Recent Commonplace Entries

November

“The plot of Faust makes no sense if you cannot conceive, even for dramatic purposes only, that there is a life beyond the grave.” (A. N. Wilson, in Goethe: His Faustian Life, according to Daniel Johnson in TLS review, October 25)

“I do not write history, I dissect it – lay bare the logic which other men have taken to be an arbitrary sequence of accidents.” (Bone, in Another Moon Called Earth, by Tom Stoppard)

“But Gregory Radick, a historian of science at the University of Leeds, thinks that paying closer attention to such examples would help the rest of us rethink our assumptions about genetic determinism. He wants us to stop talking about ‘genes for’ this or that trait or using such metaphors as ‘it’s in the DNA’ to describe some ancestral and unalterable trait of a person or institution, and he wants us to guard against genomic hype, whether it’s the fantasies of ancestral identity bound up with 23andMe or promises that the discoveries of genes for schizophrenia or cardiovascular disease are just around the corner. The reality, Radick insists, is a lot more complicated, and if we had a better appreciation of that reality, we might come to see other things differently too. We might, in particular, be more sceptical of claims made about robust genetic differences between groups – not least regarding race.” (Lorraine Daston, in review of Gregory Radick’s Disputed Inheritance: The Battle Over Mendel and the Future of Biology, in LRB, November 7)

“Many people saw the internal German migration as a kind of multi-cultural attack on themselves. Tribalism blossomed and people distinguished themselves with customs, practices, faith rituals and dialects that set them apart from their neighbours, let alone from German Bohemians, Banat Swabians, Silesians, Pomeranians and Bessarabian German – all of whom were dismissed as ‘Polacks’.” (from Harald Jähner’s Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955, p 69)

“But it was a while before the detainees stopped chiefly marrying into their own tribes, and a Bohemian German, for instance, was accepted by the parents of a Frankish bride. Even weddings between Protestants and Catholics, officially called ‘mixed marriages’, were held with increasing frequency in spite of the bitter resistance among clerics.” (from Harald Jähner’s Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955, p 72)

“Sir William Beveridge, head of University College, paved the way for the welfare state with his report Social Insurance and Allied Services (mocked by waspish colleagues as ‘Mein Pamph’).”  (from Nicholas Rankin’s review of Ashley Jackson’s Oxford’s War 1939-1945, in Literary Review, November)

“In creating a genealogy of that style and approach, the author, alternating her chapters between general overviews and more individualized case studies, maps the way stations of the classic twentieth-century American Jewish intellectual experience: the immigrant childhood, the hothouse education at City College, the flirtation or immersion with the left, the disillusionment with Stalin, the love affairs and break-ups and gimlet-eyed acceptance of, and by, Ivy League gentlemen’s clubs, along with prizes for the evocation of immigrant experience.” (Jeremy Dauber, in review of Ronnie A. Grinberg’s Write Like A Man, in TLS, November 15)

Churchill and Race

“As to Mandatory Palestine under British rule, Churchill said truly enough that the British faced an inescapable choice: either ‘facilitate the establishment of the Jewish National Home, or we are to hand over the government of the country to the people who happen to live there at the moment. You cannot do both’. When Lord Peel, the chairman of the commission, asked whether there shouldn’t be some compunction about ‘downing the Arabs’ merely because they wanted to remain in their own country, Churchill answered in still more forthright terms. He did not think the Palestinian Arabs should be allowed to dictate the future of the country simply because they had lived there so long. ‘I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.’” (from letter by Geoffrey Wheatcroft to TLS, November 15)

“He [Churchill] distrusted Indians in general, and hated Hindusim in particular, and he had little sense of the ways in which India was changing or sympathy for the challenges facing Indian politicians.” (from Daniel Todman’s Britain’s War, p 55)

“Lucid, sceptical, sagacious, it perfectly explains how we are all, like it or not, Freudians now.”  (from William Boyd’s choice of Frank Tallis’s Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the making of the modern mind, as his Book of the Year, in TLS, November 15)

“Facts are not how we know ourselves, while memory – its tricks, its evasions, its silences, its inventions, its inevitable questions – is who we become”. (Ruth Scurr, quoting Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, her choice of Book of the Year, in TLS, November 15)

“Rodger’s critique of the arrogant, amateurish incompetence of the Royal Air Force is devastating. Obsessed with status and fixated on strategic bombing, a concept based entirely on abstract theory, and one that failed catastrophically in the Second World War, it resisted the obvious need to command the skies over the Atlantic to win the war’s longest ‘battle’. The problem was solved in the end by political intervention and American long-range B-24 Liberator aircraft.” (Andrew Lambert, in review of N. A. M. Rodger’s The Price of Victory, in TLS, November 15)

“Hitler was left to incorporate a remilitarized Rhineland, a success that emboldened him to open the question of a return of Germany’s former colonies. What seemed, in retrospect, like the most clear-cut moment at which Hitler could have been ‘stopped’ passed almost without comment. Hitler was astonished at the French and British passivity.” (from Daniel Todman’s Britain’s War, p 92)