Christopher Hitchens, Arguably
Christopher Hitchens, Arguably, Twelve Books, New York, 2011.
In passing the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—the basis of the later First Amendment—they brilliantly exploited the fear that each Christian sect had of persecution by the others. It was easier to get the squabbling factions to agree on no tithes than it would have been to get them to agree on tithes that might also benefit their doctrinal rivals. In his famous “wall of separation” letter, assuring the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, of their freedom from persecution, Jefferson was responding to the expressed fear of this little community that they would be oppressed by—the Congregationalists of Connecticut. (Gods of Our Fathers: The United States of Enlightenment, 5)
It is arguably a good thing—and in no way detracts from Andrew Burstein absorbing book—that Jefferson’s Secrets does not quite live up to its title. Secrecy, death, and desire are the ingredients of the sensational, even of the violent, and they consort ill with the measure and scruple for which Thomas Jefferson is still renowned. It might be better to say that this study is an inquiry into the privacy and reticence of a very self-contained man, along with an educated speculation upon the motives and promptings for his defensive style. (The Private Jefferson, 9)
…this was a man who could oppose the emancipation of slaves because he feared the “ten thousand recollections” they would retain of their hated condition, while almost in the same breath saying dismissively that “their griefs are transient.” (The Private Jefferson, 10)
How many know that perhaps 1.5 million Europeans and Americans were enslaved in Islamic North Africa between 1530 and 1780? We dimly recall that Miguel de Cervantes was briefly in the galleys. But what of the people of the town of Baltimore in Ireland, all carried off by “corsair” raiders in a single night? (Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates, 13)
One immediate effect of the American Revolution, however, was to strengthen the hand of those very same North African potentates: roughly speaking, the Maghrebian provinces of the Ottoman Empire that conform to today’s Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. Deprived of Royal Navy protection, American shipping became even more subject than before to the depredations of those who controlled the Strait of Gibraltar. (Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates, 13)
There were many Americans—John Adams among them—who made the case that it was better policy to pay the tribute. It was cheaper than the loss of trade, for one thing, and a battle against the pirates would be “too rugged for our people to bear.” Putting the matter starkly, Adams said: “We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.”
The cruelty, exorbitance, and intransigence of the Barbary states, however, would decide things. The level of tribute demanded began to reach 10 percent of the American national budget, with no guarantee that greed would not increase that percentage, while from the dungeons of Algiers and Tripoli came appalling reports of the mistreatment of captured men and women. (Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates, 15)
Once again, Barbary obstinacy tipped the scale. Yusuf Karamanli, the pasha of Tripoli, declared war on the United States in May 1801, in pursuit of his demand for more revenue. This earned him a heavy bombardment of Tripoli and the crippling of one of his most important ships. … The Barbary regimes continued to underestimated their new enemy, with Morocco declaring war in its turn and the others increasing their blackmail. (Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates, 16)
But even the dullest soul could regard the continued triangular Atlantic slave trade between Africa, England, and the Americas and perceive the double standard at work. Thus, the struggle against Barbary may have helped to force some of the early shoots of abolitionism. (Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates, 19)
There are two kinds of people: those who read Franklin’s celebrated Autobiography with a solemn expression, and those who keep laughing out loud as they go along. (Benjamin Franklin: Free and Easy, 22)
A few pages father on we read of the tyranny exerted by his brother, who wanted both to indenture him and to beat him, “Tho’ He was otherwise not an ill-natur’d Man: Perhaps I was too saucy & provoking.” Surely an instance of what I call moral jujitsu (of which more later), in which pretended humility can cut like a lash. (Benjamin Franklin: Free and Easy, 22)
…those who really did take the Autobiography at face value. It is no surprise to find D. H. Lawrence among these, because a more humorless man probably never drew mortal breath. But it is astonishing to find Mark Twain saying in effect that the book had made life harder for his Toms and Hucks, who had to bear this additional burden of schoolmarmery and moral exhortation, imposed by those determined to “improve” them at any price. (Benjamin Franklin: Free and Easy, 23)
The 1747 “Speech of Missy Polly Baker,” in which a common whore made a notably eloquent speech in defense of her right to bear bastard children, fooled almost everyone at the time. We may be right in speaking of an age of innocence, in which Miss Baker’s apologia (she is “hard put to it” for a living, “cannot conceive” the nature of her offense, and half admits “all my Faults and Miscarriages”) was received with furrowed and anxious brows. But the only wonder, once you get the trick of it, is how Franklin was able to use such broad and easy punning to lampoon the Pharisees of the day. He even tells us in the Autobiography how it became a delight to him to pen anonymous screeds, put them under the door of the newspaper office at night, and then watch the local worthies try to puzzle out their authorship. (24)
Franklin’s moral jujitsu, in which he always seemingly deferred to his opponents in debate but left them first punching the air and then adopting his opinions as their own, is frequently and slyly boasted about in the Autobiography, but it cannot have afforded him as much pleasure as the applause and income he received from people who didn’t know he was kidding. The tip-offs are all there once you learn to look for them, as with Franklin’s friend Osborne, who died young. /
‘He and I had made a serious Agreement, that the one who happen’d first to die, should if possible make a friendly Visit to the other, and acquaint him how he found things in that separate State. But he never fulfill’d his Promise.’ (27)
Lincoln… To read of the unrelenting coarseness and brutality of the boy’s father is lowering to the spirit, as is the shame he felt at his mother’s reputation for unchastity. (Abraham Lincoln: Misery’s Child, 35)
Lincoln’s own experience of legal bondage and hard usage is very graphically told: Not only did his father’s improvidence deprive him of many necessities, but it resulted in his being hired out as a menial to be a hewer of wood and drawer of water for his father’s rough and miserly neighbors. … struggled to keep reading, an activity feared and despised by his father, as it was by the owner of Frederick Douglass, … (Abraham Lincoln: Misery’s Child, 36)
Here again, we can see the legalistic and sometimes pedantic mind that exhausted all the possibilities of compromise before coming up with the tortuous form of words that finally became the Emancipation Proclamation. / In rather the same way, Lincoln sought a deft means of negotiating the shoals of the religious question. Burlingame’s highly diverting early pages show Lincoln being actively satirical in matters of faith, lampooning preachers, staging mock services, and praying to God “to put stockings on the chicken’s feet in winter,” in the words of his stepsister Matilda. Reminiscing about frontier Baptists many years, he told an acquaintance: “I don’t like to hear cut and dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees!” … Several moments in the narrative—the bee-fighting preacher being one such—put me in mind of Mark Twain. The tall tales, the dry wit, the broad-gauge humor, the imminence of farce even in grave enterprises: (37)
Mark Twain and Frederick Douglass, too, were persons who could only have been original Americans, sprung from American ground. It is engaging and affecting to read of Lincoln’s lifelong troubles with spelling and pronunciation (he addressed himself to “Mr. Cheerman” in his famous Cooper Union Speech of 1860) and of his frequent appearance with as much as six inches of shin or arm protruding from his ill-made clothes: truly a Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. (37)
“Do not misunderstand me,” said Amis p[e]re when he reviewed the first edition, “if I say that one of the troubles with Lolita is that, so far from being too pornographic, it is not pornographic enough.” … (Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita, 72)
…neither can I forget Sally’s older brother [Martin Amis], who wrote, / ‘Parents and guardians of twelve-year-old girls will have notices that their wards have a tendency to be difficult. That may take Humbert’s word for it that things are much more difficult—are in fact entirely impossible—when your twelve-year-old girl is also your twelve-year-old girlfriend. The next time that you go out with your daughter, imagine that you are going out with your daughter.’ (72)
But, just as Humbert’s mind is on a permanent knife-edge of sexual mania, so his creator manages to tread the vertiginous path between incest, by which few are tempted, and engagement with pupating or nymph-like girls, which will not lose its frisson. (You will excuse me if, like Humbert, I dissolve into French when euphemism is required.) (73)
…Humbert himself does not allow us to forget—that immediately following each and every one of the hundreds of subsequent rapes, the little girl weeps for quite a long time… (73)
Who but Gore could begin a discussion by saying that the three most dispiriting words in the English language were “Joyce Carol Oates”? (Vidal Loco, 90)
How very agreeable it must be to sit at a table in a casino where nobody seemed to lose, (America the Banana Republic, 96)
Remember the scene at the end of Peter Pan, where the children are told that, if they don’t shout out aloud that they all believe in fairies, then Tinker Bell’s gonna fucking die? (America the Banana Republic, 97)
Now ask yourself another question. Has anybody resigned, from either the public or the private sectors (overlapping so lavishly as they now do)? (America the Banana Republic, 97)
Three portraits by Hans Holbein… The first shows King Henry VIII in all his swollen arrogance and finery… (The Men Who Made England: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, 146-7)
Cromwell has sufficient immunity to keep his own edition of William Tyndale’s forbidden English Bible, published overseas and smuggled back home, with a title page that carries the mocking words printed in utopia. Thomas More will one day see to it that Tyndale, too, burns alive for that jibe. (148)
Cromwell is a practical skeptic here too, because he has spent some hard time on the Continent and knows, he says, that “the English will never be forgiven for the talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get off their own island.” (The Men Who Made England: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, 148)
More discloses himself as a hybrid of Savonarola and Bartleby the Scrivener:
“Let us be clear. You will not take the oath because your conscience advises you against it?”
“Yes.”
“Could you be a little more comprehensive in your answers?”
“No.”
“You object but you won’t say why?”
“Yes.”
“Is it the matter of the stature you object to, or the form of the oath, or the business of oath-taking in itself?”
