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)
March
“There are two maxims for historians which so harmonise with what I know of history that I would like to claim them as my own, though they really belong to nineteenth-century historiography: first, that governments try to press upon the historian the key to all the drawers but one, and are anxious to spread the belief that this single drawer contains nothing of importance; secondly, that if the historian can only find the thing which the government does not want him to know, he will lay his hand upon something that is likely to be significant.” (Sir Herbert Butterfield, in History and Human Relations, p 186, quoted by Molly J. Sasson in More Cloak than Dagger, p 204)
“He defines ‘symbolic capitalists’ as those professionals who ‘traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction’, as opposed to those who do manual labour for a living. They are typically employed in education, science, tech, finance and media, but also in law, consulting, administration and public policy. Since intellectual work tends to be valued more highly than other forms of work, symbolic capitalists occupy a superior social position. Their dominance over ‘knowledge production, cultural curation, institutional bureaucracies, and (through these) the political sphere often affords [them] more sway over society than most other Americans’. They are the elites.” (Costica Bradatan, in review of Musa Al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke, in TLS, February 14)
“The first English translation of The Brothers Karamazov was by Constance Garnett. It came out in 1912, a good while after the novel first appeared, in serial form, in Russkiy Vestnik (the ‘Russian Herald’), over the course of 1879 and 1880, the year before Dostoevsky died. Garnett worked at great speed – according to one account she turned out five thousand words a day – and didn’t know Russian well: she kept a dictionary by her deckchair and skipped bits she didn’t understand. The (Russian) critic Korney Chukovsky called her translations ‘a safe blandscript: not a volcano … a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner – which is to say a complete distortion of the original’. But the British and American press loved it. The Observer praised Garnett’s ‘careful fidelity’, fully revealing of Dostoevsky’s ‘perfect balance’ and ‘sheer technical skill’.” (Daniel Soar, in review of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Michael Katz, in LRB, March 6)
“How could the Nazis, as members of the human species, have done what they did?” (Neal Asherson, in review of Richard J. Evans’s Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, in NYRB, March 27)
“Overy’s book is a sombre reminder that the border between civilization and savagery is wafer-thin.” (Philip Snow, in review of Richard Overy’s Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan, in Literary Review, March)
“In a Chekhov play, everybody talks nonstop, but no one really listens to anyone else.” (Elizabeth Lowry, in review of Three Sisters, translated by Rory Mullarkey, in TLS, March 14)
“We cannot have truth and wisdom without accommodating error and folly because the boundary between the two is usually a matter on which people may legitimately differ. In the end, we have to accept the implications of human inquisitiveness, creativity and imagination. The alternative is to entrust significant parts of our intellectual world to public authorities whose capacity for objectivity, truthfulness and wisdom is no greater than our own.” (Jonathan Sumption, in review of Fara Dabhoiwala’s What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea, in Literary Review, March)
“English people of good position consider that the basis of all marital unions or disunions is the maxim: No scenes.” (Ford Madox Ford, quoted by Michael Dirda in review of Ford Madox Ford by Max Saunders, in NYRB, March 27)
“Charles de Gaulle said to an intimate, André Gillois, after France’s liberation: ‘Between ourselves, the Resistance is a bluff which has succeeded.’” (Max Hastings, quoting Gillois’s Histoire secrète des Français à Londres, p 164, in Operation Biting, p 240)
“Never before has it been so categorically demonstrated that counter-intelligence work consists of morally indefensible jobs not to be undertaken by the squeamish or conscience-stricken.” (undated TLS review of Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, cited by Michael Cox in his Introduction to The Oxford Book of Spy Stories)
April
“At the heart of the intelligence and security community lies an existential question: Intelligence is to be collected to be used to inform decision making, but how do you make it usable without risk to the source if the source’s access is near to exclusive?” (Richard Dearlove, in Spectator, March 22)
“Only when the country rejected fighting, and zealots had to abandon their visions of a compulsory New Jerusalem, was liberty possible. To the Whigs we owe the principle – Magna Carta restated in modern form – that rulers must obey the law and that legitimate consent requires the consent of the people. From the Tories came the principle – fundamental to any political order – that people have no right to rebel against a government because they disagree with it.” (Robert Tombs, in The English and Their History, quoted by Marcus Walker in Spectator, March 22)
“It’s a clever idea to collect what Martin Edwards, a consultant for the British Library Crime Classics series, calls ‘Academic mysteries’, because solving crimes and engaging in academic life have a surprising amount in common. Both depend on the process of assembling evidence, interpreting what has been said, then arriving at a working hypothesis and, ideally, some sort of explanation.” (Heather Donohue in review of Lessons in Crime, edited by Martin Edwards, in TLS, March 21)
A Must-Read
“Densely textured in its prose, enormously ambitious, continually attentive to the interplay between individual actions and attitudes on the one hand and the larger forces that shaped them on the other, and drawing on a wide interdisciplinary range of methods and approaches, from quantitative analysis through literary exegesis, socialist feminist theory, and questions of gendered subjectivity, it was also, like all her subsequent monographs and the many coedited collections of essays that have accompanied them, based on a deeply collaborative academic practice.” (Fara Dabhoiwala, in review of Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism, in NYRB, April 24)
“I believe in dictatorship,” he confided to his diary in the 1930s, “but not the dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletariat, like a well-brought up child, should be seen and not heard. It should be properly clothed and fed and sheltered, but not crowned with a moral halo, and above all not allowed to have anything to do with government.” (Benjamin Nathans, describing George Kenna, in review of George Kennan: A Life Between Worlds, by Frank Costigliola, in NYRB, April 24)
“A quarter of the way through this century, regime change has become a canonical term. It signifies the overthrow, typically but not exclusively by the United States, of governments around the world disliked by the West, employing for that purpose military force, economic blockade, ideological erosion, or a combination of these.” (Perry Andeson, in Regime Change in the West?, in LRB, April 3)
“‘Capitalism’ (a word Marx never used in Capital) is less a system than an anti-system, an irrational and ever changing flux of conditions and counter-conditions that are always moving towards crisis.”
“Marx, by contrast, was sharply critical of capitalism and wanted to see it collapse.” (Peter E. Gordon, in review of Karl Marx’s Capital, translated by Paul Reitter, in LRB, April 3)
“Charles Darwin had little to do with the spread of the term ‘evolution’. It had long evoked a purposeful unrolling that was the opposite of his vision of contingent open-endedness. Aside from a single ‘evolved’, the term is absent from the first edition of On the Origin of Species (1859), as it is from the titles of all his subsequent books. Yet even he used it from time to time: a concession to the growing popularity of the evolutionary writings of others, notably the journalist turned philosopher Herbert Spencer.” (Gregory Radick, in review of Peter J. Bowler’s Evolution for the People in TLS, April 18)
“I have often said that there is something grossly immoral about the profession of journalism. These men live on the woes of others, who batten on the miseries of the world, must of necessity be dead to all kindly impulse and to the gentler emotions. They must be sceptical of all that is good, and have immeasurable faith in the wickedness of human nature. They must have neither reverence for the great ones of the earth not charity for the sins of the weak.” (Edgar Wallace, in Mr Collingrey, MP, in The Oxford Book of Spy Stories)
“There were queen bees, like the misuse of the Service, and the search for the true as distinct from wishful intelligence, and there were worker bees. These included such idiosyncrasies as not employing men with beards, or those who were completely bilingual, instantly dismissing men who tried to bring pressure to bear on him through family relationships with members of the Cabinet, mistrusting men or women who were too ‘dressy’, and those who called him ‘Sir’ off -duty; and having an exaggerated faith in Scotsmen.” (Ian Fleming on ‘M’, from Risico, in The Oxford Book of Spy Stories)
“The great phenomenologist of religion Mircea Eliade argues that human beings are naturally religious.” (Jamie Franklin, in the Spectator, April 15)
Shome Mishtake Shurely?
