January
“‘What kills political writing’, Lippmann wrote, was the ‘absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes on what you think.”’ (Andrew O’Hagan, in review of Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography by Tom Arnold-Forster, in LRB, December 25, 2025)
“If you read Lippman’s columns in the era of ‘duck and cover’, of threatened nuclear annihilation, you find a man suddenly opposed to any sort of ‘ideological crusade’, who saw Soviet expansionism as a feature of Russiannness, as opposed to communism, a matter on which he has been proved correct.” (Andrew O’Hagan, in review of Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography by Tom Arnold-Forster, in LRB, December 25, 2025)
“These missing records must have been carefully removed, not by Amin or his brutal henchmen but by ordinary people employed by the regime as photographers, report writers, and clerks. Together they cleansed the official record, leaving historians with only the written accounts of witnesses and reporters and the fading memories of survivors. This tells us something about historiography and how some archives, like some people, repress, consciously or not, the most painful events of the past.” (Helen Epstein, in NYRB, January 15)
“The secret of happiness, it has been said, is to develop habits whose repetition we find enjoyable and whose outcomes we find satisfying.” (Stefan Collini, in Rolling it out: V. S. Pritchett’s Writing Life, from Common Reading)
“One of the most precious freedoms of the British is freedom from culture.” (Lord Goodman, then Chairman of the Arts Council, in the 1960s, according to Stefan Collini, in From Deference to Diversity, from Common Reading)
“In a sense, I thought, the more you know about people, the less you can possibly blame them for their behaviour; and their being irreproachable implies a hostility in fate or circumstance, which becomes very frightening when applied to oneself.” (from Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Beautiful Visit, p 307)
“Capitalism is everywhere, and almost everyone hates it. The left, of course, has always been against it, as it produces extreme inequality of wealth and incomes. The right, too, has come round to thinking that it dissolves social relations and hierarchies.” (Harold James, in review of Sven Beckert’s Capitalism, in TLS, December 26, 2025)
“It is therefore unwise to jump to conclusions at first sight in Counter-Intelligence work. Nevertheless, the man with great experience can often make an immediate summing-up which may appear intuitive but which is in fact based on certain signs that appear to him at once although they would probably be missed by the untrained observer. Just as an architect can sum up a set of plans, or at least gain a definite impression of them, at a glance, or an editor assesses an article by skimming over it quickly, so also can a trained interrogator derive important information from his first glimpses of a suspect. It is unwise to follow hunches blindly, but all the same hunches often lead one to the demonstrable truths.” (from Chapter XXII of Lt. Col. Oreste Pinto’s Spycatcher Omnibus)
“But in England or the United States which have enjoyed enlightened democratic government for many years, a man only becomes a Communist for personal reasons. Being unable to advance himself in free competition with his fellow-workers, he may look to ‘Der Tag’ when the Revolution will reward the faithful with leading jobs under the new State. He may be a delayed adolescent who delights in the thrills of intrigue, secret passwords and the knowledge that he is a dangerous and marked individual. He may be a social misfit wreaking his vengeance on a society which (he thinks) casts him out. He may be a sincere, wholly-thinking crank who confuses the teaching of Christianity with the rigid tyranny of the Soviet state. Whichever category he may fall into, he is a menace to the well-being of the State and should be treated as such.” (from Chapter XXIX of Lt. Col. Oreste Pinto’s Spycatcher Omnibus)
“Europe has enormous assets, vital to the fate of the world. It has educated citizens, vibrant cultures and vigorously free societies. Most of its countries have large, skilled and valued sectors for making things and developing a workforce, enviable in many ways, including people who can operate at the cutting edge of technological innovation. But it is addicted to benefits and processes that, as in parts of the US, have tipped the balance away from constructive dynamism and a professional determination to get things done.” (Philip Zelikow, in review of David Marsh’s Can Europe Survive?, in TLS, January 9)
