Russians don’t understand freedom, they need the Cossack and the whip

I asked everyone I met what “freedom” meant. Fathers and children had very different answers. Those who were born in the USSR and those born after its collapse do not share a common experience—it’s like they’re from different planets.

For the fathers, freedom is the absence of fear; the three days in August when we defeated the putsch. A man with his choice of a hundred kinds of salami is freer than one who only has ten to choose from. Freedom is never being flogged, although no generation of Russians has yet avoided a flogging. Russians don’t understand freedom, they need the Cossack and the whip.

S. Alexievich, tr. B. Shayevich, Second-hand time (2013), 30-31

Constantinople is where the pagan world ended, and where Dionysus met his untimely demise

There would be no global Christianity without this city, which later, under the Ottomans, came to be known as The Abode of Happiness. Constantinople is where the pagan world ended, and where Dionysus met his untimely demise. Its stony melancholy is imperial, austere and attuned to the One God, whether that of Justinian or of Mehmet the Conqueror. 'Gong-tormented' and vaporous, as Patrick Leigh Fermor famously described it in Mani, that exquisite meditation on, among many other things, the long drawn-out and misunderstood genius of Byzantium.

L. Osborne, The wet and the dry (2013), 196

A good ice cream lulls in the mind in the same way, almost, and there is about it the sweet intoxication of virtue

The Islamic warriors did not see anything to enrage them. The bar did not exist. The women were not 'exposed'. There was just the mall itself, where I sat down at last to eat an ice cream under the smiles of the headscarfed girls who served them. Ice cream. Isn't ice cream always the substitution for a nice beer, from 'dry' Islamabad to 'dry' Ocean City, New Jersey?  A good ice cream lulls in the mind in the same way, almost, and there is about it the sweet intoxication of virtue.

L. Osborne, The wet and the dry (2013), 173-4

Shi'ites always cut a deal. It was the Sunni fanatics who were the darkest version of the future

I went to Chateau Massaya and had lunch with the winemaker Ramzi Ghosn. He insisted that Hezbollah were not a problem. Their people made substantial earnings as vineyards workers and in the light of this reality the clerics would turn a blind eye. Shi'ites always cut a deal. It was the Sunni fanatics who were the darkest version of the future.

'The boys with the beards up in the hills, they are the ones who make me sleepless at night. They are the madmen. The Shi'a are something else.'

'Not true fanatics?' 

'Not about these things.'

L. Osborne, The wet and the dry (2013), 33 

Of the estimated 30 billion food miles associated with UK consumed food, 82 per cent are generated within the country

Of the estimated 30 billion food miles associated with UK consumed food, 82 per cent are generated within the country, and over half of those in 2005 were simply due to trips by car from homes to local food shops. 

… 

Buying a locally reared Welsh lamb in the UK is worse for the environment than buying a frozen one. Indeed, lamb which is imported 11,000 miles from New Zealand is, somewhat surprisingly, better for the environment and has a lower carbon footprint. The impact of food transport can be offset, to some extent, if food production is more sustainable than local production methods.

T. Spector, Spoon fed (2020), 209-10

 

In France, raising your children as vegan is classed as criminal neglect

Studies have shown that children raised on a vegan diet are often smaller and have low levels of certain nutrients such as riboflavin and B12, which, when extreme has led to high-profile deaths. In France, raising your children as vegan is classed as criminal neglect.

T. Spector, Spoon fed (2020), 126-7

Anyone worthy of admission to the university would already be fluent in French

But ever since the decline of Latin, French had been the language of cultivated cosmopolitan elites – and thus the European language par excellence. When, in the early years of the twentieth century, it was first proposed to introduce the teaching of French as part of the modern languages syllabus at Oxford University, more than one don opposed the idea on the plausible grounds that anyone worthy of admission to the university would already be fluent in French.

T. Judt, Postwar (2005), 760

Salazar, an economist who had for some years lectured at the University of Coimbra, was not only unperturbed at Portugal’s backwardness, but saw it instead as the key to stability – upon being informed that oil had been discovered in Portugal’s Angolan territories he commented merely that this was ‘a pity’ 

T. Judt, Postwar (2005), 511

The engine room of European culture for the first third of the twentieth century ... had ceased to exist

The intellectual condition of post-war Western Europe would have been unrecognizable to a visitor from even the quite recent past. German-speaking central Europe – the engine room of European culture for the first third of the twentieth century – had ceased to exist. Vienna, already a shadow of its former self after the overthrow of the Habsburgs in 1918, was divided like Berlin among the four allied power. It could hardly feed or clothe its citizens, much less contribute to the intellectual life of the continent

T. Judt, Postwar (2005), 203

Bulgaria always chooses the wrong card … and slams it on the table!

The Bulgarians has actually oscillated quite markedly over the years from enthusiastic pro-Germanism to ultra-Slavophilism. Neither served them well. As a local commentator remarked at the time, Bulgaria always chooses the wrong card … and slams it on the table!

T. Judt, Postwar (2005), 134 footnote

France ceased to be not just a Great Power but even a power

In six traumatic weeks, the cardinal reference points of European inter-state relations changed forever. France ceased to be not just a Great Power but even a power, and despite De Gaulle’s best efforts in later decades it has never been one since. For the shattering defeat of June 1940 was followed by four years of humiliating, demeaning, subservient occupation, with Marshall Petain’s Vichy regime playing Uriah Heep to Germany’s Bill Sikes.

T. Judt, Postwar (2005), 113

Boundaries stayed in broadly intact and people were moved instead

At the conclusion of the First world War, it was borders that were invented and adjusted, while people were on the whole left in place. After 1945 what happened was the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed in broadly intact and people were moved instead.

T. Judt, Postwar (2005), 27

Supposing there are some other people somewhere, people we don’t know?

Once she had said to him, ‘Supposing there are some other people somewhere, people we don’t know?’
He had looked at her seriously.
‘What sort of people?’
‘Perfectly charming people. Really delightful, intelligent, amusing, civilized…And we don’t know them, and nobody we know knows them. And they don’t know us and they don’t know anybody we know.’
Bob had thought for a moment and then he had said, ‘It’s impossible. But if it were not impossible, then I don’t think I should want to know such people. I don’t think I should find anything in common with them.’ 

I. Colegate, The shooting party (1980), 120