Recent Commonplace Entries

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 Stephan 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)