Recent Commonplace Entries

September

“The chief aim of the Society is to improve the standard of indexing, since I think you will agree that good indexing is the indispensable handmaiden of most of the arts and all the sciences, and that a book without an index is a country without a map.” (Gilfred Norman Knight to Harold Macmillan, November 1, 1957, from Indexing, the Society of Indexers and Harold Macmillan, in the Bodleian Library Record, Volume 37, Numbers 1-2, Spring/Autumn 2024)

“The mystery in all this, of course, is Stalin. His posture with the team, when they complained or tried to intercede, was that they were all in the same boat, at the mercy of the NKVD. When Georgy Dimitrov, head of the Comintern, raised such cases with him, his answer was, ‘What can I do for them, Georgy? All my own relatives are in prison, too.’” (from Sheila Fitzpatrick’s On Stalin’s Team, p 137)

“Stalin sometimes snapped at them: ‘What’s the point of talking to you? Whatever I say, you reply: ‘Yes, Comrade Stalin, of course, Comrade Stalin, you have taken a wise decision, Comrade Stalin.’” (from Sheila Fitzpatrick’s On Stalin’s Team, p 185)

‘Stalin was forcing his companions to drink to excess, so that they sometimes passed out and had to be carried home. In order to avoid the heavy drinking, Khrushchev reports, Beria, Malenkov, and Mikoyan at one point made an agreement with the waitresses to serve them colored water instead of wine – but then Alexander Shcherbakov, Zhdanov’s unpopular brother-in-law, gave them away. (Stalin was very angry at their deceit.)” (from Sheila Fitzpatrick’s On Stalin’s Team, p 199)

“Between 1935 and 1940, the report [by Pospelov] said, almost two million people had been arrested for anti-Soviet activity, and 688,503 had been shot.” (from Sheila Fitzpatrick’s On Stalin’s Team, p 243)

“Lents argues that, from an evolutionary perspective, an ‘ancestral’ heterosexual orientation would have limited our ability to respond to changes in the environment, and thereby our chances of survival; pansexuality was probably where we all began.” (Anna Machin, in review of Nathan H. Lents’s The Sexual Evolution, in TLS, September 5)

“He is ‘a great fan’ of the new usage of they for singular third persons as a way of avoiding specifying gender. And he does not mind the use of me as a subject (as in ‘Billy and me went to the store’).” (N. J. Enfield, in review of John McWhorter’s Pronoun Trouble, in TLS, September 5)

“In sum, it seems clear that the sitter in this miniature has deliberately chosen to present themselves [sic!] in an androgynous manner.” (Elizabeth Goldring, Emma Rutherford and Jonathan Bate, in A Woman’s Face  . . . in TLS, September 5)

“Pilkington’s sense of numbers, history and magnitude is sometimes off. He writes that ‘liberalism is forming broken, atomized people who are unable to pass their genes to a future generation’, apparently oblivious to the fact that fertility rates are falling in many non-liberal countries as well – in Rusia, for example – where they are lower than in the U.S. In China, fertility is lower still. Is the liberal goal really to ‘replace the family with the state’? That sounds more like the non-liberal visions we find in western thought, running from Plato to the more extreme forms of communism in which children are encouraged to report on the supposed crimes of their parents.” (Tyler Cowen, in review of Philip Pilkington’s The Collapse of Global Liberalism, in TLS, September 5)

“As a Jew, I hardly believe that the government is defending me by defunding programmes in cell biology – and the government doesn’t believe it either. The ideological project is more cynical. The putative clamping down on antisemitism, like attacks on “immoral” humanists, is a means to reach the real goal, which is power pure and simple.” (Richard Sennett, in Power Complex, in TLS, September 19)

“While we wait, we talk of the great mysteries that have brought us here. Some turn on arcane physiological and behavioural facts. Here’s an example: the Greenland and the Siberian knots are the same species. They feed and flock together in the Wadden Sea. They could happily interbreed, producing healthy, functional knots. But they don’t. There’s food enough for the Siberian knots in the Wadden Sea and the North Sea. But they choose, or are compelled, to spend their winters in West Africa. If so, what compels them? Their genes? Come on! Genes just determine the order of amino acids in proteins. There is a yawning gulf between even the most sophisticated gene clusters and the whole organism and its behaviour. And why do the birds go, turning their backs on their Greenlandish flock-mates? Are the Greenland knots not sexually alluring? If not, why not? Is it that the Siberians and the Greenlanders can’t get it together because they are as culturally isolated from one another as an Amish farmer and a Manhattan HR executive? If so, what does that mean for knot culture in general? And for the quasi-languages in which their cultures and subcultures are articulated? Does the peep-peep-peep of the departing Siberians mean, ‘Leave these degenerate Europeans behind. Life in all its fullness is found only in Africa’?” (Charles Foster, in The island of Griend, in TLS, September 19)

“How [Harry] Hopkins can have gauged the morale of the Soviet people when he was only in Moscow for three days and had no contact with any Russians outside the Kremlin is hard to tell. A consistent supporter of aid to the USSR, he knew little of the country or her regime. ‘The trouble was that Harry knew only two things about the Soviet Union,’ an American diplomat later told the journalist John Gunther. ‘The first was that they had a bad tsar named Ivan the Terrible. The second was that Russia was the first country to recognize the United States after 1776.’” (footnote in Tim Bouverie’s Allies at War, p 199) “Relieved, Beaverbrook completely lost his head, describing Stalin as ‘a kindly man’ who ‘practically never shows any impatience at all’. The professional diplomats were less impressed. ‘Let history record that in those winter negotiations Stalin ran rings around his visitors’, wrote the Third Secretary of the British Embassy in Moscow, John Russell, adding that ‘for sheer nastiness, Stalin and Beaverbrook were about a match.’” (from Tim Bouverie’s Allies at War, p 203)