Culture

Beevor's boo-boo

November 27, 2007
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To the Café Royal in central London last night for the annual Colman Getty PEN quiz—an annual fundraising event for the writers' charity PEN in the form of a rather grand pub quiz, at which the cream of London's literati (as well as a crack team of Prospect staffers, alongside the Political Quarterly) are given the opportunity to show off the breadth of their knowledge—or be humiliated by the lack of it—in front of colleagues and rivals. The event was won, for the second time in three years, by the Mail on Sunday, with the Prospect/PQ team languishing in a mid-table 14th position (out of 36 teams).

We were magnaminous in defeat, and the personal grudge I developed against my teammates—for refusing to listen to my suggestion that Larkin, not Auden, was the 20th-century poet who looked at himself in the mirror and comforted himself with the words, "I am Mrs De Winter now"—will surely soon start to fade. Much harder to get over was the fact that the quote "The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history," which we correctly attributed to Hegel, was mistakenly credited by the quizmasters to Bismarck. Worse, the question was apparently set by none other than the mighty Antony Beevor.

Professor Beevor, consider yourself fact-checked.

UPDATE: For those interested in going straight to source, the full text of Hegel's lectures can be found here, with the relevant passage in section two, "Pragmatical History":

…what experience and history teach is this, - that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.


Hegel delivered his lectures at the University of Berlin in 1822, 1828, and 1830. Bismarck was born in 1815 and, even given his prodigious abilities, it seems unlikely he was providing aphorisms for the venerable professor before his own 16th birthday.