Recent Commonplace Entries

June

“I always find books about Communism and the intellectual are usually written by people who know quite a lot about Communism and very little about intellectuals – real intellectuals.” (Goronwy Rees being interviewed by Peter Wright, March 1956, from KV 2/4607)

“Ethnic purity is a myth and we are all mongrels.”

“She makes it clear that there are still mysteries about how languages spread and are adopted, and about the relationship between language and ethnicity  . . .” (Professor David Abulafia, in review of Laura Spinney’s Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, in Literary Review, May)

“I wanted to know what creates cultural and psychological inheritance, and how we can go forward with it, instead of sleepwalking back into the geopolitical abyss. The abyss is home to the bones of our predecessors who could not escape dark forces. Some of those forces are still with us—they never went away—the better to let us know that the abyss is always open for business.” (Kapka Kassabova, in Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, quoted by Colin Thubron in review in NYRB, June 12)

“I can assure readers that if any responsible, polite correspondent ever draws attention to a genuine mistake I have made in print, or has any helpful suggestions for improving my own work, I will respond with the gratitude that I always show when I am in error, and which, in my opinion, behoves anyone who tries to pursue scholarship and truth.” (Felipe Fernández-Arnesto, in letter to TLS, May 30)

“Fascism could return in ‘the most innocent of disguises’, according to Umberto Eco, who grew up in Mussolini’s Italy, because we are all vulnerable to its emotional pull.” (Daniel Trilling, in review of Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation, in LRB, June 5)

“‘Restitution is virtue signalling of an irresponsible sort,’ the historian David Abulafia wrote in the Spectator in January, ‘threatening the integrity of great collections by pretending to apologise for past sins.’” (Jeremy Harding, in LRB, June 5)

Logic?

“As the son of a Jewish father who married a Jewish woman, I believe strongly in Israel’s absolute right to exist.” (Anthony Seldon, in the Spectator, June 7)

“Side by side with this awareness stands the belief that Jesus of Nazareth’s life was a self-revelatory act of God. Though the claim is disputed on many grounds, its foundation remains robust.” (Rupert Shortt, in review of Lamorna Ash’s Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion, in the Spectator, June 7)

“The debate over Proust’s relation to his Jewish identity ultimately turns not just on his personal attachments but on how he represents Jewish characters in his novel.” (Maurice Samuels, in review of Antoine Compagnon’s Proust, a Jewish Way, in NYRB, June 26)

“Howick says that annually around £67 million in the UK and $5 billion in the US are spent on knee washout arthroscopies for osteoarthritis, yet it has been shown that simply anesthetizing the patient and giving them a scar on the knee so that it looks as if they’ve had surgery is just as good at reducing subsequent pain.” (Gavin Francis, in review of Jeremy Howick’s The Power of Placebos, in NYRB, June 26)

“Either the translator leaves the author as undisturbed as possible and moves the reader toward him, or he leaves the reader as undisturbed as possible and moves the author toward him.” (Friedrich Schleiermacher, according to Kwame Anthony Appiah, in review of Damion Searls’s The Philosophy of Translation and J. M. Coetzee’s and Mariana Dimópulos’s Speaking in Tongues, in NYRB, June 26)

“In the West there has been a tendency to stress the political aspect of democracy rather than its economic aspect, and although at times this may have been carried too far, the fault is on the right side, seeing that a people which surrenders its political rights in return for promises of economic security will soon discover that it has made a bad bargain, as it is helpless if the promises are not kept.” (R. N. Carew Hunt, in The Theory and Practice of Communism, quoted by Leonard Schapiro in Preface, p 9)

“As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-quaker prattle about the sanctity of human life.” (Trotsky in Dictatorship versus Democracy, p 63, quoted by R. N. Carew Hunt in The Theory and Practice of Communism, p 215)

“There is a deep-rooted idea in the ordinary English mind that it is extravagant and wrong to own books.” (J. B. Priestley, in 1927, according to Dinah Birch in TLS, June 20)

“These are the often shabby and warped personalities on which we depend. Once they were called by their real names [informers], now they are officially ‘informants’, and already there is a euphemistic tendency to turn them into ‘contacts’. They are a special breed, the life’s blood of Intelligence, and the world over they have an extraordinary thing in common: a strange and exclusive loyalty to one particular master. An informer is like a duckling newly freed from its shell and in need of fostering. He can be counted on to attach himself to the first person who is prepared to listen sympathetically to what he has to say, and prefers never to transfer his allegiance. In these first few days we all made half a dozen or so ‘contacts’.” (Norman Lewis, in Naples ’44, pp 32-32)