“At its worst the principle of self-determination is a license to intervention and aggression. In any event it is a council of despair. Despite its superficial ‘democracy’ the principle of self-determination is in an exact sense deeply un-American and uncivilizing. For it rejects the civilized ideal, which is the American ideal, that comes down to us from the Roman world and has persisted in the great tradition of he West. It is the ideal of a state within which diverse people find justice and liberty under equal laws, and become a commonwealth. Self-determination, which has nothing to do with self-government but has become confused with it, is barbarous and reactionary; by sanctioning secession it invites majorities and minorities to be intransigent and irreconcilable. It is stipulated in the principle of self-determination that they need not be compatriots because they will soon be aliens. There is no end to this atomization of human society. Within the minorities who have seceded there will tend to appear other minorities who in their turn wish to secede.” (Walter Lippman, in US War Aims, quoted by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in review of Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography by Tom Arnold-Foster, in TLS, January 9)
“And sometime, guilt and innocence became relative. When people were in unnecessary possession of troublesome facts, it wasn’t crucial to ascertain that they meant to do anything with the information. Possession, after all, was nine-tenths of the law: which made it mostly legal to ensure discretion was permanent. Many senior civil servants, the Old Buffer told Crane, anticipate a K at the end of their career; but if, hypothetically, a particular senior civil servant opened the wrong file at the wrong time to learn, say, that the American air bases then in Britain held weaponry of a type not formally disclosed to the people’s elected representatives, he might look forward, instead, to an accident on an icy stretch of road. It did not matter that his loyalty was never in question. What mattered was that the secrecy was preserved intact.” (From Nick Herron’s Down Cemetery Road, p 276)
“When Stalin pledged free elections at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 he meant to keep his word, more or less.” (Eduard Mark, in Spying Through a Glass Darkly, by David Alvarez and Eduard Mark, p 177)
“The causal relationship between intelligence and decision is often the most elusive element in intelligence history. Intelligence is only one of any number of factors – personal ambition, bureaucratic and partisan politics, previous experience with a government or national leader, decision-making style, race, education, status, religion, ethnicity, gender – that might influence foreign policy maker, and it is very difficult to determine the relative influence of any one of these factors.” (from Spying Through a Glass Darkly, by David Alvarez and Eduard Mark, p 282)
“I have never been able to understand the tendency to regard philanderers as idlers. The miner, at the end of his shift, hands over his pick and shovel to his relief, and the harassed accountant can lock up an unfinished balance sheet in a drawer until Monday morning. But a woman can neither be locked up in a drawer, nor, as a general rule, handed over to a substitute. Although the mental, physical and nervous output is often far greater than in coal-mining or accountancy, respite is uncertain and fortuitous.” (from David Footman’s Pig and Pepper, Chapter 5)
“Good company is not intellectual company, nor, as we are apt to think in our extreme youth, company in which we ourselves sparkle. For good company, that sure comfort for our failures and disappointments, is the sinking of out own personal pettiness in an overwhelming consciousness of common humanity; quickened, if possible, by a common appreciation of gin.” (from David Footman’s Pig and Pepper, Chapter 38)
“Whatever his motives may be, the role of a spy is to betray trust. A man who has volunteered, or been tapped, to commit treason cannot logically ever be trusted again. Every aspect of a spy’s relationship with his case officer, or intelligence service, stems from that basic premise.” (from William Hood’s Mole, p 45)
February
“‘The great challenge facing the storyteller and the historian alike is to get inside people’s heads . . . to make some informed estimate of their motives and intentions,’ wrote Michael Frayn discussing Copenhagen, his play about the physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. ‘And this is precisely where recorded and recordable history cannot reach. Even when all the external evidence has been mastered, the only way into the protagonists’ heads is through the imagination.’” (Arthur I. Miller in the Spectator, January 24)
“This prompts reflections on the ‘unresolved trauma’ of slavery supposedly haunting the Black psyche – claims that sound, to my ear, a touch far-fetched. Much has been made of this ‘epigenetic trauma’ lately. I remain unconvinced. Most of us are descended from peasants and proles, whose lives were proverbially nasty, brutish and short. Practically every human on the planet, then, should be in line for counselling and back pay.” (Pratinav Anil, in review of Reparations, by Neil Biggar, and The Big Payback, by Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder, in TLS, January 23)
