Recent Commonplace Entries

June

“From Matt Triggs, PCC [parochial church council] secretary at St Mary the Virgin in Nottingham: ‘Just had an email from our diocese to put reducing climate emissions on the agenda. We really don’t have the time or manpower.’” (Patrick Kidd in the Spectator, May 18)

“There is nothing so permanent as a Church of England experiment.” (Jeremy Paxman, in The English, p 105)

“Unlike many of his predecessors, Mr. Macron has chosen to memorialize not only the valiant and brave, but also the shameful and forgotten — including a site where French resistance fighters were killed by French militia members who were working with the Nazi regime. Some critics have derided the events as ‘memory inflation’ but others note that they come at a time when the country should be contemplating its past ghosts. The head of an advisory board of historians, Denis Peschanski, says the events are aimed at achieving ‘historical equilibrium.’” (from report in NYT, June 6)

“Nothing is more unstable than a fashionable opinion. If your status is defined by your opinions, you’re living in a world of perpetual insecurity, perpetual mental and moral war.” (David Brooks, in NYT, June 7)

“Another part of the Troubles Legacy Act makes provisions for the ‘memorialisation’ of the conflict: alongside a project to consolidate existing oral history records, five academic historians will be granted access to UK state archives to produce what the government initially called an ‘official history’. (It has since been renamed a ‘public history’.)” (Daniel Trilling in Slow Waltz, in LRB, June 6)

“Jon Boutcher, the police officer originally in charge of Operation Kenova, told Parliament in 2020 that ‘a culture of secrecy prevails’ within the PSNI [the Police Service of Northern Ireland], the MoD and MI5. ‘They regard any examination of legacy as a criticism of them and [believe] that disclosure of information represents a threat to national security.’ In the Operation Kenova report published in March, Boutcher described several attempts to ‘undermine and discredit’ his team. On one occasion he was summoned to a meeting with two senior PSNI officers, who wrongly accused him of having broken the Official Secrets Act. On another occasion, in 2019, his team tried to hand over evidence to the public prosecutor only to be told by MI5 that the security clearance for the prosecutor’s office building had expired and the files couldn’t be delivered.” (Daniel Trilling in in Slow Waltz, in LRB, June 6)

“‘And for one awful moment’, he told me. ‘I thought I’d had a forgotten relationship with a Russian actress, Zinovia Flotta, until I realised the words I’d dictated were “Zinoviev Letter”’.” (Tony Benn to Gyles Brandreth, on his diaries, in Literary Review, June)

“We have inherited physical and psychological predispositions not only for sociability and cooperation but also for violence, and are able to deploy either or both as circumstances demand.” (Jonathan Boff, in review of Richard Overy’s Why War?, in Literary Review, June)

“His archive was purchased by the Cambridge University Library (for the surprising sum of £60,000 several decades ago when that sum would have bought a pretty substantial house) and will provide rich biographical pickings when it is free from its fifty-year embargo. Some sections of it are even embargoed until the death of the last surviving child of the current monarch.” (Neil McKendrick, in Sir John Plumb: The Hidden Life of a Great Historian, p 13)

“On the slender basis of six silver teaspoons carrying the arms of a family in whose service his grandmother had worked, he wove a fantasy of himself as a by-blow of an aristocratic English family. He even claimed to be able to trace a family resemblance. When he later confided this suspicion to one of his aristocratic friends and offered the decisive evidence of his mother’s possession of the silver teaspoons, he was quite crushed when she replied, ‘But Jack darling, the servants always steal the tea-spoons!’” (Neil McKendrick, in Sir John Plumb: The Hidden Life of a Great Historian, p 15)

“Some insight into the personal antipathies can be judged from the conversation I overheard in the SCR between Fellows of Christ’s: one said that it [the painting of Plumb by Jenny Polack] made him ‘look like an enraged toad’. ‘Yes, you’re so right’, said the other, ‘isn’t it excellent – absolutely true to life!’” (Neil McKendrick, in Sir John Plumb: The Hidden Life of a Great Historian, p 101)

“Just how left-wing Jack was in his early days in Cambridge is difficult now to assess. Rumour (and reports from some of his surviving friends) suggests that J. D. Bernal propositioned both him and Snow to join the Communist Party. They were certainly sympathizers in the 1930s. Some say that at least one of them accepted the invitation to join, they certainly discussed doing so, but the majority vote seems to be that they refused. Some claim that Jack was certainly an active and card-carrying member and some Cambridge contemporaries of his claimed that he boasted to them that he had formally joined the party. He may well have done so but I found no wholly convincing evidence of this, and in later life he resolutely denied that this was true. He and Snow were certainly passionately anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist. They were outraged by Munich and appalled by Neville Chamberlain. They certainly discussed leaving England before the war in the expectation that an ill-prepared country would lose any forthcoming conflict.” (Neil McKendrick, in Sir John Plumb: The Hidden Life of a Great Historian, p 179)