“I would rather not say.”
By this time, any luckless prisoner of More’s would have been stretched naked on the rack, but his questioners persist courteously enough until he suddenly lashes out as the arrogant theocrat he is:
“You say you have the majority. I say I have it. You say Parliament is behind you, and I say all the angels and saints are behind me, and all the company of the Christian dead, for as many generations as there have been since the church of Christ was founded, … (The Men Who Made England, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, 150-1)
…generations of sentimental and clerical history will canonize More while making Cromwell’s name a hissing and a byword. (151)
It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one. (Edmund Burke: Reactionary Prophet, 153)
In point of fact Edmund Burke was neither an Englishman nor a Tory. He was an Irishman, probably a Catholic Irishman at that (even if perhaps a secret sympathizer), and for the greater part of his life he upheld the more liberal principles of the Whig faction. (153)
Johnson… Oliver Sacks was able some years ago to make a fairly definite retrospective diagnosis of Tourette’s syndrome. (Samuel Johnson: Demons and Dictionaries, 167)
Johnson’s pitiless and violent hatred of the American Revolution, and his contemptuous cruelty towards those who apostatized from the established church (even if it was to join another Christian sect) was strong and consistent. (169)
What is amazing is the industry with which Flaubert assimilated so many books on arcane subjects (some 1,500, according to Polizzotti), all of this knowledge acquired just so that a brace of nobodies could manage to get things not just wrong, but exactly wrong. (Gustave Flaubert: I’m with Stupide, 174)
…the possessor of an anarchic sense of humor: This yields the same result. What did oyster shuckers do, Dickens demanded to know, when the succulent bivalves were out of season? / ‘Do they commit suicide in despair, or wrench open tight drawers and cupboards and hermetically-sealed bottles—for practice? Perhaps they are dentists out of the oyster-season? Who knows?’ / This pearl was contained in a private letter not intended for publication (Dickens was almost always “on”) and is somewhat more searching than the dull question—“Where do the ducks in Central Park go in winter?”—that was asked by the boy who spoke so scornfully of “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.” [Dickens vs. Caufield] (The Dark Side of Dickens, 176)
Dickens …He may not have had Shakespeare’s or Eliot’s near omniscience about human character, … (176)
Genuine radicals and reformers in mid-nineteenth-century England were to be defined above all as sympathizers with the American Revolution and with the cause of the Union in the Civil War. Dickens was scornful of the first and hostile to the second. … he was on balance sympathetic to the Confederate states, which he had never visited, and made remarks about Negroes that might have shocked even the pathologically racist Carlyle. (178)
It’s easy to tell, form the protractedly unfunny sarcasm about Mrs. Jellyby and the mock-African hellhole of Borrioboola-Gha in Bleak House, that the author did not possess the gift of imaginative sympathy when it came to those outside his immediate ken, or should I say kin. (178)
…we also encounter a method of Rebecca West’s that has given rise to much criticism. Her nonfictional characters are conscripted more as dramatis personae—Montefiore likens her to Thucydides—and given long speeches, … Throughout the book both she and her husband make long and quite grammatical addresses that would be unthinkable in real life, if only because they would be interrupted if given in mixed company and walked out upon if they occurred at the domestic hearth. (Rebecca West: Things Worth Fighting For, 198)
Note the slight clumsiness, which seems to have inflected everything Maugham ever wrote. (W. Somerset Maugham, 245)
…the specially planted avacado trees, with a skilled resident cook to transform the luscious green fruit into an ice cream flavored with rum. (This contrasts with the rebarbative lobster ice cream served by Ribbentrop at a dinner recorded in “Chips”: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon.) (247)
…Maugham kept to a rigorous regime at his desk, and turned out third-rate prose by the yard, … (248)
Permanently injured by the flagrant adultery of his first wife, and almost certainly a badly repressed homosexual, he made a living example of Cyril Connolly’s “Theory of Permanent Adolescence,” whereby Englishmen of a certain caste are doomed to re-enact their school days. The vices of the boy are notably unappealing in the grown man, and Waugh was frequently upbraided for the apparent contrast between his extreme nastiness and his ostentatious religiosity. To this he famously replied (to Nancy Mitford) that nobody could imagine how horrible he would be if he were not a Catholic. A nice piece of casuistry, but not one that bears much scrutiny. In at least two cases—his support for the Croatian Fascist Party during his wartime stint in the Balkans, and his animosity towards Jews—there was a direct connection between his spleen and his faith. And in at least two of the novels, Helena (which is based on the life of the early Christian empress of that name) and Brideshead, the narrative is made ridiculous by a sentimental and credulous approach to miracles or the supernatural. This is what Orwell meant by the incompatibility of faith with maturity. (Evelyn Waugh: The Permanent Adolescent, 251)
He toiled in three demanding vineyards: musical comedy, screenwriting, and fiction. (P.G. Wodehouse: The Honorable Schoolboy, 270)
This passage helps to introduce the oft-attempted comparison between Powell and Proust. There is, first and most obviously, that ability to evoke childhood which is, alas, lost to so many of us but still, somehow, recognizable when well done. … Like Proust, Powell was not exactly pithy (I can’t offhand recall any “quotations” from Powell, as one can from his great contemporaries Wodehouse and Waugh), but I hope I have conveyed something of the worthwhileness of hearing him out. One learns to trust certain raconteurs, even if they appear at first to be long of wind. (Anthony Powell: An Omnivorous Curiosity, 279)
George Orwell, whose flinty socialist principles—and persistence in trying to live up to them—might well have invited Powell’s gentle ridicule but (perhaps because they were not bogus) instead won his respect. The pages recollecting his friend are of interest and some beauty: ‘Goodness knows what Orwell would have been like in the army. I have no doubt whatever that he would have been brace, but bravery in the army is, on the whole, an ultimate rather than immediate requirement, demanded only at the end of a long and tedious apprenticeship.’ Here again, reading that deceptively dense sentence, one is reminded of what it is to be molded by a very highly evolved and somewhat stratified society. In such a system courage is neither a sufficient nor even in the strict sense a necessary condition for the high calling of arms; a force that depended on mere bravery would be merely a militant rabble—subject to mood swings, perhaps, and indubitably depriving its officer corps of opportunities for understatement. Such almost invisible writing about the most palpable of questions is a continual distinction of Powerll’s work and an unending reward for the reading of it. (282)
[after an excerpt: ] As I say, Powell knew when and how to write sparely. (282)
Graham Greene once wrote a celebrated essay about a doppelganger who cared enough to haunt and shadow him, even to masquerade as him. This “other” Greene appeared to have anterior knowledge of the movements of his model, sometimes showing up to grant an interview or fill a seat in a restaurant, so that Greene himself, when he arrive in some old haunt or new locale, would be asked why he had returned so soon. … This mode of imitation or emulation or substitution—at once a form of flattery and a species of threat, or at any rate of challenge— (Graham Greene: I’ll Be Damned, 297)
Greene, after all, was nothing if not radical, even subversive, in his self-presentation. Always at odds with authority, not infrequently sued or censored or even banned, a bohemian and a truant, part exile and part émigré, a dissident Catholic and a sexual opportunist, … (298)
This seems doubly ungenerous when considered in the light of the epigraph from Leon Bloy with which Greene opened The End of the Affair: “Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.” Is this creative agony available only to those who believe in transubstantiation? [301] To be fair to Greene, whose answer to that question was fairly obviously in the affirmative, one must admit that he extended the same indulgence to one other group: the Communists. … The theme of martyrdom is constant, even with these secular materialists. … Greene had briefly been a Party member while at Oxford, and although he was too intelligent and too prudent to remain a true adherent for long, he kept up a residual form… (302)
In the English past it had been considered “treasonous” to be a Roman Catholic. Official persecution was the underside of Elizabethan England. … So strongly did Greene identify with these reactionary subversives that he became a Shakespeare-hater, accusing the national bard of being an accomplice in repression, if only a silent one. … “Two years before, Shakespeare’s fellow poet Southwell had died on the scaffold after three years of torture. If only Shakespeare had shared his disloyalty, we could have loved him better as a man.” (303)
Greene was unwaveringly hostile to the United States. (304)
…fatuous apologetics… (305)
…ever since the 1950s, when he indulged the Stalinist regime in Poland because it maintained a Catholic front organization called Pax Christi. (306)
The term “anti-American” is a loose one, and loosely employed. My own working definition of it, admittedly a slack one also, is that a person is anti-American if he ow she is consistently contemptuous of American culture and furthermore supports any opponent of U.S. policy, whoever this may be. (306)
Perhaps Anglophilia continues to play its part, but if I were one of the few surviving teachers of Anglo-Saxon I would rejoice at the way in which such terms as “muggle” and “Wizengamot,” and such names as Godric, Wulfric, and Dumbledore, had become common currency. At this rate, the teaching of Beowulf could be revived. (Harry Potter: The Boy Who Lived, 382)
The schoolchildren appear to know nothing of Christianity; in this latest novel Harry and even Hermione are ignorant of two well-known biblical verses encountered in a churchyard. (382)
If I am correct about this, which I am, (Why Women Aren’t Funny, 394)
The Swedes are not the pacific herbivores that many people imagine: In the footnotes to his second novel Larsson reminds us that Prime Minister Olof Palme was gunned down in the street in 1986 and that the foreign minister Anna Lindh was stabbed to death (in a Stockholm department store) in 2003. The first crime is still unsolved, and the verdict in the second case has by no means satisfied everybody. (Stieg Larsson: The Author Who Played With Fire, 400)
Ancient Greeks and Romans knew what was going on, all right, but they are reported to have avoided the over-keen fellators for fear of their breath alone. And a man in search of this consolation might be suspected of being… unmanly. (As American as Apple Pie, 405)
…the giving of the divine Law by Moses appears in three or four wildly different scriptural versions. (When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms, always be sure to ask which set. It works every time.) The first and most famous set comes in Exodus 20 but ends with Moses himself smashing the supposedly most sacred artifacts ever known to man: the original, God-dictated panels of Holy Writ. The second edition occurs in Exodus 34, where new but completely different tablets are presented after some heavenly re-write session and are for the first time called “the ten commandments.” In the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy, Moses once more calls his audience together and recites the original Sinai speech with one highly significant alteration (the Sabbath commandment’s justifications in each differ greatly). But plainly discontented with the effect of this, he musters the flock again twenty-two chapters further on, as the river Jordan is coming into view, and gives an additional set of orders—chiefly terse curses—which are also to be inscribed in stone. (The New Commandments, 415)
(II) Then comes the prohibition of “graven images” or indeed “any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” This appears to forbid representational art, … It certainly seems to discourage Christian iconography, with its crucifixes, and statues of virgins and saints.) But the ban in obviously intended as a very emphatic one, since it comes with a reminder that I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. (415)
