January
“But only bad novelists are editorialists for their own convictions.” (Andrew O’Hagan, in review of Katherine Bucknell’s Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out, in LRB, December 26, 2024)
“In these moments, Wolf uses the distinctive elite construction that the journalist William Schneider named the “past exonerative.” It’s that unmistakable mix of passive voice and past tense that people with power use to say things like “mistakes were made” or that extrajudicial drone murders “have been authorized.” Wolf does this both when his side has done something horrible that he cannot admit and when the other side has done something undeniably good that he cannot acknowledge. Thus we find that “colonial empires disappeared,” “trade unions have greatly weakened,” and “the factories disappeared in the old industrial locations.” The revolutionary struggles for power that these phrases embody are thus rendered invisible.” (Trevor Jackson, in review of Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, in NYRB, January 16)
“Is collecting merely an extension of the hunting and gathering instincts, fixed in our chromosomes sometime in the dim and distant past? A gene for loving and understanding animals must surely have possessed considerable survival value at a period when dogs had to be tamed and trained not only to protect their owners’ territory, but to pull down game in the open.” (from Miriam Rothschild’s Walter Rothschild: The Man, the Museum and the Menagerie, p 213)
“Then I should like to see as many of the British Governors administrators as possible to be Jews provided due care is taken that no anti-Zionists are thus appointed.” (Walter Rothschild, in a letter to Chaim Weizmann of February 8, 1916, quoted by Miriam Rothschild in her Walter Rothschild: The Man, the Museum and the Menagerie, p 252)
“The anti-Zionists were almost all ‘assimilationists’, believing that for themselves and their co-religionists everywhere, the real solution to anti-semitism and persecution lay along the lines that had occurred in Britain – the wining of full rights of citizenship in the country of one’s own choice, linked to a mutual respect and public-spirited co-operation, and the freedom of religious worship. The extremists like Edwin Montagu and Marie Perugia (Mrs. Leopold de Rothschild) considered the Zionists’ creed a blueprint for anti-semitism. Montagu thought that a ‘National Home’ would turn all Jews outside Palestine into aliens, encourage their expulsion, change Palestine into a huge Ghetto glorified by the cynical name of ‘home’ and give every country a valid excuse to be rid of its chosen few.” (from Miriam Rothschild’s Walter Rothschild: The Man, the Museum and the Menagerie, p 254)
“Occasionally the dedicated acharné collector, feeling that his objets d’art or vintage cars or first editions are not only a perspicacious assemblage of interesting, rare and beautiful materials, but an expression of his own creativity – a projection or extension of himself – takes infinite trouble over the disposition of his treasures.” (from Miriam Rothschild’s Walter Rothschild: The Man, the Museum and the Menagerie, p 314)
“David Hughes, who wrote about his friendship with Gerald Durrell in the portrait Himself and Other Animals (1997), described a man who, for all his famed bonhomie and charm, was haunted, ‘nagged’, pushed toward alcohol and breakdown, by the hard facts of the world as he saw them: by our failure, as a species, to preserve not only the richness of the world’s animal life, but also the quality of human life. ” (Richard Smyth on Lawrence Durrell, in TLS January 3)
“If we have devalued the term racist through overuse – and I don’t necessarily accept this charge – a question that follows is: ‘Does racism exist?’ The answer, obvious to anyone paying the slightest attention, is ‘yes’. Specific interpersonal racism exists, including abuse aimed at racialised people – the desecration of Jewish graves, or such as when a third of Roma or black people report that they have been subjected to physical assault as a result of their ethnicity, race or religion. Structural racism also exists as embedded prejudices in institutions and society, evidenced by the fact that black and minority ethnic people are more likely to receive custodial sentences than white defendants who have committed similar crimes.” (Adam Rutherford, in review of Keon West’s The Science of Racism in the Spectator, January 4)
“I have had six years dealing with people who take six months to do what any intelligent man could do in a week, and I hoped to find Oxford free of such dithering.”. (E. W. B. Gill, Merton College bursar, quoted in Ashley Jackson’s Oxford’s War, 1939-1945, p 268)
“The book is in seven parts, though history (as he well knows) is not: five million years ago (when, he writes, we became collaborative animals); 500,000 years ago (when we learnt to use – and, he says, to enjoy using – punishment to regulate our communities); 50,000 years ago (when we developed shared values indicating whom we should believe and trust); 5,000 years ago (when inequalities started to be an obvious part of human life); 500 years ago (the rise of the individual); fifty years ago (when equality became a moral and political passion, and a new language was fashioned, with its own power to generate ethical obligations and political imperatives); and five years ago (when insulting those with whom one disagrees began to supplant serious moral reflection and obligation).”
