Recent Commonplace Entries

February

“‘The great challenge facing the storyteller and the historian alike is to get inside people’s heads  . . . to make some informed estimate of their motives and intentions,’ wrote Michael Frayn discussing Copenhagen, his play about the physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. ‘And this is precisely where recorded and recordable history cannot reach. Even when all the external evidence has been mastered, the only way into the protagonists’ heads is through the imagination.’” (Arthur I. Miller in the Spectator, January 24)

“This prompts reflections on the ‘unresolved trauma’ of slavery supposedly haunting the Black psyche – claims that sound, to my ear, a touch far-fetched. Much has been made of this ‘epigenetic trauma’ lately. I remain unconvinced. Most of us are descended from peasants and proles, whose lives were proverbially nasty, brutish and short. Practically every human on the planet, then, should be in line for counselling and back pay.” (Pratinav Anil, in review of Reparations, by Neil Biggar, and The Big Payback, by Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder, in TLS, January 23)

“Cheque-writing, then, is not atonement. It risks elite capture, corrodes solidarity, and offers the sedative of moral closure. The real task, as Sudhir Hazareesingh, Margot Finn and the better historians suggest, is reparative history: placing slavery in public memory without either self-congratulation or self-flagellation. That requires research grants, not reparations cheques.” (Pratinav Anil, in review of Reparations, by Neil Biggar, and The Big Payback, by Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder, in TLS, January 23)

“But to be clear: ‘networks’ in this sense are not real. Religious beliefs and practices are not packets of DNA or electrons. They do not propagate themselves. Every ‘node’ in these ‘networks’ is a human being, that is, the most irreducibly complex phenomenon in existence. Writing history of any kind – in fact, thinking about human beings at all – requires a heroic, insolent degree of oversimplification. Which is fine: as long as we remember that that is what we are doing and don’t get entranced by the metaphors with which we do it.” (Alec Ryrie, in review of David N. Hempton’s Christianity at the Crossroads: The Global Church from the Print Revolution to the Digital Era, in History Today, December 2025)

“Election interference, sabotage and sponsorship of anti-Communist guerrillas were the domain of the Office of Policy-Coordination, the ‘cowboys’ to the OSO’s [Office of Special Operations’] ‘librarians’.” (Christian Lorentzen, on James Angleton and the CIA, in review of True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen by Lance Richardson, in LRB, February 5)

“As for Harold Laski, who never supported him as Labour leader, Attlee later wrote that he was ‘a brilliant chap, but he talked too much  . . . He wanted to be a public figure and an éminence grise at the same time. You can’t be both. I gave him a try as an éminence grise, but he started making speeches at the week-ends. I had to get rid of him.” (from Gill Bennett’s The Zinoviev Letter, p 157)

“Austerity was a moral, political, intellectual, and humanitarian failure, possibly the single worst and most socially destructive economic idea perpetrated on the world so far this century.” (Trevor Jackson, in NYRB, February 26)

“That opacity is another kind of accountability sink: you didn’t lose your job because we made a decision; you lost your job because of credit rigidities from short-term interest rate adjustments targeting the nonaccelerating inflation rate of employment.” (Trevor Jackson, in NYRB, February 26)

“When Stalin pledged free elections at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 he meant to keep his word, more or less.” (from Spying Through a Glass Darkly, by David Alvarez & Eduard Mark, p 177)

“The causal relationship between intelligence and decision is often the most elusive element in intelligence history. Intelligence is only one of any number of factors – personal ambition, bureaucratic and partisan politics, previous experience with a government or national leader, decision-making style, race, education, economic status, religion, ethnicity, gender – that might influence a foreign policy maker, and it is very difficult to determine the relevant influence of any of these factors.” .” (from Spying Through a Glass Darkly, by David Alvarez & Eduard Mark, pp 281-282)

“Sometimes revolutions deliver a second-best result: although Leninism never evolved into genuine socialism, it did industrialise a hitherto agrarian Russia.” (Richard Bourke, in review of Dan Edelsten’s The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin and Donald Sassoon’s Revolutions: A New History, in Literary Review, February)

“It is possible to conjecture, without a statistical survey, that the large majority of self-identifying Christians still perceive and feel comfortable with a traditional God – a humanoid with human emotions and ambitions, gender and personality – a man, perhaps a little like Harold Macmillan, sitting comfortably on a throne in a chamber of cumulonimbus somewhere above us.” (Peter Burden, in letter to Prospect, March)

“And yet a paradox runs through reactionary feminist thought: human nature is said to be fixed and unalterable, while also being perpetually threatened by progressive reformers bent on ‘de-sexing and disembodying us all’. If nature is truly immovable, one wonders why it requires such vigilant policing.” (James Bloodworth in Prospect, March)

“To be fair, by this point Drayson is wandering far from her area of Andalusian expertise, allowing her blithely to assure readers that Tatarstan’s ‘multiculturalism constitutes a workable social model’ for the rest of Europe! Such is the potential folly when the historical profession – medievalists included – become convinced its highest purpose is to intervene in politics.” (Nile Green, in review of Elizabeth Drayson’s Crucible of Light in TLS, February 20)