(IV) Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. … neither one’s children nor one’s servants or animals should be allowed to perform any tasks. (Query: Why is it is specifically addressed to people who are assumed to have staff?) … But in Exodus 20: 8-11, the reason given for the day off is that “in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day.” Yet in Deuteronomy 5:15 a different reason for the Sabbath observance is offered: “Remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the LORD they God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched arm: therefore the LORD thy God commanded thee to keep the Sabbath day.” … why can’t the infallible and omniscient one make up his mind what the real reason is? (416)
Thou shalt not kill. This very celebrated commandment quite obviously cannot mean what it seems to say in English translation. In the original Hebrew it comes across as something more equivalent to “Thou shalt do no murder.” (417)
Thou shalt not commit adultery. For some reason, “the seventh” is the only one of the commandments that is still widely known by its actual number. … Most criminal codes have long given up the attempt to make it a punishable offense in law: Its rewards and punishments are carefully administered by its practitioners and victims. (417-8)
Thou shalt not steal. … prosperity of some families and some states is also founded on original theft, … (418)
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. This is possibly the most sophisticated ruling of the whole Decalogue. Human society is inconceivable unless words are to some extent bonds, … Nothing focuses the attention more than a reminder that one is speaking on oath. … Note, also, how relatively flexible this commandment is. Its fulcrum is the “against.” If you are quite sure of somebody’s innocence and you shade the truth a little in the witness-box, you are no doubt technically guilty of perjury and may be privately troubled. But if you consciously lie in order to indict someone who is not guilty, you have done something irretrievably foul. (418-9)
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s. … Instead, this is the first but not the last introduction in the Bible of the totalitarian concept of “thought crime.” … Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament takes this a step further, announcing that those with lust in their heart have already committed the sin of adultery. In that case, you might as well be hung… Wise lawmakers know that it is a mistake to promulgate legislation that is impossible to obey. … From the “left” point of view, how is it moral to prohibit… demanding a fairer distribution of wealth? From the “right” point of view, why is it wicked to be ambitious and acquisitive? And is not envy a great spur to emulation and competition? (419)
So then: how to prune…? (420)
For millions of people for thousands of years, the Sabbath was made a dreary burden of obligation and strict observance instead of a day of leisure or recreation. It also led to absurd hypocrisies that seem to treat God as a fool: He won’t notice is we make the elevators stop on every floor so that no pious Jew needs press a button. This is unwholesome and over-strenuous. (420)
As for Number Five, by all means respect for the elders, but why is there nothing to forbid child abuse? (Insolence on the part of children is punishable by death, according to Leviticus 20:9, only a few verses before the stipulation of the death penalty for male homosexuals.) A cruel or rude child is a ghastly thing, but a cruel or brutal parent can do infinitely more harm. Yet even in a long and exhaustive list of prohibitions, parental sadism or neglect is never once condemned. (420)
Number Seven … what about rape? It seems to be very strongly recommended, along with genocide, slavery, and infanticide, in Numbers 31: 1-18, and surely constitutes a rather extreme version or sex outside marriage. (421)
Number Ten … Sinister and despotic in that it cannot be obeyed and thus makes sinners even of quite thoughtful people. (421)
Burka. What about the Ku Klux Klan? … I am not going to have a hooded man or woman teach my children, or push their way into a bank ahead of me, or drive my taxi or bus, and there will never be a law that says I have to. (In Your Face, 424)
…in many Muslim societies, such as Tunisia and Turkey, the shrouded look is illegal in government buildings, schools, and universities. Why should Europeans and Americans, seeking perhaps to accommodate Muslim immigrants, adopt the standard only of the most backward and primitive Muslim states? (424)
Even in Iran there is only a requirement for the covering of hair, and I defy anybody to find any authority in the Koran for the concealment of the face. (425)
Here is a society where rape is not a crime. It is a punishment. Women can be sentenced to be raped, by tribal and religious kangaroo courts, if even a rumor of their immodesty brings shame on their menfolk. (From Abbottabad to Worse, 475)
President Asif Ali Zardari cringes daily in front of the forces who openly murdered his wife, Benazir Bhutto, and who then contemptuously ordered the crime scene cleansed with fire hoses, as if to spit even on the pretense of an investigation. (475)
There’s absolutely no mystery to the “Why do they hate us?” question, at least as it arises in Pakistan. They hate us because they owe us, and are dependent upon us. the two main symbols of Pakistan’s pride—its army and its nuclear program—are wholly parasitic on American indulgence and patronage. (475)
If we ever ceased to swallow our pride, so I am incessantly told in Washington, then the Pakistani oligarchy might behave even more abysmally than it already does, and the situation deteriorate even further. This stale and superficial argument ignores the awful historical fact that, each time the Pakistani leadership did get worse, or behave worse, it was handsomely rewarded by the United States. We have been the enablers of every stage of that wretched state’s counter-evolution, to the point where it is a serious regional menace and an undisguised ally of our worst enemy, as well as the sworn enemy of some of our best allies. How could it be “worse” if we shifted our alliance and instead embraced India, our only rival in scale as a multi-ethnic and multi-religious democracy, and a nation that contains nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan? How could it be “worse” if we listened to the brave Afghams, like their former intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh, who have been telling us for years that we are fighting the war in the wrong country? (479)
[end of an introduction] I have saved the word “British” for as long as I decently can. (The Perils of Partition, 481)
It was arguably fair, when Andre Maurois finished his Historie de la France, to permit him a small allowance of la glorie and to agree with his conclusion that “the history of France, a permanent miracle, has the singular privilege of impassioning the peoples of the earth to the point where they all take part in French quarrels.” (Algeria: A French Quarrel, 492)
Every move to reform Algeria even slightly was vetoed by a pied-noir lobby that was addicted to overplaying his own hand. (494)
Indeed, its chief strength lies precisely in showing the vagary [499] and variety of subject, and thus obliquely convicting any single unified critique of it as essentially reductionist… (The Case of Orientalism, 499-500)
And though it is true that the protracted Greek confrontation with the Persians created the first “East-West” division in the European mind, it is also true that the Greek word barbaros, with all its freight of later associations, was not a pejorative. It simply demarcated Greek-speaking form non-Greek-speaking peoples. So it was simplistic of Said to say that the roots of the problem lay with The Iliad: The Hellenes often looked down on uncouth northerners like the Scythians, while greatly admiring (and borrowing from) the Egyptians. (500)
To return, then, to Said. … Most of all, though, one must be ready to oppose any analysis that even slightly licenses the idea that “outsiders” are not welcome to study other cultures. So far form defending those cultures form depredation, such a stance actually permits them to fall under the dominance of stultified and conservative forces to whom everything depends on an affirmation of blind faith. (502-3)
This passage is rescued from sheer vulgarity only by its incoherence. The sole testable proposition (or nontautology) is the fantastic allegation that American forces powdered the artifacts of the Iraq museum in order to show who was boss. And the essential emptiness of putting the “our” in quotation marks, … (Edward Said: Where the Twain Should Have Met, 511)
In recent arguments in Washington about democracy and self-determination and pluralism, it seemed to me that the visiting Iraqi and Kurdish activists had a lot more to teach than to learn. (511)
…the U.N.’s genocide convention, to which we are signatories. (Worse Than Nineteen Eighty-four, 553)
Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven’t already failed). A recent nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no free-world propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarized zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north. (554)
Wall posters and banners depicting all Japanese as barbarians are only equaled by the ways in which Americans are caricatured as hook-nosed monsters. (The illustrations in this book are an education in themselves.) The United States and its partners make up in aid for the huge shortfall in North Korea’s food production, but there is not a hint of acknowledgement of this by the authorities, who tell their captive subject that the bags of grain stenciled with the Stars and Stripes are tribute paid by a frightened America to the Dear Leader. (North Korea: A Nation of Racist Dwarves, 557)
The people of that tiny and nightmarish state are not, of course, allowed to make comparisons with their lives of others, and if they complain or offend, they are shunted off to camps that—to judge by the standard care and nutrition in the “wider” society—must be a living hell excusable only by the brevity of its duration. But race arrogance and nationalist hysteria are powerful cements for the most odious systems, as Europeans and Americans have good reason to remember. (558)
…a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. (558)
…the closing third of the nineteenth century, after which it was possible to begin thinking of the United States as a global power. (The Case for Humanitarian Intervention, 574)
Many also forget that the international campaign in solidarity with the Union under the Lincoln presidency rallied at a time when it was entirely possible that the United Kingdom might have thrown its whole weight behind the Confederacy and even moved troops form Canada to hasten the partition of a country half slave and half free. This is often forgotten, I suggest, because the movement of solidarity was partly led by Karl Marx and his European allies (as was gratefully acknowledged by Henry Adams in his Education) and because the boycott of Confederate goods, the blocking of shipbuilding orders for the Confederate fleet, and other such actions were to some degree orchestrated by the founders of the communist movement—not the sort of thing that is taught in school when Abraham Lincoln is the patriotic subject. Marx and Freidrich Engels hugely admired Lincoln and felt that just as Russia was the great arsenal of backwardness, reaction, and superstition, the United States was the land of potential freedom and equality. (574)
…the antique Shia concept of taqqiya, or the religious permission to dissemble in dealings with infidels. (The Persian Version, 621)
In his superb memoir, Experience (2000), Martin Amis almost casually expends a terrific line in a minor footnote. Batting away a critic he describes as “humorless,” he adds, “And by calling him humorless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.” (Martin Amis: Lightness at Midnight, 625)
(The frightful mustache was grown partly to distract attention from his rotting fangs and suppurating gums.) In the same way, he abhorred smoking, was a fanatical vegetarian, and would never allow jokes about sex in his presence. (Imagining Hitler, 642)
The maddening thought that, in other circumstances, he could have been such an ordinary bore and nuisance? The man’s opinions are trite and bigoted and deferential, and the prose in Mein Kampf is simply laughable in its pomposity. (642)