“There is no place for ‘isms’ in philosophy. To be a ‘so-and-so-ist’ is to be philosophically frail.”(Gilbert Ryle, according to Anil Gomes in review of Daniel Dennett’s I’ve Been Thinking, in LRB, June 20)

“An absolute sine qua non is that all sources, even primary, must be checked, double-checked and rechecked again. There’s a lot of stuff in the archives that got there by chance, like a forgery accepted as a genuine document, or a report based on a biased interpretation or opinion but nevertheless duly filed. Sometimes a testimony, even of a seemingly credible witness or reliable defector, or a source described as ‘a subject of undoubted loyalty’, may be completely invented and include false claims which later leak into the books and articles. There, as it happens, they are sometimes further misinterpreted or misrepresented.” (from Boris Volodarsky’s The Birth of the Soviet Secret Police, p 170)

“Spies and agents do not become known, even famous like Philby or Sorge, because of their proficiency, good tradecraft or extraordinary talents. Journalists, intelligence historians and writers do not always seem to realize that these two, like many others, were not successes but rather failures, making unforgivable mistakes, and the agents who have been caught are not heroes but losers.” (from Boris Volodarsky’s The Birth of the Soviet Secret Police, p 288)

“As historian she [Nancy Mitford] was scrupulously accurate and took great pains to check facts. Naturally, like every historian under the sun, she chose among the facts what it suited her to choose; but she did not invent.” (Diana Mosley, in review of Harold Acton’s ‘Nancy Mitford: A Memoir, from The Pursuit of Laughter, p 22)

“The Macmillan family of publishers came from a croft on Arran Island, as Harold Macmillan, prime minister, allowed nobody to forget. Humble origins are quite common, but there is something special about an island in the Hebrides. Life was so very primitive and uncomfortable, to exist at all such a tough business, the surroundings so dramatically beautiful, that it is quite in order to boast about it for one hundred and eighty years.” (Diana Mosley, in review of Richard Davenport-Hines’ The Macmillans, from The Pursuit of Laughter, p 78)

“There is virtue in this naive approach, for it demonstrates a fact so often ignored by the historian who has never left his study – namely the power of charm in a politician to dazzle even such an old hand at the game as the author of this book. It is a quality shared by all who rise to the very top in politics in every country in the world, and nothing is harder to explain or define.” (Diana Mosley, in review of the Rt. Hon. Earl Winterton’s Orders of the Day, from The Pursuit of Laughter, p 95)

“He himself had a passing whim for the Church. Life in a pleasant country village appealed to him; he could ride round his parish; the clergy were not supposed to hunt all day long. But there was an insurmountable obstacle; his attitude to God.” (Diana Mosley, on Lord Berners, from The Pursuit of Laughter, p 473)

“A rich Christian must sell all he has and give it to the poor; a rich socialist on the other hand aspires to abolish poverty.” (Diana Mosley, on Sir Oswald Mosley, from The Pursuit of Laughter, p 498)

“It was my first lesson in intelligence. Never be certain that someone is not betraying you, just because you like and trust them.” (Allen Dulles, according to Scott Miller in Agent 110, p 9)

Problems with Phenomenology

“The ‘proprietors practically all assured me that they did not regard themselves as Poles nor desire annexation to Poland’. They were ethnically Polish, but most spoke only German, like their ancestors had done for centuries. . . . . He [Winthrop Bell] advised that only a plebiscite – a series of local regional votes – would show the truth. This accorded with a lesson of phenomenology: the value of a first-person subjective perspective should not be subsumed to data sets, like ethnographical data. For phenomenology, data is valuable, but it requires personal purposes and sustained attention to exist.” (From Jason Bell’s Cracking the Nazi Code, p 168)

“We are inescapably conditioned by the past; in the first instance genetically by our own past.” (Winthrop Bell, in A Genealogical Study, quoted by Jacob Bell in Cracking the Nazi Code, p 303)

“It’s not that we are witnessing the process of forgetting – it’s that we had our earrings wrong in the first place. We thought we were constructing historical memory. But historical memory can exist only when there is a clear line separating the present from the past. That’s when you can say, ‘After the Holocaust,’ for example. But we don’t have that break – there is no past, only a continuous present. As long as that’s the case, we are talking about legacy rather than memory: the continuing legacy of an experience we so cavalierly relegated to the past. That was a mistake. We really wanted it to be true, we really wanted to be like Germany, so we just decided that it was true.” (Irina Flige, from Masha Geesen’s Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s Gulag in Putin’s Russia, p 54)