Recent Commonplace Entries | Coldspur (original) (raw)

August

Two All Souls Fellows on Personality

“There is no such thing as anyone’s real personality. Personalities are the product of the initial feelings or attitudes someone takes up and the needs of the situation they find themselves in . . . and, for that matter, the initial feelings themselves are the product of earlier conflicts of that sort. There is a dialectic of personality, just as there is a dialectic of history (and it’s just as unpredictable).” (Jeremy Wolfenden, in letter to Michael Parsons, January 1961, quoted by Sebastian Faulks in The Fatal Englishman, p 305)

“For as long as I can remember it has always surprised and slightly bewildered me that other people should take it so much for granted that they each possess what is usually called a ‘character’; that is to say, a personality with its own continuous history which can be described as objectively as the life cycle of a plant or an animal. I have never been able to find anything of that sort in myself, and in the course of my life this has been the source of many misunderstandings, since other people persist in expecting of one a kind of consistency which, in the last resort, they really have no right to demand.” (Goronwy Rees, in Foreword to A Bundle of Sensations (1960))

“Goronwy Rees knew Burgess from 1932 until the latter’s defection to Moscsow, and Rees has tried to describe his very extraordinary personality and behaviour (as well as the very odd incidents in which he himself became involved) as they seemed to him at the time.)” (from blurb for A Chapter of Accidents, on back cover of A Bunch of Sensations)

White Mess Jackets

“But it’s also interesting to note that the characteristics Keane invokes aren’t the characteristics of the literary Jeeves at all – as anyone who recalls the matter of the white mess jacket will immediately appreciate.

‘I fear that you inadvertently left Cannes in the possession of a coat belonging to some other gentleman, sir.’ I switched on the steely a bit more. ‘No, Jeeves,’ I said, in a level tone, ‘the object under advisement is mine. I bought it out there.’ ‘You wore it, sir?’ ‘Every night.’ _‘But surely you are not proposing to wear it in England, sir?’_”

(from Simon Gubler’s review of Webb Keane’s Animals, Robots, Gods in TLS, August 2)

“The pudgy Obergruppenführer entered the room wearing a white mess jacket that gave him, Alexander observed, ‘the appearance of an American businessman on vacation in Palm Beach.’” (Ben Macintyre describing Gottlob Berger, in Prisoners of the Castle, p 293)

“But then history is like dentistry: you never know quite what you will find until you drill down.” (from Ben Macintyre’s Prisoners of the Castle, p 307)

“Charlie Parker also took refuge in her [Nica de Koenigswarter’s, the sister of Victor Rothschild] apartment. Taken ill one evening, he was asked by the doctor whether he drank. He replied, ‘I sometimes have a glass of sherry before dinner’. Soon afterwards he died.” (from Kenneth Rose’s Elusive Rothschild, p 56)

“How you live, where you live and what you eat actually affect the DNA and affect genetic expression. There are actual biological changes that people go through based on their social determinants.” (Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, quoted in NYT, August 11)

“While sympathetic to such views, Chopra seems, like the existentialists, to consider anxiety the essence of human consciousness – but an inevitable’ response to existence, and not just the prerogative of philosophers. ‘Mental illness’ and ‘anxiety disorders’ (he puts them in inverted commas) have greatly increased over the last 100 years, partly, he suspects, because of the money to be made from medicalizing them. But, rather than being ‘medicated out of existence’, anxiety should be ‘integrated into our lives. It makes us acknowledge, and challenge, psychological, moral and social norms.” (Jane O’Grady, in review of Samir Chopra’s Anxiety in TLS, August 16)

“Ivan G. Marcus highlights a fundamental difference between attitudes towards the rival religion: Jews were hostile to Christianity, its beliefs, symbols and rites, but not to Christians; whereas Christians were hostile to Jews, and to their imagined hatred for Christians, but not to Judaism, a valid but abrogated faith. He closes with a reflection on the links between medieval and modern forms of antisemitism. Medieval antisemitism was based on three tropes: first, Jews upended proper hierarchy, in which Christians were superior. Second, Jews were accused of hating Christians and of acting out their hatred through violence. Third, the Jewish character was supposedly indelible: even after conversion to Christianity, a Jew was still a Jew. Modern antisemitism contains the same three elements, often stripped of their Christian context.” (John Tolan, in review of Ivan G. Marcus’s How the West Became Antisemitic in TLS, August 16)

“One can’t judge Wagner’s opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don’t intend to hear it a second time”. (Gioachino Rossini, according to Kay Bagon in letter to the Spectator, August 10)

“I believe this understates the importance of his [William Morris’s] commitment to improving the condition of the working class (that is, the vast majority of people) . . .” (Michael Holzman, in letter to TLS, August 23)

“The job of NATO is to keep the Russians out, the Americans in ,and the Germans down.” (aphorism attributed to General ‘Pug’ Ismay by Peter Hennessy, quoted by Paul Winter in TLS, August 23)

“Mihail Gorbachev is given the Fulton podium from which he declares, to warm applause, that the Cold War was (a) a great misunderstanding and (b) as much our faut as Stalin’s . . . This was the wrong speech given by the wrong man. It was given by the man who accidentally destroyed communism. It should have been given by someone who intended to, someone like Havel or Walesa or Sharanksy or even Yeltsin.” (Charles Krauthammer, according to Martin Sixsmith in The War of Nerves, p 543)

“James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence, drew on the preposterous excesses of the McCarthy era when he declared in 2017 that ‘Russians are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour. It’s in their genes to be opposed, diametrically opposed, to the United States and western democracies.” (Martin Sixsmith, in The War of Nerves, p 552)