Recent Commonplace Entries

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)