“His account of the early evolution of human societies is fairly uncontroversial. We evolved big, metabolically costly brains, dangerous to push through our mother’s birth canal, because large brains are necessary to broker and curate relationships.” (from Charles Foster’s review of Hanno Sauer’s The Invention of Good and Evil, in TLS, January 10)
“‘Our genome is a kind of gigantic jigsaw to which each of our ancestors, with their varied origins, has contributed pieces, and which forms a picture of so many shades, each original and different for every human being. It is a fact: none of us carries a genome with a single ancestral origin.’
This is one of the most effective messages threaded throughout Human Peoples: how magnificent and multifaceted human variation really is. The more we understand this diversity, the more we can see through the fallacy of biological race. ‘This is not an ideological slogan or a well-intended mantra, but a scientific observation’, Quintana-Murci writes.” (Jennifer Raff, in review of Lluis Quintana-Murci’s Human Peoples, in TLS, January 10)
“We woke the next morning to the horrifying news that the whole of Pacific Palisades had been destroyed. Thousands of people, including dozens of close friends, had lost their homes.” (Joan Collins, in the Spectator, January 18)
“It isn’t reasonable to suppose that only reason, narrowly framed, reveals the world to us. A better path involves reason harnessed to our ethical and aesthetic impulses. The process will not involve simple certitude. Whether we realise it or not, we are all people of faith at some level . . . McGrath is very well equipped to voice this message, being a former Marxist and atheist who became a theologian after pursuing doctoral research in biochemistry. Various teaching posts at Oxford followed; he ended his career there as Andreas Idrios Professor of Science and Religion. His conclusion – that all of us, religious believers and secularists alike, need broad narratives with which to craft our lives, even though their truth cannot be proved beyond doubt – recalls Tom Holland’s remark that belief in human equality involves as big a leap of faith as accepting the existence of angels.”
(Rupert Shortt, in review of Alister McGrath’s Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times, in the Spectator, January 18)
“If this is all correct, Hicks is guilty of the fault that far too many historians make: of deciding what he wants to demonstrate before mastering the data, for it is on evidence alone that conclusions can be built.” (David Abulafia, on Dan Hicks, curator at the Pitt-Rivers Museum, in the Spectator, January 18)
“Admittedly, nothing is harder than clearing your mind of the frameworks and paradigms of the moment, but it is crucial to try. We want to address issues relevant to our time, of course, but to what extent? If we can’t think our way outside it, the hive mind just speaks through us – and how then can we see the unusual, surprising, funny, unanticipated in the past?” (Susan Pedersen, in review of Tehila Sasson’s The Solidarity Economy, in LRB, January 23)
“Government files that are allowed into the public domain are placed there by the authorities as the result of deliberate decisions. The danger is that those who work only on this controlled material may become something close to official historians, albeit once removed. There is potential cost involved in researching in government-managed archives where the collection of primary material is quick and convenient. Ultimately there is no historical free lunch.” (Richard J. Aldrich in The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence, p 5)
“Thousands of years have not sufficed to settle the contentious (particularly among Jews) debates about what constitutes Jewishness—what makes a person a Jew. And in the absence of solid criteria, when push, so to speak, comes to shove, either self-definition or antisemitism will qualify you as a Jew to someone. And in that sense—although his relationship to both Judaism and Zionism (like Judaism a blurry category) was complex, conflicted, and vacillating throughout the course of his life—Kafka doubly qualified.” (Deborah Eisenberg in NYRB, February 18)
“As a literary translator once said to me, “If you don’t understand what’s going on between the lines, you can’t translate the lines.” (Deborah Eisenberg in NYRB, February 18)