You can chuck out your Alan Bullock and Joachim Fest and Hugh Trevor Roper biographies, in my opinion, and read only one relatively short book: The Meaning of Hitler, by the brave, brilliant former German exile Sebastian Haffner. In one dense paragraph, written in 1978, before the Kershaw disclosures, he guessed correctly that Hitler’s maniacal reaction to the Munich revolution in 1918-19 was the key that unlocked everything. Read it carefully, because it leaves noting out:
“There must never again be and there will never again be a November 1918 in Germany,” was his first political resolution after a great many political ponderings and speculations. It was the first specific objective the young private politicians set himself and incidentally the only one he truly accomplished. There was certainly no November 1918 in the Second World War—neither a timely termination of a lost war nor a revolution. Hitler prevented both. /
Let us be clear about what this “never again a November 1918” implied. It implied quite a lot. First of all the determination to make impossible any future revolution in a situation analogous to November 1918. Secondly—since otherwise the first point be left in the air—the determination to bring about once more a similar situation. And this implied, thirdly, the resumption of the war that was lost or believed to be lost. Fourthly, the war had to be resumed on the basis of a domestic constitution in which there were no potentially revolutionary forces. From here it was not far to the fifth point, the abolition of all Left-wing parties, and indeed why not, while one was about it, of all parties. Since, however, one could not abolish the people behind the Left-wing parties, the workers, they would have to be politically won over to nationalism, and this implied, sixth, that one had to offer them socialism, or at least a kind of socialism, in fact National Socialism. Seventh, their former faith, Marxism, had to be uprooted and that meant—eighth—the physical annihilation of the Marxist politicians and intellectuals who, fortunately, included quite a lot of Jews so that—ninth, and Hitler’s oldest wish—one could also, at the same time, exterminate all the Jews. (646)
It’s known that he had a brutal father and a doting mother, but as Kershaw carefully shows, there is no serious foundation to the rumors of hidden Jewish ancestry, … (649)
Yet deep within himself, Haffner argues, Hitler did not trust the German people, or think them worthy of his leadership. With outright military catastrophe threatening in 1944, he ordered the arrest of 5,000 leading German politicians, from minister to mayor (including the highly conservative politician Konrad Adenauer, later to become the first West German chancellor), because he thought they might go soft, and even sue for peace, and perhaps allow another November 1918 defeat. He kept his Final Solution a state secret, to be conducted well away from German soil—a compliment to public opinion in its way—and, at the end, coldly decided that Germany itself should be laid to waste as a punishment for its weakness. (650)
…splendid book called In Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion, by Professor Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel. This volume establishes conclusively that British prime minister Neville Chamberlain was no duped “appeaser,” with a silly mustache of his own. He had made a cold calculation that Hitler should be re-armed, and be allowed—if not, indeed, encouraged—to expand his Reich. This was partly to keep his marauding hands off the British Empire, and partly to encourage his “tough-minded” solution to the Bolshevik problem in the East. Chamberlain and his foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, refused even to meet with senior German officers who belatedly implored their help, at the last available moment, in overthrowing the madman. The German people, said these brave men, said these brave men, had been partly duped by Hitler because he had apparently restored full employment and overturned the unpopular and humiliating Treaty of Versailles, destroy their illusion, and there were several generals ready to move against their former protégé. (651)
Banish your sentimentality (and I have left out the most heart-touching passages) : Is there not something fabulously grotesque about a regime that in the midst of total war will pedantically insist that Jews and their spouses either euthanize their own pets or surrender them to the state for extermination? (Victor Klemperer: Survivor, 655)
It all sounds oddly…Churchillian. The old lion himself never tired of striking notes like these, and was quite unembarrassed by invocations of race and nation and blood. Yet he is the object of Buchanan’s especial dislike and contempt, because he had a fondness for “wars of choice.” (A War Worth Fighting, 662)
If you want to demonstrate that Germany was more the victim than the aggressor in 1914, then you must confine your account (as Buchanan does) to the very minor legal question of Belgian neutrality… (663)
As General Douglas MacArthur once put it, all military defeats can be summarized in two words: “Too late.” (666)
It’s quite another thing to say that the Nazi decision to embark on a Holocaust of European Jewry was “not a cause of the war but an awful consequence of the war.” Not only is Buchanan claiming that Hitler’s fanatical racism did not hugely increase the likelihood of war, but he is also making the insinuation that those who wanted to resist him are the ones who are equally if not indeed mainly responsible for themurder of the Jews! This absolutely will not do. (666)
Some reviewers have expressed shock or even disbelief at evidence that Baker has adduced, … I myself, however, grew increasingly impatient with Baker’s assumption of his own daring transgressiveness. (Just Give Peace a Chance, 670)
Gandhi… an open letter he wrote to the British people on July 3, 1940. “Your soliders are doing the same work of destruction as the Germans,” wrote the Mahatma. “I want you to fight Nazism without arms.” He went on to say: “Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to own allegiance to them.” (671)
On two pages to which I call your attention—pages 204 and 233—Nicholson Baker leaves the distinct impression that Hitler would have been content to ship all Europe’s Jews to somewhere like Madagascar and would have done so were it not for Churchill’s awful belligerence. You are perfectly free to believe this yourself, should you choose. (672)
Indeed, the little matter of democracy is entirely ignored by the self-satisfied Baker analysis. Not only are Britain and America discussed as if they were little if any better than the dictatorships of the time, but we are never even faced with the question of how much force would ever be justifiable in a war to the finish between the pluralist and the absolutist principle (in which the absolutist principle was, lest we forget, rather convincingly vanquished). (672)
When the envoys of the anti-Nazi officers corps visited London at the eleventh hour, they came to tell Chamberlain and Halifax that they could overthrow and imprison their demented Fuhrer, as long as Britain could be counted on to say, and to mean, that it could and would fight for Prague. If you want to avoid a very big and very bad war later, be prepared to fight a small and principled war now. (672)
Infuriating More, Tyndale whenever possible was loyal to the Protestant spirit by correctly translating the word ecclesia to mean “the congregation” as an autonomous body, rather than “the church” as a sacrosanct institution above human law. (When the King Saved God, 689)
For example, in Isaiah 7:14 it is stated that “behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” This is the scriptural warrant and prophecy for the impregnation of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Ghost. But the original Hebrew wording refers only to the pregnancy of an almah, or young woman. If the Hebrew language wants to identify virginity, it has other terms in which to do so. (691)
And so bleak and spare and fatalistic—almost non-religious—are the closing verses of Ecclesiastes that they were read at the Church of England funeral service the unbeliever George Orwell had requested in his will: “Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home… Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. / Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was.” /
At my father’s funeral I chose to read a similarly non-sermonizing part of the New Testament, this time an injunction from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” (693)
…the King James Bible slowly overhauled and overtook the Geneva version, and, as the Pilgrim-type mini-theocracies of New England withered away, became one of the very few books from which almost any American could quote something. (694)
Those who opposed the translation of the Bible into the vernacular—were afraid that the mystic potency of incantation and ritual would be lost, and that daylight would be let in upon magic. They also feared that if God’s word became too everyday and commonplace it would become less impressive, or less able to inspire awe. But the reverse turns out to have been the case, at least in this instance. (695)
Penelope Eckert and Norma Mendoza-Denton phrase matters this way: “One of the innovative developments in the white English of Californians is the use of the discourse-marker ‘I’m like’ or ‘she’s like’ to introduce quoted speech, as in ‘I’m like, where have you been?’n This quotative is particularly useful because it does not require the quote to be of actual speech (as ‘she said’ would, for instance). (The Other L-Word, 737)
The actual grammatical battle was probably lost as far back as 1954, when Winston announced that its latest smoke “tasted good, like a cigarette should.” Complaints from sticklers that this should have been “as a cigarette should” (or, in my view, “as a cigarette ought to do”) … How could one preserve what’s useful about “like” without allowing it to reduce everyday vocabulary and without having it weaken the two strong senses of the word, which are: to be fond of something or somebody (As You Like, Like It) or to resemble something or somebody (“Like, Like a Virgin”)? (738)
In passing the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—the basis of the later First Amendment—they brilliantly exploited the fear that each Christian sect had of persecution by the others. It was easier to get the squabbling factions to agree on no tithes than it would have been to get them to agree on tithes that might also benefit their doctrinal rivals. In his famous “wall of separation” letter, assuring the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, of their freedom from persecution, Jefferson was responding to the expressed fear of this little community that they would be oppressed by—the Congregationalists of Connecticut. (Gods of Our Fathers: The United States of Enlightenment, 5)
It is arguably a good thing—and in no way detracts from Andrew Burstein absorbing book—that Jefferson’s Secrets does not quite live up to its title. Secrecy, death, and desire are the ingredients of the sensational, even of the violent, and they consort ill with the measure and scruple for which Thomas Jefferson is still renowned. It might be better to say that this study is an inquiry into the privacy and reticence of a very self-contained man, along with an educated speculation upon the motives and promptings for his defensive style. (The Private Jefferson, 9)
…this was a man who could oppose the emancipation of slaves because he feared the “ten thousand recollections” they would retain of their hated condition, while almost in the same breath saying dismissively that “their griefs are transient.” (The Private Jefferson, 10)
How many know that perhaps 1.5 million Europeans and Americans were enslaved in Islamic North Africa between 1530 and 1780? We dimly recall that Miguel de Cervantes was briefly in the galleys. But what of the people of the town of Baltimore in Ireland, all carried off by “corsair” raiders in a single night? (Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates, 13)
One immediate effect of the American Revolution, however, was to strengthen the hand of those very same North African potentates: roughly speaking, the Maghrebian provinces of the Ottoman Empire that conform to today’s Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. Deprived of Royal Navy protection, American shipping became even more subject than before to the depredations of those who controlled the Strait of Gibraltar. (Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates, 13)
There were many Americans—John Adams among them—who made the case that it was better policy to pay the tribute. It was cheaper than the loss of trade, for one thing, and a battle against the pirates would be “too rugged for our people to bear.” Putting the matter starkly, Adams said: “We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.”