“In January 1945, she [Josephine Baker] performed for Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and de Gaulle in Berlin.” (Caroline Moorehead, in TLS, April 4)
“On immigration, socialist demands should include full labour and civic rights for migrants, full entitlement to benefits, unionization across the economy, and an undoing of vulnerabilities that contribute to the super-exploitation of migrants.” (China Miéville, in letter to LRB, April 17)
“A major campaign which will force an end to this unhappy state of affairs needs to be launched immediately. It is pure sophistry to suggest that the security of the state will be imperiled if, after seventy-five years, say, the secret archives of government are opened up. If now we were to know the dead truth about 1899, would anything but the reputations of some of our long-dead leaders seriously suffer?” (Stewart Steven in Operation Splinter Factor (1974), p 11)
“This view was rejected because, as Sir Stuart Menzies, head of SIS in Britain, liked to say, once you grant the enemy a mind so supreme that it thinks of everything, you are left with no choice but to do nothing.” (Stewart Steven in Operation Splinter Factor, p 35)
“In light of this, Noel Field came to believe that he had a higher duty than that of loyalty to the State Department: he had a duty to humanity.” (Stewart Steven in Operation Splinter Factor, p 77)
“There are only a limited number of occasions when a ‘double’ can be used. An agent who transmits information which subsequently turns out to be false is never fully trusted again. Agent X’s track record was perfect: his reports, though never necessarily of high moment, were nevertheless always accurate.” (Stewart Steven in Operation Splinter Factor, p 102)
“There are readings of Picasso’s Guernica, Pasolini’s Accatone and the centenary commemorations of the Russian Revolution, and an essay on what Clark calls the ‘Image-World’ – an analysis of late late capitalism taking in the 2001 London riots and the infamous Sparkasse Chemnitz credit card which featured a statue of Karl Marx.” (Matthew Holman, in review of ‘scot-free Western Marxist’ T J Clark’s Those Passions: On Art and Politics, in Literary Review, April)
“About Guy, about whom you ask, I see him quite often. Stories, inadvertently started, it seems, by his mum, that we have quarrelled are not true. I understand many people think if [sic] us as sort of Siamese twins – but Debenham and Freebody, Hobbs and Sutcliffe, Burke and Hare were probably neither on the one hand Castors and Polluxes nor on the other Cains and Abels and if these gentlemen, specially Hobbs and Sutcliffe, will forgive being dragged in, neither are we, as you know.” (Donald Maclean, in letter to Philip Toynbee, October 1956, from FCO 158/11 at the National Archives)
“Matthes considers the concern that our responses to art, buildings and traditions may be ‘merely subjective’, but counters it by invoking the notion of ‘intersubjectivity’ – not the personal response of an individual human to some objective reality, but the communal, shared response of all of us, thanks to our common humanity. But how communal are our responses, really, in multicultural, identity-riven societies? Perhaps we are united by the need to ‘save the planet’ and its diversity – in which case, rather than endorsing the Inuits’ extension of tradition in using gas-powered sleds for seal-hunting, should one instead recommend that they stop hunting seals at all? How much should we cater to the fact that Zuni wooden sculptures are made to decay, given that the tradition that would produce new ones is dying out?.” (Jane O’Grady, in review of Erich Hatala Matthes’s What to Save and Why, in TLS, April 25)
“In ‘On Pharaohs’, Coates writes about his visit to Dakar, the capital of Senegal. This is his first trip to Africa, the continent of origin for African Americans, from which most of their ancestors were removed during the slave trade and with which many Blacks in the US seek a connection. Coates went ‘back to the origin point of all of us to see my lost siblings, the ones who had evaded sale and slavery’. His essay explores the different factors complicating that act of going ‘home’, from the reactions of those he encountered to his own ‘ghosts’, or aspects of his own psychological baggage. An African woman tells Coates, ‘Look, I understand what Black is in America. I get that you’re Black there, but here you are mixed. That’s how we see most Black Americans’. Coates paraphrases the woman as saying that, in Senegal, ‘Black Americans are seen as cool, glamorous, and even beautiful because we are mixed’.” (Clifford Thompson, in review of The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, in TLS, April 25)
May
“Victors and perpetrators were mixed together in the same families, ethic groups, and lines of descent . . . If the Nazi Holocaust exterminated the Other, the Soviet terror was suicidal. The self-inflicted nature of Soviet terror had complicated the circulation of three energies that structure the postcatastrophic world: a cognitive striving to learn about the catastrophe; and emotional desire to mourn for its victims; and an active desire to find justice and take revenge on the perpetrators. . . The suicidal nature of the Soviet atrocities made revenge all but impossible, and even learning very difficult.” (Alexander Etkind, in Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied, pp 8-9, quoted by Masha Gessen in The Future is History, p 143)
“A chapter on ravens explains that we domesticated dogs around 13,000 BC, but we were living with and eating ravens in 28,000 BC.” (Horatio Clare, in review of Adam Nicolson’s Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood, in Spectator, May 3)
“To understand what really went haywire in the Americas, you have to replace traditional prejudices with three ingredients of a helpful perspective: first, awareness of environment (which, while it determines nothing, limits and conditions everything that humans do); second, appreciation that the best approach is regional and transnational; third, acknowledgement that history is not the predictable or inevitable product of long-grinding determinants, but a series of sudden or short-lived contingencies that scatter opportunities and challenges apparently at random. However daunting the impersonal, material forces may seem, the individual – as Latin American history shows – is always free to make matters even worse.” (Felipe Fernández-Arnesto in review of Greg Grandin’s America, América, in TLS, May 9)
“Historical writing in the US academy seems to be in regression. Ranke seems to have been forgotten. Instead of writing history wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, or trying to sympathize with or understand dead white males of currently unfashionable opinions, academics can achieve renown and win prizes by traducing the past, inflicting sententious value judgements on their readers and plucking at motes in dead men’s eyes, while ignoring the beams in their own. Grandin is entitled to detest imperialism and plutocracy, but not to misrepresent his uninformed denunciations as history. We should be wary of wallowing in self-righteous judgements of the past: they will be visited on us in our turn.” (Felipe Fernández-Arnesto in review of Greg Grandin’s America, América, in TLS, May 9)
“Humans: A monstrous history explores how we as a species make monsters by ‘monstrifying’ those seen as other or foreign, in terms of ethnicity, race, ability or sexuality.” (Jan Machielsen in review of Surekha Davies’s Humans, in TLS May 9)
