Things Not Yet Noted

In Cliopatria's Symposium VI, my colleagues, Manan Ahmed, Oscar Chamberlain, KC Johnson, and Jonathan Reynolds, offer thoughtful responses to Bernard Porter's"British and American Colonialisms Compared." They are joined by Nick, an Australian undergraduate, at A Smoother Pebble. Other history bloggers are welcome to the seminar table. Send links to your comments to: manan*at*uchicago*dot*edu.

Christopher Silvester,"The Importance of Not Being Earnest," London Times, 16 July, reviews Richard Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson. Trevor-Roper is probably not Cliopatria's favorite historian. Our Africanists, in particular, pick over his bones. But, like a good reviewer, Silvester taunts us with delicious clips from the letters.

Visiting Iraq in 1957, [Trevor-Roper] found it"efficient, energetic, prosperous, complacent: a Levantine Switzerland".

Acute observation about Iraq in the days of its monarchy or not, the comment is a poignant reminder of the Iraq that was.

The Observer, then the favourite paper of the chattering classes, is skewered as"that declining organ of Germanic Wykehamist apocalyptic socialism", while the tribe of English Roman Catholics is tellingly vignetted as"that bristling defensive phalanx of sensitive conformists" .... The economic historian Arnold Toynbee, a great sacred cow of those times, is dismissed as"the Apostle of the Half-Baked", and Arthur Koestler and Franz Borkenau as"professional ex-communist boulevardiers", while a splendidly malicious put-down of CS Lewis is too elaborate to be quoted here.

I have no problem with Toynbee as"the Apostle of the Half-Baked," but an"economic historian"? Here, Silvester confuses Arnold Toynbee, the economic historian, for whom London's Toynbee Hall was named, with his nephew, who was, indeed, a sacred cow. Trevor-Roper was not referring to the economic historian, who'd been dead for 70 years by the time of these letters. T-R's well-known attack on the younger man's work,"Arnold Toynbee's Millenium," described it as"a Philosophy of Mishmash." But I do want to know what Trevor-Roper said about C. S. Lewis. Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the tip.

Scott McLemee,"The Moralist," Boston Globe, 16 July, thoughtfully probes the long-term intellectual relationship between Philip Reiff and Susan Sontag.

Richard Cohen,"Hunker Down with History," Washington Post, 18 July, begins"The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake." Don't leap to any conclusions about what he means by that. Read the whole thing.