The cruelty, exorbitance, and intransigence of the Barbary states, however, would decide things. The level of tribute demanded began to reach 10 percent of the American national budget, with no guarantee that greed would not increase that percentage, while from the dungeons of Algiers and Tripoli came appalling reports of the mistreatment of captured men and women. (Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates, 15)
Once again, Barbary obstinacy tipped the scale. Yusuf Karamanli, the pasha of Tripoli, declared war on the United States in May 1801, in pursuit of his demand for more revenue. This earned him a heavy bombardment of Tripoli and the crippling of one of his most important ships. … The Barbary regimes continued to underestimated their new enemy, with Morocco declaring war in its turn and the others increasing their blackmail. (Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates, 16)
But even the dullest soul could regard the continued triangular Atlantic slave trade between Africa, England, and the Americas and perceive the double standard at work. Thus, the struggle against Barbary may have helped to force some of the early shoots of abolitionism. (Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates, 19)
There are two kinds of people: those who read Franklin’s celebrated Autobiography with a solemn expression, and those who keep laughing out loud as they go along. (Benjamin Franklin: Free and Easy, 22)
A few pages father on we read of the tyranny exerted by his brother, who wanted both to indenture him and to beat him, “Tho’ He was otherwise not an ill-natur’d Man: Perhaps I was too saucy & provoking.” Surely an instance of what I call moral jujitsu (of which more later), in which pretended humility can cut like a lash. (Benjamin Franklin: Free and Easy, 22)
…those who really did take the Autobiography at face value. It is no surprise to find D. H. Lawrence among these, because a more humorless man probably never drew mortal breath. But it is astonishing to find Mark Twain saying in effect that the book had made life harder for his Toms and Hucks, who had to bear this additional burden of schoolmarmery and moral exhortation, imposed by those determined to “improve” them at any price. (Benjamin Franklin: Free and Easy, 23)
The 1747 “Speech of Missy Polly Baker,” in which a common whore made a notably eloquent speech in defense of her right to bear bastard children, fooled almost everyone at the time. We may be right in speaking of an age of innocence, in which Miss Baker’s apologia (she is “hard put to it” for a living, “cannot conceive” the nature of her offense, and half admits “all my Faults and Miscarriages”) was received with furrowed and anxious brows. But the only wonder, once you get the trick of it, is how Franklin was able to use such broad and easy punning to lampoon the Pharisees of the day. He even tells us in the Autobiography how it became a delight to him to pen anonymous screeds, put them under the door of the newspaper office at night, and then watch the local worthies try to puzzle out their authorship. (24)
Franklin’s moral jujitsu, in which he always seemingly deferred to his opponents in debate but left them first punching the air and then adopting his opinions as their own, is frequently and slyly boasted about in the Autobiography, but it cannot have afforded him as much pleasure as the applause and income he received from people who didn’t know he was kidding. The tip-offs are all there once you learn to look for them, as with Franklin’s friend Osborne, who died young. /
‘He and I had made a serious Agreement, that the one who happen’d first to die, should if possible make a friendly Visit to the other, and acquaint him how he found things in that separate State. But he never fulfill’d his Promise.’ (27)
Lincoln… To read of the unrelenting coarseness and brutality of the boy’s father is lowering to the spirit, as is the shame he felt at his mother’s reputation for unchastity. (Abraham Lincoln: Misery’s Child, 35)
Lincoln’s own experience of legal bondage and hard usage is very graphically told: Not only did his father’s improvidence deprive him of many necessities, but it resulted in his being hired out as a menial to be a hewer of wood and drawer of water for his father’s rough and miserly neighbors. … struggled to keep reading, an activity feared and despised by his father, as it was by the owner of Frederick Douglass, … (Abraham Lincoln: Misery’s Child, 36)
Here again, we can see the legalistic and sometimes pedantic mind that exhausted all the possibilities of compromise before coming up with the tortuous form of words that finally became the Emancipation Proclamation. / In rather the same way, Lincoln sought a deft means of negotiating the shoals of the religious question. Burlingame’s highly diverting early pages show Lincoln being actively satirical in matters of faith, lampooning preachers, staging mock services, and praying to God “to put stockings on the chicken’s feet in winter,” in the words of his stepsister Matilda. Reminiscing about frontier Baptists many years, he told an acquaintance: “I don’t like to hear cut and dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees!” … Several moments in the narrative—the bee-fighting preacher being one such—put me in mind of Mark Twain. The tall tales, the dry wit, the broad-gauge humor, the imminence of farce even in grave enterprises: (37)
Mark Twain and Frederick Douglass, too, were persons who could only have been original Americans, sprung from American ground. It is engaging and affecting to read of Lincoln’s lifelong troubles with spelling and pronunciation (he addressed himself to “Mr. Cheerman” in his famous Cooper Union Speech of 1860) and of his frequent appearance with as much as six inches of shin or arm protruding from his ill-made clothes: truly a Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. (37)
“Do not misunderstand me,” said Amis p[e]re when he reviewed the first edition, “if I say that one of the troubles with Lolita is that, so far from being too pornographic, it is not pornographic enough.” … (Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita, 72)
…neither can I forget Sally’s older brother [Martin Amis], who wrote, / ‘Parents and guardians of twelve-year-old girls will have notices that their wards have a tendency to be difficult. That may take Humbert’s word for it that things are much more difficult—are in fact entirely impossible—when your twelve-year-old girl is also your twelve-year-old girlfriend. The next time that you go out with your daughter, imagine that you are going out with your daughter.’ (72)
But, just as Humbert’s mind is on a permanent knife-edge of sexual mania, so his creator manages to tread the vertiginous path between incest, by which few are tempted, and engagement with pupating or nymph-like girls, which will not lose its frisson. (You will excuse me if, like Humbert, I dissolve into French when euphemism is required.) (73)
…Humbert himself does not allow us to forget—that immediately following each and every one of the hundreds of subsequent rapes, the little girl weeps for quite a long time… (73)
Who but Gore could begin a discussion by saying that the three most dispiriting words in the English language were “Joyce Carol Oates”? (Vidal Loco, 90)
How very agreeable it must be to sit at a table in a casino where nobody seemed to lose, (America the Banana Republic, 96)
Remember the scene at the end of Peter Pan, where the children are told that, if they don’t shout out aloud that they all believe in fairies, then Tinker Bell’s gonna fucking die? (America the Banana Republic, 97)
Now ask yourself another question. Has anybody resigned, from either the public or the private sectors (overlapping so lavishly as they now do)? (America the Banana Republic, 97)
Three portraits by Hans Holbein… The first shows King Henry VIII in all his swollen arrogance and finery… (The Men Who Made England: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, 146-7)
Cromwell has sufficient immunity to keep his own edition of William Tyndale’s forbidden English Bible, published overseas and smuggled back home, with a title page that carries the mocking words printed in utopia. Thomas More will one day see to it that Tyndale, too, burns alive for that jibe. (148)
Cromwell is a practical skeptic here too, because he has spent some hard time on the Continent and knows, he says, that “the English will never be forgiven for the talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get off their own island.” (The Men Who Made England: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, 148)
More discloses himself as a hybrid of Savonarola and Bartleby the Scrivener:
“Let us be clear. You will not take the oath because your conscience advises you against it?”
“Yes.”
“Could you be a little more comprehensive in your answers?”
“No.”
“You object but you won’t say why?”
“Yes.”
“Is it the matter of the stature you object to, or the form of the oath, or the business of oath-taking in itself?”
“I would rather not say.”