“The journalists would follow what had become a tried-and-tested formula: gather every available scrap of information, assemble it into a coherent narrative and trust that the answers to the central question would become clear.” (Peter Gillman and Emanuele Midolo in Murder in Cairo, p 21)
“Fundamentally, the founding fathers of US intelligence were liars. The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. These people attracted and promoted each other. Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it. Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Office and Frank Wisner were the grandmasters. If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell. I guess I will see them there soon.” (James Angleton to Joe Trento, cited by Peter Gillman and Emanuele Midolo in Murder in Cairo, p 307)
“To reverse the rise of protectionism, nationalism and authoritarianism across the world – and restore stability, sustainability and prosperity – it will be necessary to restore political, democratic liberalism. Above all, political leaders will need to commit to a new spirit of internationalism and to building a cooperative and coordinated economic world order.” (Ann Pettifor, in Prospect, June)
“When, towards the end of the [19th] century, the academic study of English literature was beginning to be more seriously mooted, it was usually considered a subject for the less able. One proponent suggested it as appropriate for ‘the weaker candidates’ – ‘the women’ and ‘the second- or third-rate men who were to become schoolmasters’.” (Philip Hensher, in review of Stefan Collini’s Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain, in the Spectator, May 10)
“It was sometimes said that the school of ‘Eng. Lit.’, as we knew it, was not a true academic discipline; and that instead of providing a basis of solid learning, it served as a forcing-house for literary chatter masquerading as æsthetic criticism. This was certainly a danger, but the best teachers knew how to avoid it.” (Lord Strang, in Home and Abroad, p 30)
“In my view about the Rhineland, namely that there was great force in the widely-held opinion that it would not be a wise course to throw the Germans by force out of indisputably German territory, I was, as I now see it, certainly wrong.” (Lord Strang, in Home and Abroad, p 66)
“ . . . I would remark that the work of a civil servant in putting public business through is not performed merely by writing words on pieces of paper. It means also seeing the right people at the right time and saying the right thing to them in the right way, a process which, is used for personal ends or to promote a personal policy, may justly be called intrigue, but which, if applied for the purposes of government as laid down by Ministers, I an essential skill in the professional repertory.” (Lord Strang, in Home and Abroad, p 127)
‘For the handling pf international affairs, the qualities most to be desired are knowledge enough to understand the past, perception enough to judge the present, imagination enough to scan the future, and, when action is needed, resolution enough to take courageous decisions and act on them. It is our good fortune as a people that in later times, men with more than a touch of these qualities have been found holding commanding positions in Governments of both parties.” (Lord Strang, in Home and Abroad, p 153)
“When the Council of Europe was first mooted, he [Ernest Bevin] is reported to have burst out: ‘I don’t like it. I don’t like it. When you open that Pandora’s box, you will find it full of Trojan horses.’” (Lord Strang, in Home and Abroad, p 290)
“The painter Dorothy Brett’s sister Sylvia whose hand was said to have come into contact with the trousers was married to Charles Vyner de Windt Brooke, soon to become the third and last White Rajah of Sarawak and it would certainly have taken some nerve for Asquith to introduce his private parts to the wife of a man whose family subjects included several thousand head-hunters.” (from Stefan Buczacki’s My darling Mr Asquith, p 190)
“He [Edwin Montagu] was and always had been deeply and passionately anti-Zionist, believing the Jews were a religious community and not a nation. He considered himself a Jewish Englishman, not someone whose real home was on an alien and foreign territory . . . as Edwin wrote in his diary was that he believed ‘The Government has dealt an irreparable blow at Jewish Britons, and they have endeavoured to set up a people which does not exist; they have alarmed unnecessarily the Mohammedan world . . .’” (from Stefan Buczacki’s My darling Mr Asquith, p 199)
“After Kim’s escape to the Soviet Union in January 1963, I discussed his defection with Lebanon’s former security chief Emir Farid Chehab. Farid was a great friend of Britain, ever since the British sprang him from a Vichy French goal during the Second World War, and could not understand how Philby had been allowed to escape. ‘We could so easily have arranged a small accident,’ he told me, clearly puzzled by the behaviour of his British colleagues.” (from Richard Beeston’s Looking for Trouble, p 34)
“It was Elliott’s idea that when Philby died, in order to confuse the KGB, he should be appointed a CMG, and that Nicholas should write in his obituary that Philby was one of the bravest men he had ever known. ‘This’, suggested Elliott, ‘would cause terrific trouble in the Lubyanka!’” (from Richard Beeston’s Looking for Trouble, p 134)
June
“I always find books about Communism and the intellectual are usually written by people who know quite a lot about Communism and very little about intellectuals – real intellectuals.” (Goronwy Rees being interviewed by Peter Wright, March 1956, from KV 2/4607)
“Ethnic purity is a myth and we are all mongrels.”
“She makes it clear that there are still mysteries about how languages spread and are adopted, and about the relationship between language and ethnicity . . .” (Professor David Abulafia, in review of Laura Spinney’s Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, in Literary Review, May)
“I wanted to know what creates cultural and psychological inheritance, and how we can go forward with it, instead of sleepwalking back into the geopolitical abyss. The abyss is home to the bones of our predecessors who could not escape dark forces. Some of those forces are still with us—they never went away—the better to let us know that the abyss is always open for business.” (Kapka Kassabova, in Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, quoted by Colin Thubron in review in NYRB, June 12)
“I can assure readers that if any responsible, polite correspondent ever draws attention to a genuine mistake I have made in print, or has any helpful suggestions for improving my own work, I will respond with the gratitude that I always show when I am in error, and which, in my opinion, behoves anyone who tries to pursue scholarship and truth.” (Felipe Fernández-Arnesto, in letter to TLS, May 30)
“Fascism could return in ‘the most innocent of disguises’, according to Umberto Eco, who grew up in Mussolini’s Italy, because we are all vulnerable to its emotional pull.” (Daniel Trilling, in review of Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation, in LRB, June 5)
“‘Restitution is virtue signalling of an irresponsible sort,’ the historian David Abulafia wrote in the Spectator in January, ‘threatening the integrity of great collections by pretending to apologise for past sins.’” (Jeremy Harding, in LRB, June 5)
Logic?