“Cheque-writing, then, is not atonement. It risks elite capture, corrodes solidarity, and offers the sedative of moral closure. The real task, as Sudhir Hazareesingh, Margot Finn and the better historians suggest, is reparative history: placing slavery in public memory without either self-congratulation or self-flagellation. That requires research grants, not reparations cheques.” (Pratinav Anil, in review of Reparations, by Neil Biggar, and The Big Payback, by Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder, in TLS, January 23)
“But to be clear: ‘networks’ in this sense are not real. Religious beliefs and practices are not packets of DNA or electrons. They do not propagate themselves. Every ‘node’ in these ‘networks’ is a human being, that is, the most irreducibly complex phenomenon in existence. Writing history of any kind – in fact, thinking about human beings at all – requires a heroic, insolent degree of oversimplification. Which is fine: as long as we remember that that is what we are doing and don’t get entranced by the metaphors with which we do it.” (Alec Ryrie, in review of David N. Hempton’s Christianity at the Crossroads: The Global Church from the Print Revolution to the Digital Era, in History Today, December 2025)
“Election interference, sabotage and sponsorship of anti-Communist guerrillas were the domain of the Office of Policy-Coordination, the ‘cowboys’ to the OSO’s [Office of Special Operations’] ‘librarians’.” (Christian Lorentzen, on James Angleton and the CIA, in review of True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen by Lance Richardson, in LRB, February 5)
“As for Harold Laski, who never supported him as Labour leader, Attlee later wrote that he was ‘a brilliant chap, but he talked too much . . . He wanted to be a public figure and an éminence grise at the same time. You can’t be both. I gave him a try as an éminence grise, but he started making speeches at the week-ends. I had to get rid of him.” (from Gill Bennett’s The Zinoviev Letter, p 157)
“Austerity was a moral, political, intellectual, and humanitarian failure, possibly the single worst and most socially destructive economic idea perpetrated on the world so far this century.” (Trevor Jackson, in NYRB, February 26)
“That opacity is another kind of accountability sink: you didn’t lose your job because we made a decision; you lost your job because of credit rigidities from short-term interest rate adjustments targeting the nonaccelerating inflation rate of employment.” (Trevor Jackson, in NYRB, February 26)
“When Stalin pledged free elections at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 he meant to keep his word, more or less.” (from Spying Through a Glass Darkly, by David Alvarez & Eduard Mark, p 177)
“The causal relationship between intelligence and decision is often the most elusive element in intelligence history. Intelligence is only one of any number of factors – personal ambition, bureaucratic and partisan politics, previous experience with a government or national leader, decision-making style, race, education, economic status, religion, ethnicity, gender – that might influence a foreign policy maker, and it is very difficult to determine the relevant influence of any of these factors.” .” (from Spying Through a Glass Darkly, by David Alvarez & Eduard Mark, pp 281-282)
“Sometimes revolutions deliver a second-best result: although Leninism never evolved into genuine socialism, it did industrialise a hitherto agrarian Russia.” (Richard Bourke, in review of Dan Edelsten’s The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin and Donald Sassoon’s Revolutions: A New History, in Literary Review, February)
“It is possible to conjecture, without a statistical survey, that the large majority of self-identifying Christians still perceive and feel comfortable with a traditional God – a humanoid with human emotions and ambitions, gender and personality – a man, perhaps a little like Harold Macmillan, sitting comfortably on a throne in a chamber of cumulonimbus somewhere above us.” (Peter Burden, in letter to Prospect, March)
“And yet a paradox runs through reactionary feminist thought: human nature is said to be fixed and unalterable, while also being perpetually threatened by progressive reformers bent on ‘de-sexing and disembodying us all’. If nature is truly immovable, one wonders why it requires such vigilant policing.” (James Bloodworth in Prospect, March)
“To be fair, by this point Drayson is wandering far from her area of Andalusian expertise, allowing her blithely to assure readers that Tatarstan’s ‘multiculturalism constitutes a workable social model’ for the rest of Europe! Such is the potential folly when the historical profession – medievalists included – become convinced its highest purpose is to intervene in politics.” (Nile Green, in review of Elizabeth Drayson’s Crucible of Light in TLS, February 20)