“Despite such seemingly deistic moments in his writings, Darwin took a great interest in the capacity of animals to be their own creators, transforming themselves, one another, and their environment, and so influencing the course of evolution. An example is his idea of “use and disuse”: animals strengthen and enhance their body parts by using them, or weaken them by declining to use them, then pass these changes on to their offspring.” (Jessica Riskin, in review of Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert M. Sapolsky in NYRB, February 18)
February
“Klavan’s argument . . . is that ‘the world is not made of material objects. It is made of the meeting between mind and matter.’ Quantum mathematics, he insists, has revealed an ancient truth that the prophets of the mechanical universe tried but failed to discredit, which is that the mind and its perceptions are just as real as the physical world, and indeed that the physical world is only comprehensible with reference to the mind.” (John Daniel Davidson, in review of Spencer A. Klavan’s Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith, in The Spectator World, February)
“Despite such seemingly deistic moments in his writings, Darwin took a great interest in the capacity of animals to be their own creators, transforming themselves, one another, and their environment, and so influencing the course of evolution. An example is his idea of “use and disuse”: animals strengthen and enhance their body parts by using them, or weaken them by declining to use them, then pass these changes on to their offspring.” (Jessica Riskin, in review of Robert M. Sapolsky’s Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, in NYRB, February 13)
“One might also ask whether it is such a simple thing to maintain one’s inner freedom in a totalitarian state. If the state determines the contents of everyone’s education, does that not have an effect on the inner lives of a populace? What about dissenters forced to torture one another in political prison as part of their “reeducation”? If secret police break down the bonds of trust between even the closest of family members by manipulating people to inform on their loved ones, as both Romania’s Securitate and Albania’s Sigurimi did, is their dignity not necessarily affected? Is it possible, in other words, to have a concept of freedom separate from the ideals of justice or proportionality? It is all well and good to claim that “we never lose our inner freedom: the freedom to do what is right,” but when dissidents know their families will be targeted in retribution, the consequences of standing up for one’s ideals can be unbearable.” (Irina Dumitrescu, in review of Lea Ypi’s Free; Coming of Age at the End of History, in NYRB, February 27)
“I have to say, too, that I find it difficult to commend an Oxford Regius professor for beautiful writing if she doesn’t know the meaning of ‘crescendo’, ‘ironically’ or ‘enormity’.” (Philip Hensher, in review of Lyndal Roper’s Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War, in the Spectator, February 8)
“To say that cereal-farming was responsible for the rise of such states is a little like saying that the development of calculus in medieval Persia is responsible for the invention of the atom bomb.” (Jonathan Kennedy, quoting Jared Diamond [?], in Pathogenesis, p 40)
“While the tone of much of the book is quite cool and aloof, there is an enthusiastic chapter called ‘The Art of Spying’. ‘I have been fascinated by espionage from a very young age,’ it begins. For readers who might worry he is about to reveal a grudging respect for MI6 or the CIA, the example he gives is reassuring: ‘The first Soviet spies were not technicians or trained killers. In the 1920s, spies were above all political people, chosen for their ability to grasp, analyse and connect events that appeared to be unconnected. Above all, Soviet spies in those days of hope saw themselves as foot soldiers of the world revolution.’ Effective secret agents also know how to collect gossip and distribute it to their advantage; have unusually capacious memories, and a capacity to hold grudges; show a keen awareness of political and bureaucratic hierarchies; and possess a certain mischief and charm. In this book’s best sections, Ali shows all these qualities.” (Andy Beckett, in review of Tariq Ali’s You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024, in LRB, February 20)