“As the son of a Jewish father who married a Jewish woman, I believe strongly in Israel’s absolute right to exist.” (Anthony Seldon, in the Spectator, June 7)
“Side by side with this awareness stands the belief that Jesus of Nazareth’s life was a self-revelatory act of God. Though the claim is disputed on many grounds, its foundation remains robust.” (Rupert Shortt, in review of Lamorna Ash’s Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion, in the Spectator, June 7)
“The debate over Proust’s relation to his Jewish identity ultimately turns not just on his personal attachments but on how he represents Jewish characters in his novel.” (Maurice Samuels, in review of Antoine Compagnon’s Proust, a Jewish Way, in NYRB, June 26)
“Howick says that annually around £67 million in the UK and $5 billion in the US are spent on knee washout arthroscopies for osteoarthritis, yet it has been shown that simply anesthetizing the patient and giving them a scar on the knee so that it looks as if they’ve had surgery is just as good at reducing subsequent pain.” (Gavin Francis, in review of Jeremy Howick’s The Power of Placebos, in NYRB, June 26)
“Either the translator leaves the author as undisturbed as possible and moves the reader toward him, or he leaves the reader as undisturbed as possible and moves the author toward him.” (Friedrich Schleiermacher, according to Kwame Anthony Appiah, in review of Damion Searls’s The Philosophy of Translation and J. M. Coetzee’s and Mariana Dimópulos’s Speaking in Tongues, in NYRB, June 26)
“In the West there has been a tendency to stress the political aspect of democracy rather than its economic aspect, and although at times this may have been carried too far, the fault is on the right side, seeing that a people which surrenders its political rights in return for promises of economic security will soon discover that it has made a bad bargain, as it is helpless if the promises are not kept.” (R. N. Carew Hunt, in The Theory and Practice of Communism, quoted by Leonard Schapiro in Preface, p 9)
“As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-quaker prattle about the sanctity of human life.” (Trotsky in Dictatorship versus Democracy, p 63, quoted by R. N. Carew Hunt in The Theory and Practice of Communism, p 215)
“There is a deep-rooted idea in the ordinary English mind that it is extravagant and wrong to own books.” (J. B. Priestley, in 1927, according to Dinah Birch in TLS, June 20)
“These are the often shabby and warped personalities on which we depend. Once they were called by their real names [informers], now they are officially ‘informants’, and already there is a euphemistic tendency to turn them into ‘contacts’. They are a special breed, the life’s blood of Intelligence, and the world over they have an extraordinary thing in common: a strange and exclusive loyalty to one particular master. An informer is like a duckling newly freed from its shell and in need of fostering. He can be counted on to attach himself to the first person who is prepared to listen sympathetically to what he has to say, and prefers never to transfer his allegiance. In these first few days we all made half a dozen or so ‘contacts’.” (Norman Lewis, in Naples ’44, pp 32-32)
July
“A 2 per cent tax on assets above £10 m – which means hardly anybody’s house – for instance, would raise in excess of £12 bn a year, every year, and it would be a rational way of doing it, because property taxation in our country, asset taxation, is outdated.” (Neil Kinnock, in interview by Alan Rusbridger in Prospect, July)
“As an Australian, I’m personally not opposed to the odd spot of pom-bashing.” (Alexander Wells, in History Today, June)
“People in the Middle Ages had no inkling that they were medieval.” (George Garnett, in History Today, June)
“What is it about the British temperament that made us so capable of running an empire but so hopeless when it came to dividing it? A lack of emotional intelligence and empathy? Our habit of compromise might be admirable for day-to-day administration but is less useful for the building of new nations, when what was needed were clean lines not fudged ones.” (Hugh Thomson, in review of Sam Dalrymple’s Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern South Asia, in the Spectator, June 28)
“Identity is a slippery concept in the Carpathians, a part of Europe where countries have popped in and out of existence throughout the centuries, created or destroyed by changing borders. As a result, national identities are not as easily defined, or as robust, as they perhaps are in more stable parts of the continent. Many of the people Thorpe meets identify as Hutsul, Transylvanian, Boyko or Lemko – tribal or regional allegiances, compared to which nationality is an abstract concept. One ninety-five-year-old woman describes herself as a Hutsul from the Bohdan valley, while her seventy-eight-year-old daughter says she’s a Hutsul from the Breboja region. (Both are in the Transcarpathian area of Ukraine.) A retired ecologist Thorpe meets in Bratislava says that the “local patriotism” of many Carpathian people ‘is underestimated unfortunately by our liberal and democratic politicians and is tapped very effectively by our fascists and conservatives’ – a bitter irony, given that fascism was founded on the notion of a single homogenous [sic] nation.” (Mark Nayler, in review of Nick Thorpe’s Walking Europe’s Last Wilderness, in TLS, June 27)
“The boundaries around personhood are porous, a matter of social norms rather than scientific definition. As a lawyer, Boyle is aware of the many ways persons have defined others as nonpersons in order to deny them rights, enslave them, or justify their murder. A geneticist draws a line between Homo sapiens and other species, but Homo neanderthalensis might beg to differ, and Boyle rightly acknowledges ‘our prior history in failing to recognize the humanity and legal personhood of members of our own species.’” (James Gleick, in review of The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, and The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood, by James Boyle, in NYRB, July 24)
“Early Britons hunted, foraged and lived beneath forest canopies for nearly a million years, he writes, and they are therefore ‘as natural to us as breathing air and drinking water’. His initially surprising observation that ‘we have rainforests in our blood’ grows in force with every chapter.”
“He suggests that a return to natural environments is essential to cure ‘the mental health pandemic raging across the Western world’, as well as offering a means to alleviate certain diseases. He cites the theory of ‘environmental mismatch’, which proposes that we each are at our physical and psychological best when we live in the habitats in which our ancient predecessors evolved and engage in activities that ‘match the physical exertions and behaviours of our evolutionary forebears’. This means digging our hands into loamy soil, drinking water purified by forests and including “woodland fare” in our diets.” (Chloe Dalton, in review of Merlin Hanbury-Tenison’s Our Oaken Bones, in TLS, July 4)
“A dilemma faced by biographers is how much credence to give to information provided by those whose lives they write about, given that, by nature, these are not ‘objective’ sources.” (From letter by Daniel Waissbein in TLS, July 4)
“Movement is the part of us that is free, and it’s hard-wired. Walking across the land connects me with the wild self just as the Karakachan sheep, the Karakachan horse and the long-haired goat are now domesticated but carry the imprint of their wild selves. Biologists call it a ‘genetic bank’. Its currency is life itself. This whole place is a giant bank.” (From Kapka Kassabova’s Anima: A Wild Pastoral, p 333)
“The historian’s most challenging task is to pout himself, and his reader, back into the events he is treating as if they had not occurred and he did not know the ‘ultimate’ outcome. Rejecting the deceptive omniscience of hindsight, he must look forward with his characters toward their future, which is to him already in the past. Only this can he reopen what now appears to be closed, put himself in their places, see things as they looked to his protagonists before they made their choices among the possibilities of action. Only thus can he comprehend their dilemmas, appraise their achievements, misjudgements, errors, responsibilities, the consequences of their choosing to do one thing and not another, the results of their failure to foresee what might follow from what they do and leave undone. Only thus can he give to his story the breath of life, and extricate its human – that is to say, moral – significance.” (from Introduction to Bertrand D. Wolfe’s Three Who Made a Revolution)
