Recent Commonplace Entries

August

“His [Einstein’s] horror of the Nazis prompted him to urge Roosevelt to accelerate the programme to develop an atomic bomb before the Germans did, but, when he learned of the destruction of Hiroshima his reaction was to mobilise his scientific colleagues and political contacts to lobby for the international control of nuclear weapons.” (Ray Monk, in review of books on and about Einstein, in LRB, July 23)

“He [James Joyce] tried to read Capital, but found its opening sentence absurd and failed to get beyond it.” (Terry Eagleton, in review of Frank Callaghan’s James Joyce: A Political Life, in LRB, July 23)

‘We must build. But we must build surely.’ (Peter Sellers in Party Political Speech  – 1958) “He [Andy Burnham] added: ‘We’ve got to show fiscal discipline. We’ve got to show that our commitment to the fiscal rules is real. Boldy Labour, but prudently Labour as well at the same time. That’s the thing we’ve got to pull off.” (Tim Shipman in the Spectator, July 25)

“The Second Great War, which opened in 1939 and became a world-wide conflict, saw Germany and her allies, nations with finite resources in raw materials and manpower facing a combination.” of countries whose resources, if not infinite, were considerably greater.” (James Lucas, in Introduction to Hitler’s Enforcers)

“Rendulic wrote in his account of the battle [Oserany] that many of the enemy wounded had committed suicide by slitting their throats. Other Russian infantry men, too badly wounded to kill themselves had had their throats cut by the commissars. The few enemy prisoners taken alive were shaking with fear: they had been told that the Germans murdered those whom they captured, but the treatment they received showed that the commissars had lied.” (James Lucas, in Hitler’s Austrian Fireman [Rendulic], from Hitler’s Enforcers)

“Under normal circumstances, Wright would have been executed. He was fully aware of this and thus offered to become a double agent, knowing that the Provisionals needed to learn more about MRF and its ‘Freds’ operation before they could take active countermeasures. The latter also realized this and agreed to the proposal while also making clear what would befall him if he betrayed them again.” (from Peter Harclerode’s Secret Soldiers, p 320)

“Suspecting an informer in their midst, the Provisionals launched a hunt but it took them some time to pinpoint him. Two years later, the individual concerned was flagged down at a roadblock by men dressed in British Army uniforms. Dragged from his vehicle he was still by his captors, whom he believed to be members of the SAS, that they knew he was a Provisional and were going to shoot him. Terrified, he gave the codeword given to him by his Special Branch handler but that was his undoing. Subsequently ‘court-martialled, he was murdered and buried in a secret location.” (from Peter Harclerode’s Secret Soldiers, p 328)

“There is something appalling about photographing people. It is certainly some sort of violation; so if sensitivity is lacking, there can be something barbaric about it.” (Cartier-Bresson, according to Michael Kimmelman in The Accidental Masterpiece, p 15)

“The placing in the hands of the general public a means of taking pictures with but little labor and requiring less knowledge has of necessity been follows by the production of millions of photographs. It is due to this fatal facility that photography as a picture-making medium has fallen into disrepute.” (Alfred Stieglitz in 1899, according to Michael Kimmelman in The Accidental Masterpiece, p 32)

“His [Chardin’s] famous painting of a woman drinking tea, we have been told, is not just a picture of a woman drinking tea but a meditation on our perception of a woman drinking tea: the with came Cole the momentary sensitivity of a woman (she happened to be Chardin’s first wife, just weeks before her death) whom we register as if at the periphery of our vision – it’s a picture about seeing, in other words, not just a pretty girl enjoying liquid refreshment.” (from Michael Kimmelmen’s The Accidental Masterpiece, p 217)

“I may add for my part that it is quite true that many army officers of the rank of general have an absurd habit of saying, ‘I have served my sovereign . . .’ as though wishing to imply that their sovereign is not the same as the sovereign of ordinary subjects, but a special one, one that belongs only to them.” (from Dostoevsky’s The Devils, ‘By Way of an Introduction’, translated by David Magarshack)

“Why is it, as I have noticed,’ Mr Verkhovensky whispered to me once – ‘why is it that all these desperate socialists and communists are, at the same time, also such incredible misers, such acquisitive fellows, such believers in private property, and indeed, the bigger the socialist, the more extreme he is, the stronger is his instinct for private ownership – why is it? Can that, too, be merely the result of sentimentality?’” (from Dostoevsky’s The Devils, ‘Prince Harry: A Marriage Proposal’, translated by David Magarshack)

“SS: ‘How often and which books do you winnow out?’ AM: ‘I don’t cull. I consider culling the librarian’s equivalent of ethnic cleansing.’” (Sebastian Shakespeare to Alberto Manguel, who donated forty thousand books to the National Library of Argentina, from Literary Review, August)

“One of those essays, ‘Flight into Blackness’, is a meditation on Australia’s relationship with its Aboriginal minority, which at one point caused its author to be banned from entering the Northern Territory. Either the Aboriginal accepts that he is an Australia citizen, Naipaul argues, or he retreats into a kind of adventure playground made up of koala bears, red native earth and lofted didgeridoos.” (D. J. Taylor on Shiva Naipaul, in Spectator, August 17)

“Kahlo adopted the Tehuana costume – several of her outfits are in the exhibition – though she confessed that she had never been to Tehuantepec, ‘nor do I have any connection with the town’. In different circumstances, this might be described as ‘appropriation’, but here it is interpreted as evidence of Kahlo’s admiration for Mexican culture.” (Miranda France on Frida Kahlo, in TLS, August 21)