By this time, any luckless prisoner of More’s would have been stretched naked on the rack, but his questioners persist courteously enough until he suddenly lashes out as the arrogant theocrat he is:
“You say you have the majority. I say I have it. You say Parliament is behind you, and I say all the angels and saints are behind me, and all the company of the Christian dead, for as many generations as there have been since the church of Christ was founded, … (The Men Who Made England, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, 150-1)
…generations of sentimental and clerical history will canonize More while making Cromwell’s name a hissing and a byword. (151)
It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one. (Edmund Burke: Reactionary Prophet, 153)
In point of fact Edmund Burke was neither an Englishman nor a Tory. He was an Irishman, probably a Catholic Irishman at that (even if perhaps a secret sympathizer), and for the greater part of his life he upheld the more liberal principles of the Whig faction. (153)
Johnson… Oliver Sacks was able some years ago to make a fairly definite retrospective diagnosis of Tourette’s syndrome. (Samuel Johnson: Demons and Dictionaries, 167)
Johnson’s pitiless and violent hatred of the American Revolution, and his contemptuous cruelty towards those who apostatized from the established church (even if it was to join another Christian sect) was strong and consistent. (169)
What is amazing is the industry with which Flaubert assimilated so many books on arcane subjects (some 1,500, according to Polizzotti), all of this knowledge acquired just so that a brace of nobodies could manage to get things not just wrong, but exactly wrong. (Gustave Flaubert: I’m with Stupide, 174)
…the possessor of an anarchic sense of humor: This yields the same result. What did oyster shuckers do, Dickens demanded to know, when the succulent bivalves were out of season? / ‘Do they commit suicide in despair, or wrench open tight drawers and cupboards and hermetically-sealed bottles—for practice? Perhaps they are dentists out of the oyster-season? Who knows?’ / This pearl was contained in a private letter not intended for publication (Dickens was almost always “on”) and is somewhat more searching than the dull question—“Where do the ducks in Central Park go in winter?”—that was asked by the boy who spoke so scornfully of “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.” [Dickens vs. Caufield] (The Dark Side of Dickens, 176)
Dickens …He may not have had Shakespeare’s or Eliot’s near omniscience about human character, … (176)
Genuine radicals and reformers in mid-nineteenth-century England were to be defined above all as sympathizers with the American Revolution and with the cause of the Union in the Civil War. Dickens was scornful of the first and hostile to the second. … he was on balance sympathetic to the Confederate states, which he had never visited, and made remarks about Negroes that might have shocked even the pathologically racist Carlyle. (178)
It’s easy to tell, form the protractedly unfunny sarcasm about Mrs. Jellyby and the mock-African hellhole of Borrioboola-Gha in Bleak House, that the author did not possess the gift of imaginative sympathy when it came to those outside his immediate ken, or should I say kin. (178)
…we also encounter a method of Rebecca West’s that has given rise to much criticism. Her nonfictional characters are conscripted more as dramatis personae—Montefiore likens her to Thucydides—and given long speeches, … Throughout the book both she and her husband make long and quite grammatical addresses that would be unthinkable in real life, if only because they would be interrupted if given in mixed company and walked out upon if they occurred at the domestic hearth. (Rebecca West: Things Worth Fighting For, 198)
Note the slight clumsiness, which seems to have inflected everything Maugham ever wrote. (W. Somerset Maugham, 245)
…the specially planted avacado trees, with a skilled resident cook to transform the luscious green fruit into an ice cream flavored with rum. (This contrasts with the rebarbative lobster ice cream served by Ribbentrop at a dinner recorded in “Chips”: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon.) (247)
…Maugham kept to a rigorous regime at his desk, and turned out third-rate prose by the yard, … (248)
Permanently injured by the flagrant adultery of his first wife, and almost certainly a badly repressed homosexual, he made a living example of Cyril Connolly’s “Theory of Permanent Adolescence,” whereby Englishmen of a certain caste are doomed to re-enact their school days. The vices of the boy are notably unappealing in the grown man, and Waugh was frequently upbraided for the apparent contrast between his extreme nastiness and his ostentatious religiosity. To this he famously replied (to Nancy Mitford) that nobody could imagine how horrible he would be if he were not a Catholic. A nice piece of casuistry, but not one that bears much scrutiny. In at least two cases—his support for the Croatian Fascist Party during his wartime stint in the Balkans, and his animosity towards Jews—there was a direct connection between his spleen and his faith. And in at least two of the novels, Helena (which is based on the life of the early Christian empress of that name) and Brideshead, the narrative is made ridiculous by a sentimental and credulous approach to miracles or the supernatural. This is what Orwell meant by the incompatibility of faith with maturity. (Evelyn Waugh: The Permanent Adolescent, 251)
He toiled in three demanding vineyards: musical comedy, screenwriting, and fiction. (P.G. Wodehouse: The Honorable Schoolboy, 270)
This passage helps to introduce the oft-attempted comparison between Powell and Proust. There is, first and most obviously, that ability to evoke childhood which is, alas, lost to so many of us but still, somehow, recognizable when well done. … Like Proust, Powell was not exactly pithy (I can’t offhand recall any “quotations” from Powell, as one can from his great contemporaries Wodehouse and Waugh), but I hope I have conveyed something of the worthwhileness of hearing him out. One learns to trust certain raconteurs, even if they appear at first to be long of wind. (Anthony Powell: An Omnivorous Curiosity, 279)
George Orwell, whose flinty socialist principles—and persistence in trying to live up to them—might well have invited Powell’s gentle ridicule but (perhaps because they were not bogus) instead won his respect. The pages recollecting his friend are of interest and some beauty: ‘Goodness knows what Orwell would have been like in the army. I have no doubt whatever that he would have been brace, but bravery in the army is, on the whole, an ultimate rather than immediate requirement, demanded only at the end of a long and tedious apprenticeship.’ Here again, reading that deceptively dense sentence, one is reminded of what it is to be molded by a very highly evolved and somewhat stratified society. In such a system courage is neither a sufficient nor even in the strict sense a necessary condition for the high calling of arms; a force that depended on mere bravery would be merely a militant rabble—subject to mood swings, perhaps, and indubitably depriving its officer corps of opportunities for understatement. Such almost invisible writing about the most palpable of questions is a continual distinction of Powerll’s work and an unending reward for the reading of it. (282)
[after an excerpt: ] As I say, Powell knew when and how to write sparely. (282)
Graham Greene once wrote a celebrated essay about a doppelganger who cared enough to haunt and shadow him, even to masquerade as him. This “other” Greene appeared to have anterior knowledge of the movements of his model, sometimes showing up to grant an interview or fill a seat in a restaurant, so that Greene himself, when he arrive in some old haunt or new locale, would be asked why he had returned so soon. … This mode of imitation or emulation or substitution—at once a form of flattery and a species of threat, or at any rate of challenge— (Graham Greene: I’ll Be Damned, 297)
Greene, after all, was nothing if not radical, even subversive, in his self-presentation. Always at odds with authority, not infrequently sued or censored or even banned, a bohemian and a truant, part exile and part émigré, a dissident Catholic and a sexual opportunist, … (298)
This seems doubly ungenerous when considered in the light of the epigraph from Leon Bloy with which Greene opened The End of the Affair: “Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.” Is this creative agony available only to those who believe in transubstantiation? [301] To be fair to Greene, whose answer to that question was fairly obviously in the affirmative, one must admit that he extended the same indulgence to one other group: the Communists. … The theme of martyrdom is constant, even with these secular materialists. … Greene had briefly been a Party member while at Oxford, and although he was too intelligent and too prudent to remain a true adherent for long, he kept up a residual form… (302)
In the English past it had been considered “treasonous” to be a Roman Catholic. Official persecution was the underside of Elizabethan England. … So strongly did Greene identify with these reactionary subversives that he became a Shakespeare-hater, accusing the national bard of being an accomplice in repression, if only a silent one. … “Two years before, Shakespeare’s fellow poet Southwell had died on the scaffold after three years of torture. If only Shakespeare had shared his disloyalty, we could have loved him better as a man.” (303)
Greene was unwaveringly hostile to the United States. (304)
…fatuous apologetics… (305)
…ever since the 1950s, when he indulged the Stalinist regime in Poland because it maintained a Catholic front organization called Pax Christi. (306)
The term “anti-American” is a loose one, and loosely employed. My own working definition of it, admittedly a slack one also, is that a person is anti-American if he ow she is consistently contemptuous of American culture and furthermore supports any opponent of U.S. policy, whoever this may be. (306)
Perhaps Anglophilia continues to play its part, but if I were one of the few surviving teachers of Anglo-Saxon I would rejoice at the way in which such terms as “muggle” and “Wizengamot,” and such names as Godric, Wulfric, and Dumbledore, had become common currency. At this rate, the teaching of Beowulf could be revived. (Harry Potter: The Boy Who Lived, 382)
The schoolchildren appear to know nothing of Christianity; in this latest novel Harry and even Hermione are ignorant of two well-known biblical verses encountered in a churchyard. (382)
If I am correct about this, which I am, (Why Women Aren’t Funny, 394)
The Swedes are not the pacific herbivores that many people imagine: In the footnotes to his second novel Larsson reminds us that Prime Minister Olof Palme was gunned down in the street in 1986 and that the foreign minister Anna Lindh was stabbed to death (in a Stockholm department store) in 2003. The first crime is still unsolved, and the verdict in the second case has by no means satisfied everybody. (Stieg Larsson: The Author Who Played With Fire, 400)
Ancient Greeks and Romans knew what was going on, all right, but they are reported to have avoided the over-keen fellators for fear of their breath alone. And a man in search of this consolation might be suspected of being… unmanly. (As American as Apple Pie, 405)
