Recent Commonplace Entries

April

“At the heart of the intelligence and security community lies an existential question: Intelligence is to be collected to be used to inform decision making, but how do you make it usable without risk to the source if the source’s access is near to exclusive?” (Richard Dearlove, in Spectator, March 22)

“Only when the country rejected fighting, and zealots had to abandon their visions of a compulsory New Jerusalem, was liberty possible. To the Whigs we owe the principle – Magna Carta restated in modern form – that rulers must obey the law and that legitimate consent requires the consent of the people. From the Tories came the principle – fundamental to any political order – that people have no right to rebel against a government because they disagree with it.” (Robert Tombs, in The English and Their History, quoted by Marcus Walker in Spectator, March 22)

“It’s a clever idea to collect what Martin Edwards, a consultant for the British Library Crime Classics series, calls ‘Academic mysteries’, because solving crimes and engaging in academic life have a surprising amount in common. Both depend on the process of assembling evidence, interpreting what has been said, then arriving at a working hypothesis and, ideally, some sort of explanation.”  (Heather Donohue in review of Lessons in Crime, edited by Martin Edwards, in TLS, March 21)

A Must-Read

“Densely textured in its prose, enormously ambitious, continually attentive to the interplay between individual actions and attitudes on the one hand and the larger forces that shaped them on the other, and drawing on a wide interdisciplinary range of methods and approaches, from quantitative analysis through literary exegesis, socialist feminist theory, and questions of gendered subjectivity, it was also, like all her subsequent monographs and the many coedited collections of essays that have accompanied them, based on a deeply collaborative academic practice.” (Fara Dabhoiwala, in review of Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism, in NYRB, April 24)

“I believe in dictatorship,” he confided to his diary in the 1930s, “but not the dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletariat, like a well-brought up child, should be seen and not heard. It should be properly clothed and fed and sheltered, but not crowned with a moral halo, and above all not allowed to have anything to do with government.” (Benjamin Nathans, describing George Kenna, in review of George Kennan: A Life Between Worlds, by Frank Costigliola, in NYRB, April 24)

“A quarter​ of the way through this century, regime change has become a canonical term. It signifies the overthrow, typically but not exclusively by the United States, of governments around the world disliked by the West, employing for that purpose military force, economic blockade, ideological erosion, or a combination of these.” (Perry Andeson, in Regime Change in the West?, in LRB, April 3)

“‘Capitalism’ (a word Marx never used in Capital) is less a system than an anti-system, an irrational and ever changing flux of conditions and counter-conditions that are always moving towards crisis.”

“Marx, by contrast, was sharply critical of capitalism and wanted to see it collapse.” (Peter E. Gordon, in review of Karl Marx’s Capital, translated by Paul Reitter, in LRB, April 3)

“Charles Darwin had little to do with the spread of the term ‘evolution’. It had long evoked a purposeful unrolling that was the opposite of his vision of contingent open-endedness. Aside from a single ‘evolved’, the term is absent from the first edition of On the Origin of Species (1859), as it is from the titles of all his subsequent books. Yet even he used it from time to time: a concession to the growing popularity of the evolutionary writings of others, notably the journalist turned philosopher Herbert Spencer.” (Gregory Radick, in review of Peter J. Bowler’s Evolution for the People in TLS, April 18)

“I have often said that there is something grossly immoral about the profession of journalism. These men live on the woes of others, who batten on the miseries of the world, must of necessity be dead to all kindly impulse and to the gentler emotions. They must be sceptical of all that is good, and have immeasurable faith in the wickedness of human nature. They must have neither reverence for the great ones of the earth not charity for the sins of the weak.” (Edgar Wallace, in Mr Collingrey, MP, in The Oxford Book of Spy Stories)

“There were queen bees, like the misuse of the Service, and the search for the true as distinct from wishful intelligence, and there were worker bees. These included such idiosyncrasies as not employing men with beards, or those who were completely bilingual, instantly dismissing men who tried to bring pressure to bear on him through family relationships with members of the Cabinet, mistrusting men or women who were too ‘dressy’, and those who called him ‘Sir’ off -duty; and having an exaggerated faith in Scotsmen.” (Ian Fleming on ‘M’, from Risico, in The Oxford Book of Spy Stories)

“The great phenomenologist of religion Mircea Eliade argues that human beings are naturally religious.” (Jamie Franklin, in the Spectator, April 15)

Shome Mishtake Shurely?

