Recent Commonplace Entries

August

“Unlike Schlözer’s prominent contemporary at Göttingen, the ethnographer Christoph Meiners (1747–1810), who attributed racial differences to separate human species with independent origins (a view known as polygenesis), Herder subscribed to monogenesis, concluding that “mankind on earth are but one and the same species”. Unlike Kant, Herder apparently rejected racial categories, arguing that “the colors run into one another … on the whole all ultimately become shades of one and the same picture”. Yet at the same time, Herder makes evolutionist statements about people of colour that reinstate implicitly the very racial hierarchies he has just undermined. That said, he still sees slavery as a crime and an outrage, subjecting European missions, colonial trading companies and the diseases that they spread to withering criticism. Colonial interventions into non-European landscapes are regarded as a special kind of folly, since we should not “suppose that human art, with an impetuous and imperious act of will, can turn a remote corner of the earth into another Europe by felling its trees and cultivating its soil”. Herder does not escape the dominant Eurocentrism of his age, in other words, but he is more self-aware than most of his contemporaries.” (Angus Nicholls, in review of Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, in the TLS, July 18)

“As Hipp points out (and has been instrumental in proving), oaks could diversify and survive in part because of some quirks of reproduction that amount to self-directed evolution. In the traditional Darwinian model of evolution, a species splits when it can no longer interbreed and produce viable offspring, because populations are separated either geographically or genetically. The classic example is that of the horse and the donkey; the offspring, mules or hinnies, are normally infertile. Oaks defy this dogma through a mechanism called introgression, which allows two species to exchange genes, but maintain a clear difference. They do this by hybridizing, often choosing preferentially pollen with ‘odd’ genetics, and maintaining the acorns that develop with the ‘odd’ genes through two rounds of abortions, but then breeding again with their own species. As a result, a collection of unusual genes can be passed on to a tree that appears little different from the trees around it. If that gene provides an evolutionary advantage, it will spread through the population. In fact, nearly all members of the huge and diverse family of oaks can swap genes because, although the genes themselves greatly vary between trees, the fundamental structure of the chromosomes is highly conserved.”  (Harriet Rix, in review of Andrew L. Hipp’s Oak Origins, in the TLS, July 18)

“Although Michael Haag’s new biography only covers the first thirty-three years of its subject’s long career, coming to a close with Larry’s wartime service at the British embassy in Cairo, the idea that you can behave in a particular way because you are an artist hangs over the proceedings like the scent of patchouli at a hippy wedding.” (D. J. Taylor, in review of books on the Durrells by Michael Haag and Richard Bradford, in Literary Review, July)

“When the American Civil War began, there were more slaves in the Muslim states of West Africa alone than there were in all of the American South. “ (Bartle Bull, in review of Justin Marozzi’s Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World, in Literary Review, July)

“Gimson’s book features all the ghastly types who have played a part in the decline of Britain’s economy over the last thirty years, from ineffectual civil servants, MPs who think they are local councillors, human rights lawyers, sock-puppet lobbyists and quangos to rapacious suppliers who can’t believe the perverse incentives baked into the system. HS2’s victims include homeowners and businesses forced to relocate, disrupted rail passengers, the landscape of the Chilterns and even the Treasury, which has been forced to write ever larger cheques at a time of economic stress.” (David Leeder, in review of Sally Gimson’s Off the Rails: the Inside Story of HS2, in Literary Review, August)

“However, says Vinen, Churchill’s lucrative histories, created with much assistance, were accurate but untrue, whereas de Gaulle’s memoirs, laboriously penned alone (the royalties going to charity), were inaccurate but true.” (Piers Brendon, in review of Richard Vinen’s The Last Titans: Churchill and de Gaulle, in Literary Review, August)

“Today, its [the red-cockaded woodpecker’s] population hovers around 17,000, but the bird is not out of the woods yet.” (from Nature Conservancy magazine, Issue 3, 2025)

“She [Larissa Salmina] knew all of Russia’s faults and was sometimes horrified by them, but also noted its positives – the education and cultural policies, the possibilities of genuine social mobility, the lack of materialism, the housing for the masses, all of which were considerably ahead of a country like Britain at the same time.” (Iain Pears, writing about Leningrad in 1949, in Parallel Lives, p 110)

“Letting an artist – painter, sculptor, poet, novelist – off the hook of moral responsibility on the grounds of creative achievement is no longer the critical fashion, and the hunger for money and social success that marked Gus’s [Augustus John’s] later years now looks tawdry.” (Dinah Birch, in review of Judith Mackrell’s Artists, Siblings, Visionaries, in TLS August 8)

“The very existence of sensitivity readers, Szetela claims, rests on a form of essentialism which implicitly sees Afro-American life, for example, as so opaque that it needs ;cultural ambassadors’ to explain it to white people and so homogeneous that a single person can claim to speak for ‘Black/African-American culture’ across history.” (Matthew Reisz, in review of That Book is Dangerous!: How Moral Panic, Social Media and the Culture Wars are Remaking Publishing, in the Spectator, August 16)

“The Soviets found it necessary to divide the area [Georgia] into some seventeen Autonomous Areas, Autonomous Regions and Autonomous Republics: the North Caucasian; the Adygeisk; the Cherkess; the Karachaevsk; the Kabardino-Balgar; the Northern Ossetian; the Southern Ossetian; the Chechen-Ingush; the Abkhaska; the Adzharskaya; the Nagorny-Karabagh; the Yakichev; the Orjonikidze; the Armenian; the Daghestan; and the Georgian. Nor does the above list complete the complexity of this patchwork of peoples. Thus, to take only one of the Autonomous Republics: in 1945 the Council of People’s Commissars of the Daghestan Republic included among its twenty-two members three Avars, five Kumyks, four Laks, two Lesgians and two Darghins.” (from Chapter 23, The Youth of Soso Djugashvili, in Bertrand D. Wolfe’s Three Who Made a Revolution)

“Our one agreed aim in the First World War was to break up German militarism. It was no part of our original intention to break up the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, to create Czechoslovakia or resurrect Poland, to make a Russian revolution, to treble the size of Serbia and double that of Rumania, to create Iraq and Estonia and Lithuania and a Jewish National Home, or to give the keys of the Brenner and the Adriatic to Italy. Yet, in the outcome, all these – and much else – sprang from the war . . . while the one thing which we promised ourselves, the destruction of German militarism, we failed to achieve.” (H. N. Fieldhouse, quoted by Bertrand D. Wolfe in Chapter 35, A World Ends, of Three Who Made a Revolution)