“The intelligentsia, tending, as is the intellectuals’ habit, to elaborate temporary and superficial phenomena into deep and timeless generalizations, developed a new theory to fit the new situation.” (from Chapter 8, Prison and Exile, in Bertrand D. Wolfe’s Three Who Made a Revolution)
“I was merely following the first principle of scholarship: consult the soundest source. Your journalists don’t seem to work like that. Most of you only talk to people who are likely to tell you what you want to hear – the acceptable version.” (Tom Llewyllyn in Simon Raven’s The Rich Pay Later)
August
“Unlike Schlözer’s prominent contemporary at Göttingen, the ethnographer Christoph Meiners (1747–1810), who attributed racial differences to separate human species with independent origins (a view known as polygenesis), Herder subscribed to monogenesis, concluding that “mankind on earth are but one and the same species”. Unlike Kant, Herder apparently rejected racial categories, arguing that “the colors run into one another … on the whole all ultimately become shades of one and the same picture”. Yet at the same time, Herder makes evolutionist statements about people of colour that reinstate implicitly the very racial hierarchies he has just undermined. That said, he still sees slavery as a crime and an outrage, subjecting European missions, colonial trading companies and the diseases that they spread to withering criticism. Colonial interventions into non-European landscapes are regarded as a special kind of folly, since we should not “suppose that human art, with an impetuous and imperious act of will, can turn a remote corner of the earth into another Europe by felling its trees and cultivating its soil”. Herder does not escape the dominant Eurocentrism of his age, in other words, but he is more self-aware than most of his contemporaries.” (Angus Nicholls, in review of Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, in the TLS, July 18)
“As Hipp points out (and has been instrumental in proving), oaks could diversify and survive in part because of some quirks of reproduction that amount to self-directed evolution. In the traditional Darwinian model of evolution, a species splits when it can no longer interbreed and produce viable offspring, because populations are separated either geographically or genetically. The classic example is that of the horse and the donkey; the offspring, mules or hinnies, are normally infertile. Oaks defy this dogma through a mechanism called introgression, which allows two species to exchange genes, but maintain a clear difference. They do this by hybridizing, often choosing preferentially pollen with ‘odd’ genetics, and maintaining the acorns that develop with the ‘odd’ genes through two rounds of abortions, but then breeding again with their own species. As a result, a collection of unusual genes can be passed on to a tree that appears little different from the trees around it. If that gene provides an evolutionary advantage, it will spread through the population. In fact, nearly all members of the huge and diverse family of oaks can swap genes because, although the genes themselves greatly vary between trees, the fundamental structure of the chromosomes is highly conserved.” (Harriet Rix, in review of Andrew L. Hipp’s Oak Origins, in the TLS, July 18)
“Although Michael Haag’s new biography only covers the first thirty-three years of its subject’s long career, coming to a close with Larry’s wartime service at the British embassy in Cairo, the idea that you can behave in a particular way because you are an artist hangs over the proceedings like the scent of patchouli at a hippy wedding.” (D. J. Taylor, in review of books on the Durrells by Michael Haag and Richard Bradford, in Literary Review, July)
“When the American Civil War began, there were more slaves in the Muslim states of West Africa alone than there were in all of the American South. “ (Bartle Bull, in review of Justin Marozzi’s Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World, in Literary Review, July)
“Gimson’s book features all the ghastly types who have played a part in the decline of Britain’s economy over the last thirty years, from ineffectual civil servants, MPs who think they are local councillors, human rights lawyers, sock-puppet lobbyists and quangos to rapacious suppliers who can’t believe the perverse incentives baked into the system. HS2’s victims include homeowners and businesses forced to relocate, disrupted rail passengers, the landscape of the Chilterns and even the Treasury, which has been forced to write ever larger cheques at a time of economic stress.” (David Leeder, in review of Sally Gimson’s Off the Rails: the Inside Story of HS2, in Literary Review, August)
“However, says Vinen, Churchill’s lucrative histories, created with much assistance, were accurate but untrue, whereas de Gaulle’s memoirs, laboriously penned alone (the royalties going to charity), were inaccurate but true.” (Piers Brendon, in review of Richard Vinen’s The Last Titans: Churchill and de Gaulle, in Literary Review, August)
“Today, its [the red-cockaded woodpecker’s] population hovers around 17,000, but the bird is not out of the woods yet.” (from Nature Conservancy magazine, Issue 3, 2025)
“She [Larissa Salmina] knew all of Russia’s faults and was sometimes horrified by them, but also noted its positives – the education and cultural policies, the possibilities of genuine social mobility, the lack of materialism, the housing for the masses, all of which were considerably ahead of a country like Britain at the same time.” (Iain Pears, writing about Leningrad in 1949, in Parallel Lives, p 110)
“Letting an artist – painter, sculptor, poet, novelist – off the hook of moral responsibility on the grounds of creative achievement is no longer the critical fashion, and the hunger for money and social success that marked Gus’s [Augustus John’s] later years now looks tawdry.” (Dinah Birch, in review of Judith Mackrell’s Artists, Siblings, Visionaries, in TLS August 8)
“The very existence of sensitivity readers, Szetela claims, rests on a form of essentialism which implicitly sees Afro-American life, for example, as so opaque that it needs ;cultural ambassadors’ to explain it to white people and so homogeneous that a single person can claim to speak for ‘Black/African-American culture’ across history.” (Matthew Reisz, in review of That Book is Dangerous!: How Moral Panic, Social Media and the Culture Wars are Remaking Publishing, in the Spectator, August 16)
“The Soviets found it necessary to divide the area [Georgia] into some seventeen Autonomous Areas, Autonomous Regions and Autonomous Republics: the North Caucasian; the Adygeisk; the Cherkess; the Karachaevsk; the Kabardino-Balgar; the Northern Ossetian; the Southern Ossetian; the Chechen-Ingush; the Abkhaska; the Adzharskaya; the Nagorny-Karabagh; the Yakichev; the Orjonikidze; the Armenian; the Daghestan; and the Georgian. Nor does the above list complete the complexity of this patchwork of peoples. Thus, to take only one of the Autonomous Republics: in 1945 the Council of People’s Commissars of the Daghestan Republic included among its twenty-two members three Avars, five Kumyks, four Laks, two Lesgians and two Darghins.” (from Chapter 23, The Youth of Soso Djugashvili, in Bertrand D. Wolfe’s Three Who Made a Revolution)
“Our one agreed aim in the First World War was to break up German militarism. It was no part of our original intention to break up the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, to create Czechoslovakia or resurrect Poland, to make a Russian revolution, to treble the size of Serbia and double that of Rumania, to create Iraq and Estonia and Lithuania and a Jewish National Home, or to give the keys of the Brenner and the Adriatic to Italy. Yet, in the outcome, all these – and much else – sprang from the war . . . while the one thing which we promised ourselves, the destruction of German militarism, we failed to achieve.” (H. N. Fieldhouse, quoted by Bertrand D. Wolfe in Chapter 35, A World Ends, of Three Who Made a Revolution)
September
“The chief aim of the Society is to improve the standard of indexing, since I think you will agree that good indexing is the indispensable handmaiden of most of the arts and all the sciences, and that a book without an index is a country without a map.” (Gilfred Norman Knight to Harold Macmillan, November 1, 1957, from Indexing, the Society of Indexers and Harold Macmillan, in the Bodleian Library Record, Volume 37, Numbers 1-2, Spring/Autumn 2024)