…the giving of the divine Law by Moses appears in three or four wildly different scriptural versions. (When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms, always be sure to ask which set. It works every time.) The first and most famous set comes in Exodus 20 but ends with Moses himself smashing the supposedly most sacred artifacts ever known to man: the original, God-dictated panels of Holy Writ. The second edition occurs in Exodus 34, where new but completely different tablets are presented after some heavenly re-write session and are for the first time called “the ten commandments.” In the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy, Moses once more calls his audience together and recites the original Sinai speech with one highly significant alteration (the Sabbath commandment’s justifications in each differ greatly). But plainly discontented with the effect of this, he musters the flock again twenty-two chapters further on, as the river Jordan is coming into view, and gives an additional set of orders—chiefly terse curses—which are also to be inscribed in stone. (The New Commandments, 415)
(II) Then comes the prohibition of “graven images” or indeed “any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” This appears to forbid representational art, … It certainly seems to discourage Christian iconography, with its crucifixes, and statues of virgins and saints.) But the ban in obviously intended as a very emphatic one, since it comes with a reminder that I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. (415)
(IV) Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. … neither one’s children nor one’s servants or animals should be allowed to perform any tasks. (Query: Why is it is specifically addressed to people who are assumed to have staff?) … But in Exodus 20: 8-11, the reason given for the day off is that “in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day.” Yet in Deuteronomy 5:15 a different reason for the Sabbath observance is offered: “Remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the LORD they God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched arm: therefore the LORD thy God commanded thee to keep the Sabbath day.” … why can’t the infallible and omniscient one make up his mind what the real reason is? (416)
Thou shalt not kill. This very celebrated commandment quite obviously cannot mean what it seems to say in English translation. In the original Hebrew it comes across as something more equivalent to “Thou shalt do no murder.” (417)
Thou shalt not commit adultery. For some reason, “the seventh” is the only one of the commandments that is still widely known by its actual number. … Most criminal codes have long given up the attempt to make it a punishable offense in law: Its rewards and punishments are carefully administered by its practitioners and victims. (417-8)
Thou shalt not steal. … prosperity of some families and some states is also founded on original theft, … (418)
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. This is possibly the most sophisticated ruling of the whole Decalogue. Human society is inconceivable unless words are to some extent bonds, … Nothing focuses the attention more than a reminder that one is speaking on oath. … Note, also, how relatively flexible this commandment is. Its fulcrum is the “against.” If you are quite sure of somebody’s innocence and you shade the truth a little in the witness-box, you are no doubt technically guilty of perjury and may be privately troubled. But if you consciously lie in order to indict someone who is not guilty, you have done something irretrievably foul. (418-9)
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s. … Instead, this is the first but not the last introduction in the Bible of the totalitarian concept of “thought crime.” … Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament takes this a step further, announcing that those with lust in their heart have already committed the sin of adultery. In that case, you might as well be hung… Wise lawmakers know that it is a mistake to promulgate legislation that is impossible to obey. … From the “left” point of view, how is it moral to prohibit… demanding a fairer distribution of wealth? From the “right” point of view, why is it wicked to be ambitious and acquisitive? And is not envy a great spur to emulation and competition? (419)
So then: how to prune…? (420)
For millions of people for thousands of years, the Sabbath was made a dreary burden of obligation and strict observance instead of a day of leisure or recreation. It also led to absurd hypocrisies that seem to treat God as a fool: He won’t notice is we make the elevators stop on every floor so that no pious Jew needs press a button. This is unwholesome and over-strenuous. (420)
As for Number Five, by all means respect for the elders, but why is there nothing to forbid child abuse? (Insolence on the part of children is punishable by death, according to Leviticus 20:9, only a few verses before the stipulation of the death penalty for male homosexuals.) A cruel or rude child is a ghastly thing, but a cruel or brutal parent can do infinitely more harm. Yet even in a long and exhaustive list of prohibitions, parental sadism or neglect is never once condemned. (420)
Number Seven … what about rape? It seems to be very strongly recommended, along with genocide, slavery, and infanticide, in Numbers 31: 1-18, and surely constitutes a rather extreme version or sex outside marriage. (421)
Number Ten … Sinister and despotic in that it cannot be obeyed and thus makes sinners even of quite thoughtful people. (421)
Burka. What about the Ku Klux Klan? … I am not going to have a hooded man or woman teach my children, or push their way into a bank ahead of me, or drive my taxi or bus, and there will never be a law that says I have to. (In Your Face, 424)
…in many Muslim societies, such as Tunisia and Turkey, the shrouded look is illegal in government buildings, schools, and universities. Why should Europeans and Americans, seeking perhaps to accommodate Muslim immigrants, adopt the standard only of the most backward and primitive Muslim states? (424)
Even in Iran there is only a requirement for the covering of hair, and I defy anybody to find any authority in the Koran for the concealment of the face. (425)
Here is a society where rape is not a crime. It is a punishment. Women can be sentenced to be raped, by tribal and religious kangaroo courts, if even a rumor of their immodesty brings shame on their menfolk. (From Abbottabad to Worse, 475)
President Asif Ali Zardari cringes daily in front of the forces who openly murdered his wife, Benazir Bhutto, and who then contemptuously ordered the crime scene cleansed with fire hoses, as if to spit even on the pretense of an investigation. (475)
There’s absolutely no mystery to the “Why do they hate us?” question, at least as it arises in Pakistan. They hate us because they owe us, and are dependent upon us. the two main symbols of Pakistan’s pride—its army and its nuclear program—are wholly parasitic on American indulgence and patronage. (475)
If we ever ceased to swallow our pride, so I am incessantly told in Washington, then the Pakistani oligarchy might behave even more abysmally than it already does, and the situation deteriorate even further. This stale and superficial argument ignores the awful historical fact that, each time the Pakistani leadership did get worse, or behave worse, it was handsomely rewarded by the United States. We have been the enablers of every stage of that wretched state’s counter-evolution, to the point where it is a serious regional menace and an undisguised ally of our worst enemy, as well as the sworn enemy of some of our best allies. How could it be “worse” if we shifted our alliance and instead embraced India, our only rival in scale as a multi-ethnic and multi-religious democracy, and a nation that contains nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan? How could it be “worse” if we listened to the brave Afghams, like their former intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh, who have been telling us for years that we are fighting the war in the wrong country? (479)
[end of an introduction] I have saved the word “British” for as long as I decently can. (The Perils of Partition, 481)
It was arguably fair, when Andre Maurois finished his Historie de la France, to permit him a small allowance of la glorie and to agree with his conclusion that “the history of France, a permanent miracle, has the singular privilege of impassioning the peoples of the earth to the point where they all take part in French quarrels.” (Algeria: A French Quarrel, 492)
Every move to reform Algeria even slightly was vetoed by a pied-noir lobby that was addicted to overplaying his own hand. (494)
Indeed, its chief strength lies precisely in showing the vagary [499] and variety of subject, and thus obliquely convicting any single unified critique of it as essentially reductionist… (The Case of Orientalism, 499-500)
And though it is true that the protracted Greek confrontation with the Persians created the first “East-West” division in the European mind, it is also true that the Greek word barbaros, with all its freight of later associations, was not a pejorative. It simply demarcated Greek-speaking form non-Greek-speaking peoples. So it was simplistic of Said to say that the roots of the problem lay with The Iliad: The Hellenes often looked down on uncouth northerners like the Scythians, while greatly admiring (and borrowing from) the Egyptians. (500)
To return, then, to Said. … Most of all, though, one must be ready to oppose any analysis that even slightly licenses the idea that “outsiders” are not welcome to study other cultures. So far form defending those cultures form depredation, such a stance actually permits them to fall under the dominance of stultified and conservative forces to whom everything depends on an affirmation of blind faith. (502-3)
This passage is rescued from sheer vulgarity only by its incoherence. The sole testable proposition (or nontautology) is the fantastic allegation that American forces powdered the artifacts of the Iraq museum in order to show who was boss. And the essential emptiness of putting the “our” in quotation marks, … (Edward Said: Where the Twain Should Have Met, 511)
In recent arguments in Washington about democracy and self-determination and pluralism, it seemed to me that the visiting Iraqi and Kurdish activists had a lot more to teach than to learn. (511)
…the U.N.’s genocide convention, to which we are signatories. (Worse Than Nineteen Eighty-four, 553)
Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven’t already failed). A recent nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no free-world propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarized zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north. (554)
Wall posters and banners depicting all Japanese as barbarians are only equaled by the ways in which Americans are caricatured as hook-nosed monsters. (The illustrations in this book are an education in themselves.) The United States and its partners make up in aid for the huge shortfall in North Korea’s food production, but there is not a hint of acknowledgement of this by the authorities, who tell their captive subject that the bags of grain stenciled with the Stars and Stripes are tribute paid by a frightened America to the Dear Leader. (North Korea: A Nation of Racist Dwarves, 557)
The people of that tiny and nightmarish state are not, of course, allowed to make comparisons with their lives of others, and if they complain or offend, they are shunted off to camps that—to judge by the standard care and nutrition in the “wider” society—must be a living hell excusable only by the brevity of its duration. But race arrogance and nationalist hysteria are powerful cements for the most odious systems, as Europeans and Americans have good reason to remember. (558)
…a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. (558)
…the closing third of the nineteenth century, after which it was possible to begin thinking of the United States as a global power. (The Case for Humanitarian Intervention, 574)
