Recent Commonplace Entries

September

“I think questions of truth and accuracy in memoir are very, very blurred because they are subjective accounts of a bit of someone’s life. A memoir is not an autobiography, and it’s important to make the distinction between the two. If you’re thinking of, for example, John Major or Mrs Thatcher’s autobiography you would expect that to be absolutely true. But a memoir is a work of literature which is verging on fiction, and you cannot necessarily expect a memoir to be a factual day-by-day or year-by-year account of someone’s life.” (Alexandra Pringle on Jason Arday, from the Spectator, August 28)

“The Foreign Secretary had suggested in November 1943 that it might be worthwhile asking the Swedes for operational facilities. He thought they would be prepared to go a long way towards meeting the Allies’ wishes, provided they were not driven to give the Germans a casus belli. They were already allowing refugees from Norway to have weapons and to engage in military training as a ‘police force’. Eden was in fact more concerned with pleasing the Russians than striking a blow at the German: Molotov had been disappointed by Britain’s negative attitude towards the acquisition of air bases in Sweden ‘and it would be well to make some positive proposals’.” (from Charles Cruickshank’s Deception in World War II, p 125)

“Primatologists like Frans de Wal and evolutionary psychologists like Michael Tomasello have worked to show that the foundations of morality – ideas of reciprocal fairness – are so naturally wired into our biology that they are present in other primates, too. Modern morality, they argue, is a scaled-up version of what was there from humankind’s origins, though they disagree about the size of the leap from animal to human physiology.” (Susan Neman, in review of Steven Lukes’s The Diversity of Morals, in NYRB, September 24)

“Other critics tend to be mentioned only when she thinks they are wrong, and her sue of the critical ‘we’ often carries the supra-personal authority of someone who doesn’t have reason to doubt her entitlement to the plural form.” (Colin Burrow, in review of Helen Vendler’s Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays, in LRB, September 10)

“Someone else might come along and see it differently, but if you’ve made them argue with you then you’ve done something worthwhile. If that doesn’t have a point to it, just in itself, then probably living doesn’t have a point to it, either, because making ad hoc judgments on the basis of a mosaic of information and misinformation about people and what you should say on a particular occasion, even a difficult one, is what we all need to do every day.” (Colin Burrow, in review of Helen Vendler’s Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays, in LRB, September 10)

“In the next hour, I swam tiny laps in the dark and considered the savage ironies of late capitalism. I repented my own contribution to the catastrophe on the mountain and realised how desperately I love water.” (Anne Enright, in Diary from Yugoslavia, in LRB, September 10)

“Study many books and listen to many stories, but know which you ought to believe. People write many unbelievable things.’  (from The Distichs of Cato (3^rd or 4^th century), quoted by Eleanor Parker in History Today, September)

“Old spies outgrow their covers; their sleeves become tattered and worn. They forget which lies they’re meant to tell, which truths they ought to conceal, and that was without the added pain of dementia, of cells fraying and losing their connections, of neural networks decaying into leaderless chaos  . . .  Old spies can grow ridiculous. Old spies aren’t much better than clowns.” (from Mike Herron’s Clown Town, p 127)

“His life was no more animated by the prospect of evolution than that of a Victorian hunting parson was animated by the prospect of Christ’s return to earth.” (Richard Vinen, in review of Emile Chabal’s The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian, in Literary Review, September)

“There is no more place for the feminist art historian than there is for the feminist radiographer.” (Anita Brookner, in The Obstacle Race, quoted by Kathryn Hughes in review of Hermione Lee’s Anita Brookner: Art and Life, in Literary Review, September)

“Although Buchwald and Gordin seek to present Einstein’s objections to quantum mechanics as sympathetically as they can, they are compelled to point out that subsequent developments in physics have down that what Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen describe as a ‘paradox’ is just how the world is. Experiment after experiment has shown that quantum entanglement and its associated ‘spooky action at a distance’ are detectable aspects of reality. ‘Even the great Einstein,’ they conclude, ‘could be wrong about important questions in physics’.” (Ray Monk, in review of books on Einstein in LRB, July 23)

“  . . . the shadow of their death precedes them; they lose hope, appetite viability.  They feel the meaning of their lives draining away, and they recognise that they have lost, or never attained, their heart’s desire, and they give up. In the eyes of such people one reads dreadful recognition, the ultimate self-knowledge: I have not lived enough and it is too late to redeem myself.” (Anita Brookner in Hotel du Lac, quoted by Andrew O’Hagan in review of Anita Brookner: Art and Life, by Hermione Lee, in LRB, September 24)