Recent Commonplace Entries

March

Stalin from the Grave

“It has been said that Stalin also crossed his [Pasternak’s] name off a list of those to be purged and came to regard him almost as inviolable, even after Doctor Zhivago was published abroad in 1957.” (Alexander Lee in History Today, February)

Eh?

“Despite being co-responsible for the demise of hundreds of Allied parachute agents, the British Secret Intelligence Service faked Kopkow’s death and gave him freedom in exchange for his unrivalled understanding of Soviet espionage in Western Europe, particularly the famed Red Orchestra.” (Declan O’Reilly, in abstract of ‘Interrogating the Gestapo: SS-Sturmbannfűhrer Horst Kopkow, the Rote Kapelle and Post-war British Security Interests’, published in the Journal of Intelligence History, 2023, Vol. 22, No. 2)

“‘The major problem was his mother,’ Ms. Gorme explained. ‘She said she’d put her head in the oven if Steve married me.’ He rolled his eyes and tried to get a word in edgewise, but she plunged on: ‘To the day his mother died, she said I wasn’t Jewish but Spanish.’” (from Steve Lawrence’s obituary in NYT, March 9)

“As I know from my own experience, trust is the essential foundation of successful intelligence and operational work.” (Sir John Scarlett, in Foreword to Tony Insall’s Secret Alliances)

“On the Mindscape podcast, Egginton noted that after spending half his career writing scholarly books that were read only by colleagues and graduate students, he found popular writing to be a revelation—not because it was easier but because it demanded more rigorous thought. ‘And then it began to seem to me that some of my past writing was relying on, say, jargon,’ he said, ‘or skipping steps in thinking through a problem by using a kind of shorthand that I felt that my colleagues and students would totally understand but that we hadn’t necessarily really thought through.’” (Meghan O’Gieblyn in review of William Egginton’s The Rigor of Angels, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, in New York Review of Books, March 21)

“The archbishop of Canterbury — Justin Welby, who is the head of the church and a peer in the House of Lords — and the archbishop of York said in a statement on Tuesday that the new definition ‘not only inadvertently threatens freedom of speech, but also the right to worship and peaceful protest, things that have been hard won and form the fabric of a civilized society.’ They added, ‘Crucially, it risks disproportionately targeting Muslim communities, who are already experiencing rising levels of hate and abuse.’” (from report in NYT, March 15)

“To meet spiking demand, utilities in states like Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia are proposing to build dozens of power plants over the next 15 years that would burn natural gas. In Kansas, one utility has postponed the retirement of a coal plant to help power a giant electric-car battery factory.” (from report in NYT, March 18)

“Lal quotes the historian Saidiya Hartman in this section and has evidently been influenced by her idea of ‘critical fabulation’. This is a technique, combining research, memoir and fiction, that Harman has used to fill lacunae in the documentation of transatlantic slavery.” (Lucy Moore, in review of Ruby Lal’s Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan, in Literary Review, March)

“I’m sorry to compound Jonathan Ree’s ‘unseemliness’ towards 20^th-century Oxford philosophes, but here’s a list of my own for their champion, Richard Davenport-Hines (LR Letters, February) to contemplate. Their German contemporaries included Simmel, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Jaspers, Arendt, Anders, Jonas, Habemas and Blumenberg. The contrast of the depth, radicalism, richness and engagement exhibited by such figures with Oxford philosophy’s strangulated linguistic pedantry, logic-chopping triviality, cultural aridity and wilful experiential impoverishment (le style, c’est l’homme) could hardly be more grotesque, indeed embarrassing. Or would Davenport-Hines regard such a comparison as ‘misapplied’?” (letter from Peter Labanyi in Literary Review, March)

???

“When Philby disappeared, Comyns Carr lost his job – the feeling being if he knew about Philby he was a traitor, and if he didn’t he was a fool. The couple decamped to Spain in 1956, staying there.” (from Lee Randall’s review of Avril Horner’s Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence, in the Spectator, March 16)

“Of Hone’s two bibliographical detective heroes, [Graham] Pollard is by far the most [sic!] interesting. A member of the Hypocrites at Oxford, he married a communist, became a spy, working for MI5, and eventually enjoyed a successful career working for the Board of Trade.” (from Ian Sansom’s review of The Book Forger: The True Story of a Literary Crime that Fooled the World, in the Spectator, March 16)

“This is the condition of the exile, who can never find what he was looking for in his new land yet can never return to the same home he left behind. This is the condition of those who abandon their hometowns around the world and, having changed in the process, also find their towns unrecognizably transformed when they come for a visit, both because of circumstances and because they no longer see them with the same eyes.” (from Omer Bartov’s Tales From The Borderlands, p 201)

“He called upon his German audience to follow ‘the path of coexistence and fraternal cooperation with the democratic camp, at whose forefront stands the mighty Soviet Union under the leadership of the great friend of humanity, the genius Stalin. Your task in the name of the ideals of Lessing, Goethe, and Heine, in the name of the immortal legacy of Marx and Engels, is to lead the German people in the fight for a united, democratic, freedom-loving Germany against the forces of reaction and of vengeance, against the Americans and British imperialist warmongers, who want to make West Germany, supported by capitalist war criminals and former Nazis, into a forward attack base against the free independent peoples, against Poles, against our border on the Oder and Neisse.’” (The Pole Ostap Dłuski, on the occasion of Goethe’s two-hundredth anniversary in 1949, recorded by Omer Bartov in Tales From The Borderlands, pp 226-227)

??

“We are quintessentially relational, not cognitive. Yet natural selection, or God, has overprovided, we have a capacity and a desire for relationship that can never be satisfied. We are hard-wired to be frustrated; to be locked inside our own heads and our own rooms, desperate for meaningful contact.” (Charles Foster, in review of three books on loneliness, in the TLS, March 22)