Many also forget that the international campaign in solidarity with the Union under the Lincoln presidency rallied at a time when it was entirely possible that the United Kingdom might have thrown its whole weight behind the Confederacy and even moved troops form Canada to hasten the partition of a country half slave and half free. This is often forgotten, I suggest, because the movement of solidarity was partly led by Karl Marx and his European allies (as was gratefully acknowledged by Henry Adams in his Education) and because the boycott of Confederate goods, the blocking of shipbuilding orders for the Confederate fleet, and other such actions were to some degree orchestrated by the founders of the communist movement—not the sort of thing that is taught in school when Abraham Lincoln is the patriotic subject. Marx and Freidrich Engels hugely admired Lincoln and felt that just as Russia was the great arsenal of backwardness, reaction, and superstition, the United States was the land of potential freedom and equality. (574)
…the antique Shia concept of taqqiya, or the religious permission to dissemble in dealings with infidels. (The Persian Version, 621)
In his superb memoir, Experience (2000), Martin Amis almost casually expends a terrific line in a minor footnote. Batting away a critic he describes as “humorless,” he adds, “And by calling him humorless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.” (Martin Amis: Lightness at Midnight, 625)
(The frightful mustache was grown partly to distract attention from his rotting fangs and suppurating gums.) In the same way, he abhorred smoking, was a fanatical vegetarian, and would never allow jokes about sex in his presence. (Imagining Hitler, 642)
The maddening thought that, in other circumstances, he could have been such an ordinary bore and nuisance? The man’s opinions are trite and bigoted and deferential, and the prose in Mein Kampf is simply laughable in its pomposity. (642)
You can chuck out your Alan Bullock and Joachim Fest and Hugh Trevor Roper biographies, in my opinion, and read only one relatively short book: The Meaning of Hitler, by the brave, brilliant former German exile Sebastian Haffner. In one dense paragraph, written in 1978, before the Kershaw disclosures, he guessed correctly that Hitler’s maniacal reaction to the Munich revolution in 1918-19 was the key that unlocked everything. Read it carefully, because it leaves noting out:
“There must never again be and there will never again be a November 1918 in Germany,” was his first political resolution after a great many political ponderings and speculations. It was the first specific objective the young private politicians set himself and incidentally the only one he truly accomplished. There was certainly no November 1918 in the Second World War—neither a timely termination of a lost war nor a revolution. Hitler prevented both. /
Let us be clear about what this “never again a November 1918” implied. It implied quite a lot. First of all the determination to make impossible any future revolution in a situation analogous to November 1918. Secondly—since otherwise the first point be left in the air—the determination to bring about once more a similar situation. And this implied, thirdly, the resumption of the war that was lost or believed to be lost. Fourthly, the war had to be resumed on the basis of a domestic constitution in which there were no potentially revolutionary forces. From here it was not far to the fifth point, the abolition of all Left-wing parties, and indeed why not, while one was about it, of all parties. Since, however, one could not abolish the people behind the Left-wing parties, the workers, they would have to be politically won over to nationalism, and this implied, sixth, that one had to offer them socialism, or at least a kind of socialism, in fact National Socialism. Seventh, their former faith, Marxism, had to be uprooted and that meant—eighth—the physical annihilation of the Marxist politicians and intellectuals who, fortunately, included quite a lot of Jews so that—ninth, and Hitler’s oldest wish—one could also, at the same time, exterminate all the Jews. (646)
It’s known that he had a brutal father and a doting mother, but as Kershaw carefully shows, there is no serious foundation to the rumors of hidden Jewish ancestry, … (649)
Yet deep within himself, Haffner argues, Hitler did not trust the German people, or think them worthy of his leadership. With outright military catastrophe threatening in 1944, he ordered the arrest of 5,000 leading German politicians, from minister to mayor (including the highly conservative politician Konrad Adenauer, later to become the first West German chancellor), because he thought they might go soft, and even sue for peace, and perhaps allow another November 1918 defeat. He kept his Final Solution a state secret, to be conducted well away from German soil—a compliment to public opinion in its way—and, at the end, coldly decided that Germany itself should be laid to waste as a punishment for its weakness. (650)
…splendid book called In Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion, by Professor Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel. This volume establishes conclusively that British prime minister Neville Chamberlain was no duped “appeaser,” with a silly mustache of his own. He had made a cold calculation that Hitler should be re-armed, and be allowed—if not, indeed, encouraged—to expand his Reich. This was partly to keep his marauding hands off the British Empire, and partly to encourage his “tough-minded” solution to the Bolshevik problem in the East. Chamberlain and his foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, refused even to meet with senior German officers who belatedly implored their help, at the last available moment, in overthrowing the madman. The German people, said these brave men, said these brave men, had been partly duped by Hitler because he had apparently restored full employment and overturned the unpopular and humiliating Treaty of Versailles, destroy their illusion, and there were several generals ready to move against their former protégé. (651)
Banish your sentimentality (and I have left out the most heart-touching passages) : Is there not something fabulously grotesque about a regime that in the midst of total war will pedantically insist that Jews and their spouses either euthanize their own pets or surrender them to the state for extermination? (Victor Klemperer: Survivor, 655)
It all sounds oddly…Churchillian. The old lion himself never tired of striking notes like these, and was quite unembarrassed by invocations of race and nation and blood. Yet he is the object of Buchanan’s especial dislike and contempt, because he had a fondness for “wars of choice.” (A War Worth Fighting, 662)
If you want to demonstrate that Germany was more the victim than the aggressor in 1914, then you must confine your account (as Buchanan does) to the very minor legal question of Belgian neutrality… (663)
As General Douglas MacArthur once put it, all military defeats can be summarized in two words: “Too late.” (666)
It’s quite another thing to say that the Nazi decision to embark on a Holocaust of European Jewry was “not a cause of the war but an awful consequence of the war.” Not only is Buchanan claiming that Hitler’s fanatical racism did not hugely increase the likelihood of war, but he is also making the insinuation that those who wanted to resist him are the ones who are equally if not indeed mainly responsible for themurder of the Jews! This absolutely will not do. (666)
Some reviewers have expressed shock or even disbelief at evidence that Baker has adduced, … I myself, however, grew increasingly impatient with Baker’s assumption of his own daring transgressiveness. (Just Give Peace a Chance, 670)
Gandhi… an open letter he wrote to the British people on July 3, 1940. “Your soliders are doing the same work of destruction as the Germans,” wrote the Mahatma. “I want you to fight Nazism without arms.” He went on to say: “Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to own allegiance to them.” (671)
On two pages to which I call your attention—pages 204 and 233—Nicholson Baker leaves the distinct impression that Hitler would have been content to ship all Europe’s Jews to somewhere like Madagascar and would have done so were it not for Churchill’s awful belligerence. You are perfectly free to believe this yourself, should you choose. (672)
Indeed, the little matter of democracy is entirely ignored by the self-satisfied Baker analysis. Not only are Britain and America discussed as if they were little if any better than the dictatorships of the time, but we are never even faced with the question of how much force would ever be justifiable in a war to the finish between the pluralist and the absolutist principle (in which the absolutist principle was, lest we forget, rather convincingly vanquished). (672)
When the envoys of the anti-Nazi officers corps visited London at the eleventh hour, they came to tell Chamberlain and Halifax that they could overthrow and imprison their demented Fuhrer, as long as Britain could be counted on to say, and to mean, that it could and would fight for Prague. If you want to avoid a very big and very bad war later, be prepared to fight a small and principled war now. (672)
Infuriating More, Tyndale whenever possible was loyal to the Protestant spirit by correctly translating the word ecclesia to mean “the congregation” as an autonomous body, rather than “the church” as a sacrosanct institution above human law. (When the King Saved God, 689)
For example, in Isaiah 7:14 it is stated that “behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” This is the scriptural warrant and prophecy for the impregnation of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Ghost. But the original Hebrew wording refers only to the pregnancy of an almah, or young woman. If the Hebrew language wants to identify virginity, it has other terms in which to do so. (691)
And so bleak and spare and fatalistic—almost non-religious—are the closing verses of Ecclesiastes that they were read at the Church of England funeral service the unbeliever George Orwell had requested in his will: “Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home… Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. / Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was.” /
At my father’s funeral I chose to read a similarly non-sermonizing part of the New Testament, this time an injunction from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” (693)
…the King James Bible slowly overhauled and overtook the Geneva version, and, as the Pilgrim-type mini-theocracies of New England withered away, became one of the very few books from which almost any American could quote something. (694)
Those who opposed the translation of the Bible into the vernacular—were afraid that the mystic potency of incantation and ritual would be lost, and that daylight would be let in upon magic. They also feared that if God’s word became too everyday and commonplace it would become less impressive, or less able to inspire awe. But the reverse turns out to have been the case, at least in this instance. (695)
Penelope Eckert and Norma Mendoza-Denton phrase matters this way: “One of the innovative developments in the white English of Californians is the use of the discourse-marker ‘I’m like’ or ‘she’s like’ to introduce quoted speech, as in ‘I’m like, where have you been?’n This quotative is particularly useful because it does not require the quote to be of actual speech (as ‘she said’ would, for instance). (The Other L-Word, 737)
The actual grammatical battle was probably lost as far back as 1954, when Winston announced that its latest smoke “tasted good, like a cigarette should.” Complaints from sticklers that this should have been “as a cigarette should” (or, in my view, “as a cigarette ought to do”) … How could one preserve what’s useful about “like” without allowing it to reduce everyday vocabulary and without having it weaken the two strong senses of the word, which are: to be fond of something or somebody (As You Like, Like It) or to resemble something or somebody (“Like, Like a Virgin”)? (738)
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