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)