“The mystery in all this, of course, is Stalin. His posture with the team, when they complained or tried to intercede, was that they were all in the same boat, at the mercy of the NKVD. When Georgy Dimitrov, head of the Comintern, raised such cases with him, his answer was, ‘What can I do for them, Georgy? All my own relatives are in prison, too.’” (from Sheila Fitzpatrick’s On Stalin’s Team, p 137)
“Stalin sometimes snapped at them: ‘What’s the point of talking to you? Whatever I say, you reply: ‘Yes, Comrade Stalin, of course, Comrade Stalin, you have taken a wise decision, Comrade Stalin.’” (from Sheila Fitzpatrick’s On Stalin’s Team, p 185)
‘Stalin was forcing his companions to drink to excess, so that they sometimes passed out and had to be carried home. In order to avoid the heavy drinking, Khrushchev reports, Beria, Malenkov, and Mikoyan at one point made an agreement with the waitresses to serve them colored water instead of wine – but then Alexander Shcherbakov, Zhdanov’s unpopular brother-in-law, gave them away. (Stalin was very angry at their deceit.)” (from Sheila Fitzpatrick’s On Stalin’s Team, p 199)
“Between 1935 and 1940, the report [by Pospelov] said, almost two million people had been arrested for anti-Soviet activity, and 688,503 had been shot.” (from Sheila Fitzpatrick’s On Stalin’s Team, p 243)
“Lents argues that, from an evolutionary perspective, an ‘ancestral’ heterosexual orientation would have limited our ability to respond to changes in the environment, and thereby our chances of survival; pansexuality was probably where we all began.” (Anna Machin, in review of Nathan H. Lents’s The Sexual Evolution, in TLS, September 5)
“He is ‘a great fan’ of the new usage of they for singular third persons as a way of avoiding specifying gender. And he does not mind the use of me as a subject (as in ‘Billy and me went to the store’).” (N. J. Enfield, in review of John McWhorter’s Pronoun Trouble, in TLS, September 5)
“In sum, it seems clear that the sitter in this miniature has deliberately chosen to present themselves [sic!] in an androgynous manner.” (Elizabeth Goldring, Emma Rutherford and Jonathan Bate, in A Woman’s Face . . . in TLS, September 5)
“Pilkington’s sense of numbers, history and magnitude is sometimes off. He writes that ‘liberalism is forming broken, atomized people who are unable to pass their genes to a future generation’, apparently oblivious to the fact that fertility rates are falling in many non-liberal countries as well – in Rusia, for example – where they are lower than in the U.S. In China, fertility is lower still. Is the liberal goal really to ‘replace the family with the state’? That sounds more like the non-liberal visions we find in western thought, running from Plato to the more extreme forms of communism in which children are encouraged to report on the supposed crimes of their parents.” (Tyler Cowen, in review of Philip Pilkington’s The Collapse of Global Liberalism, in TLS, September 5)
“As a Jew, I hardly believe that the government is defending me by defunding programmes in cell biology – and the government doesn’t believe it either. The ideological project is more cynical. The putative clamping down on antisemitism, like attacks on “immoral” humanists, is a means to reach the real goal, which is power pure and simple.” (Richard Sennett, in Power Complex, in TLS, September 19)
“While we wait, we talk of the great mysteries that have brought us here. Some turn on arcane physiological and behavioural facts. Here’s an example: the Greenland and the Siberian knots are the same species. They feed and flock together in the Wadden Sea. They could happily interbreed, producing healthy, functional knots. But they don’t. There’s food enough for the Siberian knots in the Wadden Sea and the North Sea. But they choose, or are compelled, to spend their winters in West Africa. If so, what compels them? Their genes? Come on! Genes just determine the order of amino acids in proteins. There is a yawning gulf between even the most sophisticated gene clusters and the whole organism and its behaviour. And why do the birds go, turning their backs on their Greenlandish flock-mates? Are the Greenland knots not sexually alluring? If not, why not? Is it that the Siberians and the Greenlanders can’t get it together because they are as culturally isolated from one another as an Amish farmer and a Manhattan HR executive? If so, what does that mean for knot culture in general? And for the quasi-languages in which their cultures and subcultures are articulated? Does the peep-peep-peep of the departing Siberians mean, ‘Leave these degenerate Europeans behind. Life in all its fullness is found only in Africa’?” (Charles Foster, in The island of Griend, in TLS, September 19)
“How [Harry] Hopkins can have gauged the morale of the Soviet people when he was only in Moscow for three days and had no contact with any Russians outside the Kremlin is hard to tell. A consistent supporter of aid to the USSR, he knew little of the country or her regime. ‘The trouble was that Harry knew only two things about the Soviet Union,’ an American diplomat later told the journalist John Gunther. ‘The first was that they had a bad tsar named Ivan the Terrible. The second was that Russia was the first country to recognize the United States after 1776.’” (footnote in Tim Bouverie’s Allies at War, p 199) “Relieved, Beaverbrook completely lost his head, describing Stalin as ‘a kindly man’ who ‘practically never shows any impatience at all’. The professional diplomats were less impressed. ‘Let history record that in those winter negotiations Stalin ran rings around his visitors’, wrote the Third Secretary of the British Embassy in Moscow, John Russell, adding that ‘for sheer nastiness, Stalin and Beaverbrook were about a match.’” (from Tim Bouverie’s Allies at War, p 203)
October
“This generational selfishness runs deeper than mere historical revisionism. Today’s activists and academics seem incapable of allowing historical figures to exist on their own terms. Everything must be filtered through the lens of contemporary grievance and struggle.” (John Mac Ghlionn, in review of Nicholas Boggs’s Baldwin: A Love Story, in The Spectator World, September 15)
“As historians have long recognized, what ‘actually happened’ in the past is no more significant than what different people at different times believe to have happened. Why do they evolve—or invent—new versions of the past, and how are these alternative narratives created and marketed to the public? Are historical witnesses to be believed simply because they were ‘there’?” (Neal Ascherson, in review of Chris Heath’s No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust, in NYRB, October 9)
“I think there’s also value in being confronted, over and over, with just how little is knowable. Every barren search felt like a useful rebuke…. The truth has holes in it, and the more we cover them up, the less real the world becomes.” (Chris Heath, in No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust, cited by Neal Ascherson in review in NYRB, October 9)
“Which means we can say this about Jimmy Kimmel: he made a technically true statement which employed pragmatic implication to advance a false proposition, while also falsely implying his opponents were uniquely prone to unevidenced assertions. Whether that is a suspension-worthy offence is debatable. But at least we have turned a combustible culture war flashpoint into something quite boring. And that, for philosophy, is a job well done.” (Regina Rini, in TLS, October 3)
“There they clashed over the principles of foreign policy. Thatcher had confidently declared that nuclear weapons were needed to defend ‘Western values’. Powell responded: ‘No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a communist government.’ After this startling riposte the two went at it. ‘Nonsense, Enoch. If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values.’ ‘No, prime minister, values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time. They can neither be fought for nor destroyed.’ Thatcher was reported to be ‘utterly baffled’ by this response.” (from David Runciman’s review of Tom McTague’s Between the Waves, in LRB, October 9)
“Never a communist, he felt emotional solidarity with the Soviet Union as an ally and was indignant if anybody criticised Soviet actions (‘Oh, the Poles!’). Sisman doesn’t ask the question, but it would be interesting to know if Briggs had anything to do with the other intelligence workers (often non-communists) who were so scandalised that Ultra data was withheld from the Red Army that they secretly supplied it themselves.” (Neal Ascherson, in review of Adam Sisman’s The Indefatigable Asa Briggs, in LRB, October 9)
