Recent Commonplace Entries

December

“I read poems every day, but I don’t often finish them for reasons it would require a workshop to explain. We all have our deal-breakers. John Ciardi, then poetry editor of the Saturday Review, balked at any name from classical mythology. I find that family members can burden a poem, especially if they happen to be dead. So if I come across ‘Dad’ or ‘Mommy’, I’m out. ‘Grandma’ gets a pass.” (Billy Collins, from interview in NYT Book Review, December 1)

“The McKibben fallacy, as I wrote in an essay published last year in Modern Age (‘God, Man, and Climate Change’) is that the plural personal pronoun ‘we’, used as a synecdoche for a particular society, people or nation cannot represent a discrete personal agency: ‘we’ as a country, or a species, are a fiction. To say, then, that ‘we’ can make a collective decision about where ‘we’ wish to take society is meaningless. It amounts to a concept as unreal as Rousseau’s hypothetical ‘social contract’, for which there is no historical evidence whatsoever.” (Chilton Williamson, Jr. in The Spectator World, December)

“The Duke of Wellington complains to her, ‘the trouble with the Order of the Garter these days is that it is full of field marshals and people who do their own washing up’.” (from Richard Davenport-Hines’s review of Hugo Vickers’ Clarissa: Muse to Power – the Untold Story of Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon, in Literary Review, December 2024/January 2025)

“The plurality of worlds debate provided wonderful opportunities to make definitive pronouncements without the inconvenience of providing solid evidence: after all, it was impossible to be proved wrong.” (Patricia Fara, in History Today, September)

“The Neanderthals would vanish not long afterwards and researchers have long wondered whether it was modern humans — that is, us — who were responsible. The new research cannot provide an answer, but Professor Priya Moorjani, of the University of California, Berkeley, who led part of the work, said that the findings added to the sense that the two groups had much in common.” (from report in the Times, December 12)

“’It is because I don’t play cricket’, this obviously Jewish immigrant would complain to friends. ‘If only I played cricket it would all be different.’” (Ernst Chain, as reported by Ronald W. Clark in The Life of Ernst Chain, pp 52-53)

“‘Only one theory has been advanced to make an attempt to understand the development of life, the Darwin-Wallace theory of evolution,’ he said as late as 1972,’ and a very feeble attempt it is, based on such flimsy assumptions, mainly of morphological-anatomical nature that it can hardly be called a theory.’ And after dealing with certain evolutionary examples he added, with a vigour that would do credit to a modern Creationist rather than an accomplished scientist: ‘I would rather believe in fairies than in such wild speculation.’” (Ernst Chain, as reported by Ronald W. Clark in The Life of Ernst Chain, p 147)

“Visits to Russia had tended to qualify his views of the Soviet system but as he wrote to his elder son he felt what he called the strength of the Russian genes in his blood, and to the end of his life hoped that some rapprochement between East and West would be possible.” (on Ernst Chain, from Ronald W. Clark’s The Life of Ernst Chain, p 149)

“My Russian genes are very strong and I would like my son to experience this country too and thus see my attitude to Russia continued in the next generation of our family.” (Ernst Chain, as reported by Ronald W. Clark in The Life of Ernst Chain, p 189)

“In​ a critique of Renouvin’s La Crise européenne, the historian Jules Isaac noted that the placid surface of ‘objective’ historical prose could be deceptive. Might it not be better, he wrote

that a work of history not seem too objective, since it never is … I begin to worry when a historical exposition, by its even, bare, ‘scientific’ tone, gives the reader the illusion of certainty: I ask myself where the author is hiding, for that he certainly has to do, and by looking carefully one always finds him, as in those picture-riddles where a sheep’s fleece, insidiously drawn, contains the silhouette of a shepherd.

(Christopher Clark, in review of Perry Anderson’s Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War, in LRB, December 5)

“The party is fate and disagreement is recidivism, so, when the facts don’t support the apparat, there’s a flaw in the history that needs to be amended. Next we have our Registry records from the time, some good spying going on back then, full marks to J. Prideaux and his partner in crime. The public prints, also under the Soviet thumb. Defectors’ gossip, Foreign Office observations, each as real as the other. A collage, not a photograph. Mind you, photographs lie too, don’t they?” (Connie, in Nick Hardaway’s Karla’s Choice, p 122)

“This is how knowledge is supposed to move forward: reasoning for or against someone’s methods or conclusions without impugning their character or overdramatizing the consequences of the difference of opinion. Maddening and daunting, perhaps, but not petty.” (from Susan Tallman’s review of Svetlana Alpers’s Is Art History? in NYRB, December 19)

“If Trueman is all Sturm und Drang, Statham is the epitome of Pinteresque understatement.” (David Kynaston and Harry Ricketts, in Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes, p 100)

“Jan Machielsen concludes that it is the ‘messiness of the historian’s job, where we constantly revise and refute the work of our predecessors, knowing that some day we will be revised and refuted in turn.’” (Laura Kounine, in review of Jan Machielsen’s The Basque Witch-Hunt in TLS, December 20)