Recent Commonplace Entries

October

“In both Citizen Cohn and Angels in America, while he is slowly dying from AIDS-related conditions, he is haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, the alleged Soviet spy he sent to the electric chair in 1953.” (Fintan O’Toole, in review of American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark, in NYRB, October 8)

“‘Grounded’ is the mot juste. Ragtime is a much better book than Doctorow’s Book of Daniel, the main theme of which is that the Rosenbergs were innocent.” (John Lukacs in Remembered Past, p 315)

“Two weeks after the US bombing of Hiroshima, Stalin gave the order to create a Soviet bomb, an enormous scientific and industrial undertaking that involved hundreds of thousands of workers.” (Jerry Brown, in review of three books on nuclear weapons, in NYRB, October 8)

“The resulting bodily modifications accumulate adaptively within lineages as individuals in successive generations transmit to their offspring the physical alterations acquired during their lifetimes.” (Ian Tattersall, in review of Jessica Riskin’s The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, in NYRB, October 8)

‘Interbred’? ‘Fundamentally’?

“The mapping of the Neanderthal genome in 2010 showed that Neanderthals are not just among us, but within us. Between 52,000 and 39,000 years ago, humans and Neanderthals interbred repeatedly over a period lasting around 7,000 years, leaving nearly a third of the Neanderthal genome as fragments scattered across the DNA of the global population. Neanderthals were not a fundamentally different species but a closely related group of human peoples.” (Helen Wickstead, in The Missing Link?, a review of Peter Sahlins’ Neanderthals Among Us: The Making of a Prehistoric Human, in History Today, October)

“Unproductive by nature, inert, without industry or understanding, without justice or modesty, [the woman] needs a father, a brother, a lover, a husband, a master, a man, in short, to give her, if I may put it that way, the magnetism that makes her capable of masculine virtues, of social and intellectual faculties.” (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in 1858, according to David Todd in his review of The People’s Emperor: The Unlikely Rise and Spectacular Fall of Napoleon III, by Edward Shawcross, in LRB, October 8)

“The computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton estimated early in 2024 that there was a 10 per cent chance of AI wiping out humanity in the next twenty years.” (Paul Taylor in LRB, October 8)

“The child of a mixed marriage – his father was Jewish, his mother not  . . .” (Chris Mullin on Alf Dubs, in Spectator, October 3)

“Around the turn of the century, Akindin began his own family. He had inherited blue eyes from his Russian father and curly black hair from his Greek mother, whereas his wife, Tatyana, a Karelian Finn, had blond hair, a delicate, ruddy, complexion, and black eyes. ‘We have been Cossacks for ten generations,’ he proudly told his children  . . .” (from Luba Brezhneva’s The World I Left Behind, p 38)

“The Russian people did display extraordinary courage, defending every inch of soil with exemplary tenacity, though will due respect to my uncle [who declared it was only ‘under the guidance of our party], the party had nothing to do with it. The soldiers were defending their homes, their children, their loved ones, their parents and grandparents – in a word, their motherland.” (from Luba Brezhneva’s The World I Left Behind, p 61)

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Yasha, what are you talking about? All that stuff about communism is a tall tale for popular consumption. After all, we can’t leave the people with ho faith. The church was taken away, the czar as shot, and something had to be substituted. So let the people build communism.” (Leonid Brezhnev to his brother, (from Luba Brezhneva’s The World I Left Behind, p 162)

“The happy few are those who remain emotionally alive, who never compromise, who never succumb to cynicism or the routine of the second-hand. The happy few are not necessarily happy.” (Anita Brookner, in 1974 lecture on Jacques-Louis David, quoted by Elizabeth Lowry in TLS, October 2)

“If historians cannot tell us what will happen, the best of them remind us what has always been true.” (Eamonn Gearon, in review of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Cauldron, in TLS, October 2)

“Whether these invented incidentals aid or distort historical understanding must be moot. They speak to modern taste by giving the impression that history can mimic historical novels in recreating the past, but of course the scenes Smith conjures up are based on sources, which are themselves confections of edited memories, didacticism and invention. Narrative history can be deceptive in its uncertainty.” (Christopher Tyerman, in review of Thomas Smith’s The Fifth Crusade, in TLS, October 2)

“Lustig’s earliest known forebear was Jacob Segal HaLevi of Nuremberg, who died in 1380.”

“’To know ourselves’ he writes, ‘we have to know from whom we are descended.’” (Caroline Moorehead, in review of Robin Lustig’s And The Cello Came Too, in TLS, October 2)

“Recounting a last-minute decision in 1998 that spared him from boarding the ill-fated Swissair flight that crashed off Nova Scotia, killing all on board, he notes that he and his wife ‘both thanked God’, seemingly unaware of the moral obtuseness of that gesture. One recalls Primo Levi’s response to a fellow Auschwitz prisoner who tanked God for surviving a selection that condemned others: ‘If I were God, I’d spit at Kuhn’s prayer.’” (Lawrence Douglas, in review of Theodor Meron’s A Thousand Miracles, in TLS, October 2)

“It was [Ernst] Nolte most of all who aroused his [Habermas’s] fury in 1986 by insinuating that the murder of European Jews had not been unique but merely a preemptive response to Soviet crimes.” (Peter E. Gordon, in review of three books on Jürgen Habermas, in NYRB, October 22)