“There are many intelligence officers and government officials, in all regimes, who prefer to keep their role and decisions secret, and thrive on secrecy in order to protect their careers and way of life. It guarantees their income, their status and their pensions. Secrecy is everything to them and far too often it is not for any motives of ‘national security’. In this desire to cover things up, they are too frequently encouraged – and joined – by their politic lamsters.” (John Hughes-Wilson, in Introduction to On Intelligence: The History of Espionage and the Secret World)
“Although in liberal democracies we tend not to literally shoot the messengers, bearers of unwelcome news can quickly become unpopular and find themselves sidelined and overlooked. The temptation is there for intelligence agencies therefore to pander to the preconception and whims of their masters. In their turn, decision makers all too often try and trim and even ignore intelligence that does not coincide with their priorities.” (John Hughes-Wilson, in On Intelligence: The History of Espionage and the Secret World, p 50)
“There is no doubt that many of the MI5 staff had the racist and supremacist attitudes that were common in Britain in the twentieth century.” (Paul Lashmar, in Spies, Spin, and the Fourth Estate, p 259)
“The British have developed a capacity for exceptionalism born of the supremacist nature of the Empire. We simply justify repressive actions against those whose actions we do not think are part of the normal by ‘othering’ them, whether they are ‘natives’, suffragettes, trade unionists, people of colour, lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT), Catholics, Jews or Muslims. These instincts sit uneasily next to the enlightened aspirations of British culture that include democracy, tolerance and aiding those in distress.” (Paul Lashmar, in Spies, Spin, and the Fourth Estate, p 266)
“In the wrong hands, GCHQ can make the Stasi in East Germany look like a surveillance cottage industry.” (Paul Lashmar, in Spies, Spin, and the Fourth Estate, p 268)
“Whether Europe’s news networks fostered such a sense of incipient transnational ‘community’ is open to doubt. As our contemporary experience of social media has demonstrated all too clearly, being connected to a shared international network does not necessarily conduce to a sense of membership of a community – often the reverse.” (John Adamson, in review of Joad Raymond Wren’s The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early Modern Europe, in Literary Review, October)
“After the war, having sent so many dissidents to the gallows, Reckzeh escaped to East Germany and resumed his career as a doctor. He died peacefully aged eight-two in 1996, but not before he betrayed his own daughter to the Stasi.” (Mark Cornwall, in review of Jonathan Freedland’s The Traitors Circle: The Rebels Against the Nazis and the Spy Who Betrayed Them, in Literary Review, October)
The United Species
“Now aged seventy and garlanded with countless awards and honours, he still fights for the growth of the web and its potential to unite our species.” (Bryan Appleyard, in review of Tim Berners-Lee’s This Is for Everyone, in Literary Review, October)
“‘Given a certain lapse of time,’ writes Graham Robb in this exhilarating chronicle of Britain, ‘all history is wrong, including the histories which correct the erroneous histories.’” (Nigel Andrew, in review of Graham Robb’s The Discovery of Britain: An Accidental History, in Literary Review, October)
“The Americans are a mercurial people, unduly swayed by sentiment and prejudice than by reason or even by consideration of their own long-term interests. Their Government is handicapped by an archaic constitution, sometimes to the point of impotence, and their policy is to an exceptional degree at the mercy both of electoral changes and of violent economic fluctuations, such as might bring about a neutralization of their influence in the world.” (from a Foreign Office paper of October 1946, cited by Julian Lewis in Changing Direction, p 285)
“Children detect nothing different in their own families: I can’t remember noticing anything extraordinary in our family being the only one I knew of that devoted every Sunday afternoon to amateur archaeology.” (Guy Davenport, in Finding, quoted by Wyatt Mason in NYRB, November 6)
“When Carter raised human rights issues in China, which in his Soviet-conditioned frame of mind was bound up with the right to emigrate, Deng offered to send 10 million Chinese to the US.” (from Edward Luce’s Zbig [Zbigniew Brzezinski], p 281)
“Brzezinski’s Darth Vader had morphed into Obi-Wan Kenobi.” (from Edward Luce’s Zbig [Zbigniew Brzezinski], p 430)
“What’s changed now is that migration has become a political instrument. It’s used to transform liberal societies into something different. Liberalism depends on trust, continuity, procedural respect. You can’t infinitely expand the circle and expect those conditions to persist.” (Nick Land, quoted in The Spectator World, October 27)
November
“Espionage is one of the few proud cases, in my thoroughly biased view, in which historical truth has been better served by fiction than by . . . confections of warmed-up fact.” (John le Carré, according to John Phipps in Literary Review, November)
“Suppose we took all the [human] genetic material in the world – that is, if we extracted all the DNA from one cell of every human being alive today, and packed all this DNA together, to give a file copy of the blueprints for the human race – it would fill a space about the size of a rather small drop of water.” (Francis Crick, in a BBC broadcast in 1960, according to John Gribbin in Literary Review, November)
“The world is now in a very curious state. It is more united and more divided than it has ever been. It is united in technology; nothing of importance can happen anywhere without everyone hearing about it immediately, and seldom without repercussions all round. But this little planet, so covered over with this tight skein of technology, is divided by deep rifts of ideology. Technology imposes on us all a necessity to work together, which ideology renders inoperative.” (Sir William Hayter, in Introduction to Russia and the World, published in 1970)
“The fatal attraction of the government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices paid by others.” (Thomas Sowell, according to Ben Domenech in Spectator World, November 10)
“Anyone who wants reparations based on history will have to gerrymander history very carefully. Otherwise, practically everybody would owe reparations to practically everybody else.” (Thomas Sowell, according to Ben Domenech in Spectator World, November 10)
“It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral outrage in their ignorance.” (Thomas Sowell, according to Ben Domenech in Spectator World, November 10)
“Gee believes the only way our decline could be reversed is to recreate the conditions that existed more than forty thousand years ago.” (David Runciman, in review of Henry Gee’s The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why Our Species Is On The Edge of Extinction, in LRB, November 20)
“As Professor G. C. Williams of Princeton has said: ‘The mere presence of an adaptation is no argument for its necessity.’ Neo-Darwinism, he complains, ‘has provided very little guidance in the work of biologists.’ It has provided few generalisations and is too often employed ‘to give a vague aura of validity to conclusions on adaptive evolution’. And he adds acidly: ‘A biologist can make any theory seem scientifically acceptable by merely adorning his arguments with the forms and symbols of natural selection’.” (from Gordon Rattray Taylor’s The Great Evolution Mystery, p 11)
“The trouble with the theory of natural selection is that it is virtually impossible either to prove it or disprove it. The Philosopher Karl Popper insists that unless a theory is falsifiable (in the event of being false) then it is useless and does not deserve to be called a scientific theory. He points to the Darwinian theory as a perfect instance.” (from Gordon Rattray Taylor’s The Great Evolution Mystery, p 33)
“Nineteenth-century observers assumed that the giraffe had only to develop a longer neck and legs to be able to reach the leaves which other animals could not. But in fact such growth created severe problems. The giraffe has to pump blood up about eight feet to its head. The solution it reached was to have a heart that beats faster than average and a high blood pressure. When the giraffe puts his head down to drink, he suffers a rush of blood to the head, so a special pressure-reducing mechanism, the rete mirabile, had to be provided to deal with this. However, much more intractable are the problems of breathing through an eight-foot tube. If man tried to do so, he would die – not from lack of oxygen so much as poisoning by his own carbon dioxide. For the tube would fill with his expired, deoxygenated breath, and he would keep reinhaling it.” (from Gordon Rattray Taylor’s The Great Evolution Mystery, p 157)