“In his books, he is precise about placenames and more content dealing with a parish or a townland or a single part of a city than a sweeping moment in history. ‘For my emigrant mother and my father, the departed Irish places remained the guiding star of who they were and what they became, for it seems true that our sense of place becomes most active when we are “out” of place. To the emigrant, who is by definition always out of place and denied home, this sense is always keen, and is often passed on to the second generation.’ But he is also conscious that he may himself embody a sweeping moment in history. He draws on Eric Hobsbawm, who recognised that this change – ‘the death of the peasantry’ – is ‘perhaps the most fundamental one the contemporary modern world has seen’. Joyce thinks of himself as a historian of his own life: ‘I have seen this world we have lost, and been part of its ending. The Joyces and the Bowes – both sides of my family – were part of this silently epochal transformation. In my family history I am the link between old and new, the first-born of the new, and yet a carrier of the old.’” (Colm Tóibín, in review of Patrick Joyce’s Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World, in LRB, February 20)
“Although historians are notionally interested in establishing the truth, the past isn’t something that can easily be tested. Our evidence simply doesn’t provide us with the impersonal facts that might allow that. Rather than being a window into a past reality, documents – our main source of evidence – are components of that reality. It doesn’t matter what sort of text we are dealing with: a chronicle, a political pamphlet, or a shopping list. They are all an attempt to structure, shape or supplement the world from which they sprang, even if they purport just to describe it.”
“If we are to understand any document, we need to understand how it functioned as part of a whole and in worked in relation to other documents. To do this, we need some methodology, some criteria for evaluating our evidence.” (Alexander Lee, in History Today, February)
“I asked him [Dick Brooman-White, of SIS] how things were in the way of intelligence, and he said, in his characteristically dry way, that very good intelligence was coming from places where it was easy to get and none at all from places where it was difficult to get.” (Malcolm Muggeridge, in diary entry for July 18, 1948, from Like It Was)
“In the draft of Churchill’s Memoirs which was given to the Daily Telegraph. He put in a sentence to the effect that the Russians always observed their agreements. When it was pointed out to him that this was entirely and dangerously misleading, he struck out the sentence. What is extraordinary, is that he had been concerned in making a number of the many agreements which the Russians have broken, and therefore ought, presumably, to be in a better position than most people to know that these agreements have been broken.” (Malcolm Muggeridge, in diary entry for July 26, 1948, from Like It Was)
“Peggy Williamson and Tony [Powell] came to supper. Peggy had formerly worked in the MI6 office in Algiers and is still with the SIS. I was amused to learn that all the worst dead-beats were still firmly entrenched. Said afterwards to Tony, naming four of them, that it would be difficult to find any organization, private or public, directed by four so essentially incompetent people. In view of the nature of the organization in question, this is particularly grotesque.” (Malcolm Muggeridge, in diary entry for August 26, 1948, from Like It Was)
“John [Muggeridge, son] said à propos an offer by Frenchman to found a new Oxford college, that it should be called Dead Souls, and we’d all become Fellows.” (Malcolm Muggeridge, in diary entry for September 13, 1948, from Like It Was)
“Dick White came to lunch. He is now more or less head of MI5. We talked about the Daily Worker and how it is financed. He said that his impression was that most of its funds came from rich men. We agreed that rich men thus paying conscience money to an organization which seeks to destroy them presents a fascinating psychological problem.” (Malcolm Muggeridge, in diary entry for January 28, 1949, from Like It Was)
“To visit Glasgow after Edinburgh is rather like meeting a red-faced Lord Mayor after a session with a desiccated and long-lineaged Scottish peer. They are both magnificent in their ways, but so different that there is no comparison.” (John Betjeman, in Betjeman’s Britain, p 297)