“In general, poetry, history and philosophy ought to be suffered, like calico and cutlery, to find their proper place in the market, and that to teach men of letters to look habitually to the state for their recompense is bad for the state and bad for letters.” (Lord Macaulay, quoted by Philip Hensher in review of Alexandra Wilson’s Culture Vultures: When Activism Meets the Arts, in the Spectator, October 17)

“The behaviour of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.” (Robert Conquest’s Third Law, as cited by Philip Hensher in review of Alexandra Wilson’s Culture Vultures: Where Activism Meets the Arts, in the Spectator, October 17)

“Men endowed with the mature and contrite sense that their knowledge an understanding are circumscribed by the very nature of their being do not aspire definitive statements, do not pretend to speak for all time, and do not incline to dream of utopia (or the apocalypse).” (Mark G. Malvasi and Jeffrey O. Nelson, in Preface to John Lukacs’ Remembered Past)

““He [Lukacs] derides such constructs as:

            Human Rights Amendments and ‘Star Wars’; Sex Education and the Intelligence Community (whatever that is); World Government and Making the World Safe for Democracy; Abstract Art and the Gross National Product; Nuclear Power and Genetic Engineering; Quarks and Black Holes; Ecumenicism and the Science of Economics; Cybernetics and National Security; Computer Intelligence and Opinion Research; Psychohistory and Quantification, and so on, and so on.” (from Confessions of an Original Sinner).” (Mark G. Malvasi and Jeffrey O. Nelson, in Preface to John Lukacs’ Remembered Past)

“Little professional advantage or reputation accrues to scholars who dare criticize approved methods, impugn cherished theories, and question authorized conclusions. Those who adopt unpopular values and assumptions become immediately suspect, their work regarded as illegitimate, disreputable, and worst of all, insignificant.” (Mark G. Malvasi and Jeffrey O. Nelson, in Preface to John Lukacs’ Remembered Past)

There are the personal, the non-personal, and the collective areas of life. One cannot reach the non-personal except from what is personal; from the collective, never. Something must become personal first; after that one may go forward to what is no longer personal.” (János Pilinsky, quoted by John Lukacs in Remembered Past, p 4)

“Historiography is an unceasing struggle against the tendency to anachronic misinterpretation.” (Paul Verne, quoted by John Lukacs in Remembered Past, p 138)

“Schroeder’s generalizations are sweeping at times. But that is not a vice: generalizations, like brooms, ought to sweep and not stand in the corner, stationary and dumb.” (John Lukacs in Remembered Past, p 256)

“There is something in this world that is more important than the pursuit of justice. It is the pursuit of truth.” (John Lukacs in Remembered Past, p 377)

“My homeland is Germany. I’m interested in German history and German art. The Jews from the East are strangers to me. One of my grandfathers fought in ’48. On the other side, my family is from the one of the most beautiful regions of Germany, where they may have arrived with the Romans. And you’re asking me to consider this less important than a country that Jews – Jews altogether different from me – lived in two thousand years ago, and about which I know nothing except for what I have laboriously learned from books? Palestine isn’t my homeland.” (Armin Kollman, in Gabrielle Tergit’s Effingers, pp 417-418)

“The world is now taking a disastrous turn towards pessimism. It now believes in the completely opaque concept of race, which is common currency among Pan-Slavists and Nietzschean blond beasts alike. It believes in the inevitable impoverishment of the masses through capitalist greed. We believed that fundamental ethical concepts were not up for discussion. But people have abandoned the desire for truth – they value power and self-interest instead. The will to power has led man beyond good and evil. Every worldview now considers itself infallible. And Zionism doesn’t resist this new evil, and instead uses every argument of this dreadful new time for its own purposes. It’s fighting on a false front. From the point of view of blood and extreme nationalism, antisemitism is justified.”

“For the last time, no! Flags, songs, armbands and symbols are drugs. The world revolted against priests swinging incense. A flag can lead people to carry out mass killings, stake burnings, witch trials, – and perhaps also to the Promised Land. But the cost is too high for me. None of you want to be individuals anymore, but a herd of sheep with an anthem and a flag.” (Waldemar Oppner, in Gabrielle Tergit’s Effingers, pp 422)

“Contrary to popular assertion, there is nothing inherently absurd in this idea [Lamarck’s belief that organisms adapt to their environment through their own efforts]; it just happens not to be the main driver of evolution.” (Philip Ball, in review of Jessica Rifkin’s The Power of Life, in TLS, October 16)

“Wars are won, in the author’s view, when governments appear to be legitimate in the eyes of the population and war aims are clear. People can be terrorized into risking and losing their lives in a war, but only up to a point. If the rulers lack political legitimacy, the appetite for sacrifice diminishes.”

“What pattern of living is deemed most desirable is often an ideological question. And motives for fighting can be complicated. Soviet Red Army soldiers sacrificed their lives because they would be executed if they refused to, or because of their Russian patriotism, but surely not because they were convinced that Stalin was their ticket to a more prosperous future.” (Ian Buruma, in review of Jonathan Fennell’s Collapse, in TLS, October 16)