“Darwinism is not so much a theory, as a sub-section of some theory as yet unformulated. Its greatest weakness is that it cannot be disproved. For very circumstance it is possible to imagine some justification. If a species survives, we are told that it adapted. If it fails to survive, that it failed to adapt. If it displays some unusual feature, we are told that it is an adaptive advantage – but whether it really is or not can never be proved.” (from Gordon Rattray Taylor’s The Great Evolution Mystery, p 233)
“Our inability to know the future leads us to search harder to construct our past. Memory is thus not, as many prefer to think, a straightforward act of retrieval, but always something recreated, always at least a partial fiction. ‘I remember, that is, I invent.’” (Nick Holdstock, in review of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding, in TLS, November 14)
“Yet there is another possible business rationale for closing the archives to outsiders in a hostile content climate. It shuts down new perspectives on the past and inhibits the production of biographies and memoirs of less branded names that would be of interest to the public, but over which the BBC would not exert control. It avoids potential leaks, content heists and future embarrassments for the corporation.” (J. E. Smyth in Who controls the past, on the BBC’s restricting access to its archives, in TLS, November 14)
On Stefan Collini
“The book I most enjoyed this year was Stefan Collini’s Literature and Learning: A history of English Studies in Britain (OUP), which displayed his usual interpretative expertise to stunning effect.” (D. J. Taylor, in Books of the Year, in TLS, November 14)
“His conception of what matters in a historical account has a gigantic omission, which can be summed up as a refusal to follow the money. Unfortunately this is not all, and not the worst. I cannot see what purpose the book serves, or what good it will do: it is almost the definition of an ‘academic exercise’, the last thing I would have expected from its author.” (Daniel Karlin, in review of Stefan Collini’s Literature and Learning, in TLS, November 14)
“This is a caricature of narrative history, attributing to it a wilful fraud on the public (‘to create the illusion of comprehensive coverage and seamless continuity’). No historian would make such a claim or expect their readers to swallow it. The implication that ‘the “and then . . . and then . . .” model’ is a simplistic form of historical writing is mistaken (as the ‘historical’ books of the Old Testament show), leaving aside the fact that few narrative histories actually conform to it. Historians who base their method on chronology are perfectly capable of looking before and after.” (Daniel Karlin, in review of Stefan Collini’s Literature and Learning, in TLS, November 14)
“Even if the distinction between ‘history’ and ‘polemic’ could be maintained (and it can’t), it would be sterilizing; the effort at objectivity leads, inevitably, to the question of why the history of anything matters in the first place. ‘So what?’ is the most devastating question that can be put to a historian.” (Daniel Karlin, in review of Stefan Collini’s Literature and Learning, in TLS, November 14)
“The late Lord Rothschild, who inherited a barony created in 1885, told Doughty that ‘he didn’t regard himself as an aristocrat’ because ‘you think of old English families and we’re not an old English family. I don’t think it’s about being Jewish or not being English . . . it’s to do with having been around for more than a hundred years.’” (Michael Hall, in review of Eleanor Doughty’s Heirs and Graces, in the TLS, October 17)
“When I majored in history at Yale, I once asked the eminent American historian Edmund Morgan whether he didn’t think that all revolutions had the same basic structure. If I believed that,’ he replied kindly, ‘I wouldn’t be a historian.’ I was taught that the worst error a historian can make is to be ‘ahistorical’ – to fail to recognize that even things that seem familiar today were part of a mindset very different from our own.” (Joan C. Williams, in review of Victoria Bateman’s Economica, in TLS, October 17)
December
“And like other major social institutions, marriage is not some arbitrary cultural construct like a bank holiday. Rather, it rests on genetically shaped behaviours that evolution has written into the human genome because of their survival value. Suppress or subvert these behaviours and you risk consequences.” (Nichoals Wade, in Spectator, November 29)
“Despite his, successive Great Awakenings, between the early 18th and later 20th centuries, prove that good puritan genes have been passed down through generations of American culture, manifesting in a fondness for unabashed public piety and the invocation of divine providence.” (Malcolm Gaskill, in review of A Common Grave: Being Catholic in English America, in LRB, December 4)
“The book also emphasised that the true task of the historian is to distinguish the dynamic from the static, the aberration from the trend. It is impossible to convey the excitement of that approach back in 1964.” (Geoffrey Parker on Braudel’s The Mediterranean, in History Today, November)
“In 1974 Tom Handy described to a SOOHP [Senior Officers Oral History Program] interviewer a conversation he had heard between Dykes and Bedell Smith over the draft minutes of one Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting:
Bedell Smith: ‘This sounds just fine; in fact it’s wonderful. There isn’t but one thing wrong with it.’
Dykes: ‘What’s that?”
Bedell Smith: ‘Hell, this isn’t what he said!’
Dykes: ‘I know damn well it isn’t, but it’s what he should have said. You see, these soldiers won’t object if somebody writes down what he should have said.’” (from Andrew Roberts’s Masters and Commanders, p 95)
“Old men forget, but old statesmen forget selectively.” (from Andrew Roberts’s Masters and Commanders, p 240)
“The Foreign Secretary [Eden] said that Roosevelt had asked him whether ‘he thought that Russia would want to “Communise” Europe after the war’, and he replied that ‘he did not think so, and that he thought one of the best way of avoiding this was that we should do what we could to keep on good terms with Russia’.” (from Andrew Roberts’s Masters and Commanders, p 356)
“Lenin’s solution [to the problem of ‘housework being the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do’] was not a more equitable allocation of domestic duties, but the state provision of nurseries, canteens and laundries that would liberate women from ‘that petty, stultifying, unproductive work’”. (Wendy Slater, in review of Julia Ioffe’s Motherland, in TLS, December 12)
“Pope was a satirist to his toenails, and a satirist must believe that whatever is is wrong.” (John Carey, in The Unexpected Professor, p 116)
“’Tell me, Anthony, about Roger Makins. You like him? Is he good?’
Eden: ‘Yes, I think he is very able. But the Prof. [Frederick Lindemann, Viscount Cherwell] here knows all about him.’
Prof.: ‘He passed into the F.O. at the top of the list after a brilliant first at Oxford. He is a Fellow of All Souls.’
Eden (smiling): ‘And he’s sensible in spite of that.” (from Lord Moran’s Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1945-1960, p 80, on December 30, 1951)
“A man in his eightieth year does not want to do things.” (Winston Churchill, from Lord Moran’s Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1945-1960, p 238, onDecember 30, 1953)
“And yet in this war no one, I suppose, thinks of a general as a military genius dictating the course of events by his craft. It is what Marshall was, and not what he did, that lingers in the mind – his goodness seemed to put ambition out of countenance.” (from Lord Moran’s Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1945-1960, p 283, on June 25, 1954)
“If Hitler had no blue print for conquest . . . then to follow Taylor’s reasoning, how much weight should we attach to Khrushchev’s claim that he will bury capitalism? If Hitler was only acting under the pressure of events to secure for Germany only what was right and just, may not Khrushchev be taken as merely a Russian version of the Geran model?” (Louis Morton, in World Politics, XIV, 392, quoted by C. Robert Cole in Critics of the Taylor View of History, from The Origins of the Second World War, edited by Esmonde M. Robertson)