March
“Many British and American officers in the Balkans were simply incapable of objective analysis. Their crude, classicist-orientalist educations left them with a skewed worldview that infantilized the people they were supposed to be providing intelligence on. Strangely, much better intelligence was coming from a handful of Australians who possessed a fraction of the formal education, but none of the bias.” (from Edmund Goldrick’s Anzac Guerrillas, p 269)
“However, chronological continuity is essential, and it is up to professional historians to ensure that it is established and preserved. Missing historical narratives simply have to be constructed by someone – the black holes in our collective past simply have to be filled. Yet in this age of ‘trending’ topics and instant gratification, such historiographical housekeeping is likely to be neglected unless undertaken by such emeriti as the present writer, with their careers behind them and with time on their hands, and also with a fervent desire to see history not just nurtured and written, but well written, well published, and professionally curated.” (Dr Adrian O’Sullivan, in Joe Spencer’s Ratcatchers: British Security Intelligence in Occupied Persia)
“Verification is required of the researcher on a multitude of points – from getting an author’s first name correct to proving that a document is both genuine and authentic. *
* The two adjectives may seem synonymous but they are not: that is genuine which is not forged, and that is authentic which truthfully reports on its ostensible subject. Thus an art critic might write an account of an exhibition he had never visited; his manuscript would be genuine but not authentic. Conversely, an authentic report of an event by X might be copied by a forger and passed off as the original. It would then be authentic but not genuine.” (from Chapter 5 of The Modern Researcher by Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff)
“During more than a hundred years . . . every [English] man has felt entire confidence that the state would protect him in the possession of what had been earned by his diligence and hoarded by his self-denial. Under the benignant influence of peace and liberty, science has flourished and has been applied to practical purposes on a scale never before known. The consequence is that a change to which the history of the old world furnishes no parallel has taken place in our country.” (Lord Macaulay in History of England from the Accession of James Second, 1:261, quoted by Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff in The Modern Researcher, p 189)
“In October last year 2.17 million people, 507,000 of them children, were in contact with mental health services in England. In 2023-24, 958,000 children, 8 per cent of the twelve million children in England, had an active referral to the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Services. In 2013-14 this figure was 157,000. Some see in this huge increase evidence of welcome attention being paid to previously disregarded problems, or they believe it demonstrates the destabilising effects of late capitalism or the irresponsible actions of social media companies. Others argue that it is an effect of attitudinal shifts or policy changes that prompt people to push for diagnoses they don’t need.” (Paul Tayor, in review of Suzanne O’Sullivan’s The Age of Diagnosis, in LRB, March 5)
“No history, however bent on emphasizing collective decisions, can manage to get rid of the disturbing presence of individuals: they are simply there.” (Arnaldo Momigliano, according to Benjamin Nathans in TLS, March 6)
“Kings and generals do not trip over pebbles. But when they do, history is inclined to imagine a treacherous hand placing that pebble in their path.” (from The Battle of Arnhem, by Cornelis Bauer, p 81)
“If you want to hurt a reporter, ignore him. If you really want to hurt him, indicate that you’re unaware of his work.” (Lloyd Blankfein, from Streetwise: Getting To And Through Goldman Sacks, cited by Lionel Barber in his review in the Spectator, March 14)
“In every calm and reasonable person there is a hidden second person scared witless about death.” (Philip Roth, according to Simon Ings, in the Spectator, March 14)
“It [1776] also saw one of the whiniest publications in history, a tedious sob story called the Declaration of Independence, in which a collection of colonial real-estate speculators, no longer at risk from the Spanish or French, confected a litany of spurious grievances they claimed to have suffered at the hands of the British Crown largely to advance their own narrow financial ambitions.” (Rory Sutherland, in the Spectator, March 14)
“‘Microchimerism’ is an umbrella term now used for low-level genetic diversity within an organism owing to DNA from others. (Genetic diversity due to mutation in an organism’s own DNA is ‘mosaicism’.)” (Gregory Radick, in review of Lise Barnéoud’s Living Cells, in TLS, March 20)