Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The distinguished historian and Polish-American Richard Pipes passed away earlier this year. Pipes is sometimes said to have taught and studied the "Polish version of Russian history," a line sometimes attributed to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. The idea behind the phrase, which is intended as a criticism is this: some anti-Communist Russians (Solzhenitsyn among them) see the influx of Marxist-Leninist ideas into Russia as a disastrous accident, a hijacking of a country that had until then been following a quite different path.  Eastern European anti-Communists, though, see the same influx as a natural convergence, as when someone with a genetic predisposition to the gout starts showing symptoms thereof. The "Polish version of Russian history" is the latter. The jailed are seldom inclined to make excuses for their jailers. I had encountered the quote before, but had never been curious enough to track down the source. Recently, I became curious and did a little go...

Mystery solved! As some of you may remember, I've long been intrigued by a passage in Dorothy Sayers' introduction to her translation of Dante's Inferno. The passage, written in 1949, includes allusions to roughly 60 different people who played a part in English social history in the century or so before that date. Some she refers to by full name, most by part of a name, some by an allusive phrase. Her point is that an intelligent reader five centuries later will need help understanding a poem that makes such allusions, and she tries to provide analogous help in her notes on Dante. Roughly two thirds of a century has passed, and even for Anglophilic Americans, her prediction had been amply verified. Some of the references are obvious, some take some digging, some left me confused for a long time. But I believe I have cleared up the most confusing example. She refers to "Brown and Kennedy." Those are quite common names, so googling didn't help The arc...