“In January 1945, she [Josephine Baker] performed for Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and de Gaulle in Berlin.” (Caroline Moorehead, in TLS, April 4)

“On immigration, socialist demands should include full labour and civic rights for migrants, full entitlement to benefits, unionization across the economy, and an undoing of vulnerabilities that contribute to the super-exploitation of migrants.” (China Miéville, in letter to LRB, April 17)

“A major campaign which will force an end to this unhappy state of affairs needs to be launched immediately. It is pure sophistry to suggest that the security of the state will be imperiled if, after seventy-five years, say, the secret archives of government are opened up. If now we were to know the dead truth about 1899, would anything but the reputations of some of our long-dead leaders seriously suffer?” (Stewart Steven in Operation Splinter Factor (1974), p 11)

“This view was rejected because, as Sir Stuart Menzies, head of SIS in Britain, liked to say, once you grant the enemy a mind so supreme that it thinks of everything, you are left with no choice but to do nothing.” (Stewart Steven in Operation Splinter Factor, p 35)

“In light of this, Noel Field came to believe that he had a higher duty than that of loyalty to the State Department: he had a duty to humanity.” (Stewart Steven in Operation Splinter Factor, p 77)

“There are only a limited number of occasions when a ‘double’ can be used. An agent who transmits information which subsequently turns out to be false is never fully trusted again. Agent X’s track record was perfect: his reports, though never necessarily of high moment, were nevertheless always accurate.” (Stewart Steven in Operation Splinter Factor, p 102)

“There are readings of Picasso’s Guernica, Pasolini’s Accatone and the centenary commemorations of the Russian Revolution, and an essay on what Clark calls the ‘Image-World’ – an analysis of late late capitalism taking in the 2001 London riots and the infamous Sparkasse Chemnitz credit card which featured a statue of Karl Marx.” (Matthew Holman, in review of ‘scot-free Western Marxist’ T J Clark’s Those Passions: On Art and Politics, in Literary Review, April)

“About Guy, about whom you ask, I see him quite often. Stories, inadvertently started, it seems, by his mum, that we have quarrelled are not true. I understand many people think if [sic] us as sort of Siamese twins – but Debenham and Freebody, Hobbs and Sutcliffe, Burke and Hare were probably neither on the one hand Castors and Polluxes nor on the other Cains and Abels and if these gentlemen, specially Hobbs and Sutcliffe, will forgive being dragged in, neither are we, as you know.” (Donald Maclean, in letter to Philip Toynbee, October 1956, from FCO 158/11 at the National Archives)

“Matthes considers the concern that our responses to art, buildings and traditions may be ‘merely subjective’, but counters it by invoking the notion of ‘intersubjectivity’ – not the personal response of an individual human to some objective reality, but the communal, shared response of all of us, thanks to our common humanity. But how communal are our responses, really, in multicultural, identity-riven societies? Perhaps we are united by the need to ‘save the planet’ and its diversity – in which case, rather than endorsing the Inuits’ extension of tradition in using gas-powered sleds for seal-hunting, should one instead recommend that they stop hunting seals at all? How much should we cater to the fact that Zuni wooden sculptures are made to decay, given that the tradition that would produce new ones is dying out?.” (Jane O’Grady, in review of Erich Hatala Matthes’s What to Save and Why, in TLS, April 25)

“In ‘On Pharaohs’, Coates writes about his visit to Dakar, the capital of Senegal. This is his first trip to Africa, the continent of origin for African Americans, from which most of their ancestors were removed during the slave trade and with which many Blacks in the US seek a connection. Coates went ‘back to the origin point of all of us to see my lost siblings, the ones who had evaded sale and slavery’. His essay explores the different factors complicating that act of going ‘home’, from the reactions of those he encountered to his own ‘ghosts’, or aspects of his own psychological baggage. An African woman tells Coates, ‘Look, I understand what Black is in America. I get that you’re Black there, but here you are mixed. That’s how we see most Black Americans’. Coates paraphrases the woman as saying that, in Senegal, ‘Black Americans are seen as cool, glamorous, and even beautiful because we are mixed’.” (Clifford Thompson, in review of The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, in TLS, April 25)