: “Mao cannot be seen as any wiser than Truman or the Koreans for having entered the conflict [the Korean War]. China’s battlefield casualties were horrendous – more than a million – and the war delayed badly needed investments in the domestic economy to raise the country’s miserably low standard of living.” Irrespective of the US’s adventurism, there appears nothing in this account to suggest awareness of Mao’s later social programs of ‘investment’ – the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, in which over 60 million Chinese citizens were to die. Theirs was truly a ‘Lost Peace’ – or alternatively the peace of the graveyard. Didn’t Schiller have it (as J. Wallace Larwood inquired on Peter Sellers’s The Critics) – ‘Die Ruhe eines Kirchhofs!’?

A much better read was David Lodge’s outstanding Deaf Sentence.            All three of these works have contributed to my December Commonplace entries.

A Happy New Year to all my readers!                                                                                                                                                                (December 31^st, 2010)

Similar story to tell!  Updates to Commonplace made for November.  I also draw readers’ attention to the very last item in the November Commonplace entries, an excerpt from aNew York Times report on the celebration by certain Southerners in the USA of the sesquicentennial of their states’ secession from the Union. The New York Times, in its infallible wisdom, has severely reduced the length of the article on its website, declaring bleakly that ‘a version of this article appeared in print on November 30^th’. The quotation that I reproduce runs as follows:

“We in the South, who have been kicked around for an awfully long time and are accused of being racist, we would just like the truth to be known. [While there were many causes for the war,] our people were only fighting to protect themselves from an invasion and for their independence.”  It was spoken by a Michael Givens, described as commander-in-chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and was part of his explanation of plans to air television commercials celebrating secession.

What a series of weasel-words and selective truth-telling appears in this statement! The claim for the spokesperson to represent accurately a large swath of the country (“we in the South”); the sense of grievance and victimization unreasonably claimed for people such as him (“we have been kicked around”); the facile dismissal of charges of racism (when lynching was commonplace less than 75 years ago); the arrogant claim that the truth has been concealed; the sloppy inclusiveness of the speaker and selective forefathers one hundred and fifty years ago (“our people”); the biased view of history and causes, overlooking the defense of slavery (“fighting to protect themselves”); the phoney and folksy communitarianism (“Sons of Confederate Veterans”); overall, a sickly misplaced sense of righteousness in the guise of ‘heritage’.

Cultural traditions such as these are divisive and pernicious. Kosovo Field, the Battle of The Boyne, the American ‘War Between the States’ – they all provide banners that grant a sense of belonging and grievance to individuals who are not strong enough to think for themselves, or to accept their own identity outside some collective grouping of pseudo-ethnicity. Such mutual admirers cannot even be contented with celebrating their aberrations in private, but need to promote their prejudices to society at large. (December 1, 2010)