Recent Commonplace Entries

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)