Recent Commonplace Entries

July

“It is the trick of the occultist to demand the consideration of weighed and hearsay evidence on equal terms – so that he may magnify the latter at will to overbalance the non-magnifiable former.” (H. P. Lovecraft, according to Christian Collier in letter to History Today, July)

“Pots are not people; identity, ethnicity, and belonging aren’t based in one’s blood or bones; and migration, mobility and population exchange are not synonymous with invasion, war, and conquest.” (James M. Harland, in History Today, July)

“He [James Bryce] would surely explain the current major conflicts in the world as the failure of the international community to restrain the governments of Russia, Israel and the US, as well as the consequence of the intellectual community retreating into careerism, introspection and managerialism, leaving public opinion in the hands of unscrupulous media barons.” (Ian Cawood, in review of H.S. Jones’s Liberal Worlds, in TLS, June 12)

“In those days our personal appearance had to conform strictly to the King’s Regulations for the Dress of the Army. One of these laid down: ‘The hair on the upper lip will not be shaved. Whiskers, if worn, will be of moderate length’. The whiskers of the Crimean era had long since disappeared, but the wearing of a moustache was de rigueur. In spite of this regulation one subaltern, named Osmaston, in my Field Artillery Brigade insisted on shaving his upper lip, and was summoned to the Adjutant’s office to answer for this offence. Osmaston explained that his moustache would only grow in patches, which made him look ridiculous. After three weeks he appeared with a moustache growing in tufts and was eventually given permission by the Colonel to shave completely, ‘owing to deformity’.” (from James Marshal-Cornwall’s Wars and Rumours of Wars, p 7)

“On 15 July [1938] my wife and I, on returning from a few days’ holiday in Cyprus, heard the sad news of the death of our 14-year-old elder daughter, Peggy, who had died after an operation for appendicitis at her school in Switzerland. On 28 July we left Cairo for two months’ home leave, the first I had taken since I came out with the Mission. We spent most of the time at Logie House, Perthshire, and enjoyed some good shooting, and much hospitality from old friends.” (from James Marshal-Cornwall’s Wars and Rumours of Wars, p 116)

“It is a difficult terrain for any historian: a realm of coyness and dissimulation, of ciphers and aliases, and of decidedly unreliable memoirs.” (Colin Kidd, in review of books on Jacobitism, in LRB, July 9)

“One of the enduring pleasures of espionage fiction lies in its resistance to certainty: readers are invited to occupy the same predicament as the protagonist, never entirely sure who’s trustworthy, whose motives are genuine, or whether apparent allies are in fact adversaries. The very best thrillers exploit this uncertainty not merely for the purposes of suspense, but for insights into the fragility of political and personal trust.” (Ian Sansom, in review of The Interpreter’s Secret by Andrew Rosenheim, in Spectator, July 4)

“It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the competing national histories written in this part of the world [mainly the Baltics] so rarely speak to one another, and have lost sight of a whole catalogue of non-Christian tribes and peoples: the Hevelli, Litici, Obotrites, Rani, Veleti, Galindians, Curonians, Samogitians, Selonians, Semigallians, Latgalians, Yotvingians, Samborides, Natangians, Warmians and many others. These were annihilated or gradually Germanized or Polonized, then absorbed into larger populations.” (Sebastian Sobecki, in review of Alexander Pluskowki’s The Black Cross, in TLS, July 10)

“While Jewish nationalism and Zionism have instrumentalized the myth of a Jewish nation that did not mix with the populations around them, the fates of many of these slaves tell another story. Women coming from the Caucasus, India, Europe and especially Nubia were sold as slaves to Egyptian Jews. Some of them obtained their freedom, converted to Judaism, married, and gave birth as Jewish mothers to Jewish children. Myths of ethnic purity, here as always, do not stand up to the scrutiny of historians.” (John Tolan, in review of Craig Perry’s Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt, in TLS, July 10)

‘At a few points, however, critical distance blends into outright rejection, as when, in a revealing aside, Whitmarsh brands the virgin birth ‘fictitious’.” (Levi Roach, in review of Tim Whitmarsh’s Rome’s Age of Revolution: Augustine, Empire and the Making of Christianity, in Literary Review, July)

“First came sacrifice, the assumption that it was completely acceptable to destroy millions of people and to reduce the living conditions of millions of others for the sake of the communist future.” (Mark B. Smith in Exit Stalin, p 103)

“The capitalist powers put Bolshevik Russia in disgrace for suing for peace with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk, breaking the terms of international debt agreements, and above all for breaking the laws of property and the hierarchies of class, and creating the world’s first socialist society.” (Mark B. Smith in Exit Stalin, p 114)

“But dramatic social mobility was central to Soviet civilization from the start, so this seemed a paradigm shift in the Brezhnev era.” (Mark B. Smith in Exit Stalin, p 170)