Recent Commonplace Entries

October

“Nor, despite the agreeably mischievous anti-Establishment nudging of Malcolm Muggeridge, a dear friend, do I deserve to become known as ‘Keeper of the Queen’s Moles’.” (from Epilogue of the second edition of The Climate of Treason, by Andrew Boyle)

“Grief, far from being as natural as any other phase in our lives (a point Simon Boas put well in his book A Beginner’s Guide To Dying), is sometimes now viewed almost as a kind of mental illness. To die with serenity, aware of what’s coming and content with one’s fate, is to be ever-so-slightly doolally.” (Colin Brazier, in the Spectator, September 28)

“And as we enter the 21st century, which is surely destined to be seen historically as the Age of Oligarchy, as the 20th was that of (pseudo-)Democracy, maybe we should … pay more attention to oligarchy, and not just as the Iron Law of History … Whatever the official terminology, effective oligarchies may be based on a traditional aristocracy of birth and landholding, on the prerogatives of a founding elite (such as Greek colonies, Israel and Hispanic South America), on the power of wealth (in plutocracies such as the USA and Britain), on an intellectual elite (Plato’s Republic and modern France), on military power (Myanmar and Pakistan), on theocracy (the Islamic states and early Christian Europe), on tribal supremacy (modern Africa), on control of the media (Italy) or on systemically organised corruption (Sicily and Calabria, Colombia, Russia and the Ukraine) – and of course on a mixture of any or all of these elements. The stability of oligarchies and their ability to resist social change is one of their most important characteristics; and ultimately Mitford may well be right: of all the varied oligarchic forms of the consolidation of power, perhaps the most benign may be the ‘patrios politeia’, the ‘mixed constitution’ based on historical tradition, in the vision that unites Solon, Mitford and Polybius with Montesquieu and the Founding Fathers of the essentially undemocratic American constitution.” (Oswyn Murray, in The Muse of History, quoted by Katherine Harloe in LRB, October 10)

“History as it actually occurs is not quite the whole of history, for it leaves out of account the hopes that never materialised, the attempts to prevent the outbreak of wars, the futile efforts to solve differences by conciliatory methods. Hopes such as these are as much a part of history as the terrible events which falsify them, and in trying to assess the influence of their times upon idealists and lovers of peaceful activities such as our poets and academicians the hopes are perhaps as important as the events.”  (Francis Yates, quoted by Oswyn Murray in The Muse of History)

“The student movement of the late 1960s was among other things a prophetic critique of today’s brutally philistine universities, self-avowed service stations for the capitalist economy.” (Terry Eagleton, in review of Frederic Jameson’s The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present, in LRB, October 10)

“Churchill increasingly recognised that allies against Hitler might be found on the Left. He understood that Stalin – unlike Trotsky, whom he despised – was a Russian nationalist, more interested in defending his own frontiers than spreading revolution abroad.” (from Richard Vinen’s review of Katherine Carter’s Churchill’s Citadel: Chartwell and the Gatherings Before the Storm, in Literary Review, October)

“At other times, such as when he warned of non-existent communist spies in America in the 1950s or referred to fictitious plans of conquest hatched by Lenin and Stalin, the falsehoods were more damaging.” (from Andrew Preston’s review of Reagan: His Life and Legend, in Literary Review, October)

“Around 50,000 years ago a change in the human brain made people capable of imagination and artistic expression.” (Susan Owen, in The Story of Drawing: An Alternative History of Art, quoted by Daisy Dunn in review in Literary Review, October)

“I am Jewish only in the residual sense of only half belonging. I deeply distrust Israel and Zionism and I have a loathing of all monotheistic religions.” (Jonathan Miller, according to Humphrey Carpenter in A Great, Silly Grin, p 72)

“His [Peter Cook’s] father, a District Officer in Nigeria, had to spend most of his working life separated from his family. ‘My father used to receive news by boat,’ Peter recalled, ‘six months after it was published. He’d open The Times and say, “Good God, Worcester are 78 for 6.”’” (From Humphrey Carpenter’s A Great, Silly Grin, p 82)

“Anyone who thinks they understand quantum physics doesn’t understand quantum physics.” (Richard Feynman, according to Christopher Bray, in the Spectator, October 12)

“Meg the influencer’s lavishly remodeled Victorian townhouse — she has an especially enviable kitchen, with chairs in six different colors — weighs on Nell’s mind when she contemplates the dingy shared house to which “late capitalism,” as she calls it, has consigned her.” (from Christopher Tayler’s review of Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren, in NYRB, October 13)

“How is it, Washington wonders, that the UN Declaration of Human Rights enshrines the right to leave your country but not to enter another?” (Colin Thubron, in review of John Washington’s The Case for Open Borders, in NYRB, October 13)

“Though most of my living family members have never been to Greece, the story of our Greekness is central to our identity. Its significance is teleological: being Greek means something because it is important to us that it mean something…. Many white people in the United States are animated by a similar longing to claim a faraway homeland, even as they support, explicitly or tacitly, the exclusion of contemporary migrants — people making a journey parallel to those their own ancestors made generations ago.”  (Lauren Markham)

“She writes, almost as an aside, that her brother recently took a DNA test and found that their family was not Greek after all. They were Italian and vaguely Balkan — themselves bearing witness to the fallibility of nations and the agelong flux of the world’s peoples.” (Colin Thubron, in review of Lauren Markham’s A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging, in NYRB, October 13)

“The Institute’s library classifications adopted his ‘law of the good neighbour’ to promote serendipitous discovery. As Gertrud Bing, Warburg’s assistant and later director, wrote, the arrangement ‘meant to impart certain suggestions to the reader who, looking on the shelves for one book, is attracted by the kindred ones next to it … and finds himself involved in a new trend of thought’”. (from Boyd Tonkin’s review of the Memory and Migration exhibition at the Warburg Institute, in the TLS, October 18)

“New Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s team certainly should pursue the party’s expansive strategy: under current policies, projections show that nearly five million households will live in unaffordable housing by 2030.”

“To make matters worse, Wall Street firms including Blackstone and Britain’s Lloyds’s Bank increasingly buy homes in hot markets, turning them into unaffordable rentals and further boosting home prices.” (Joel Kotkin, in Spectator World, November)

“He was regarded as ‘delicate’, something of a catch-all condition at the time for any boy not pulling the wings off insects.” (Jonathan Margolis, on John Cleese, in Cleese Encounters, p 12)

‘I’m very proud. With all these bloody silly showbiz awards around nowadays there are really only three left worth having – the CH, the OM and this one [The Queen’s Award for Industry]. I should mop that lot up in a couple of years. I certainly wouldn’t want any old OBE. They’re like school prizedays where you go up and get patted on the head for being a good boy.’ (John Cleese, quoted by Jonathan Margolis in Cleese Encounters, p 157)