Steve Donaghue,"Alexander the Great's escapades," The National, 3 December, reviews James Romm, ed., The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander, trans. from the Attic by Pamela Mensch; and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie,"Hidden identities: writing Lebanon's history," The National, 10 December, reviews Samir Kassir's Beirut.

Bruce Barcott,"Waterworld," NYT, 10 December, reviews Simon Winchester's Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories; and Ian W. Toll,"The Shores of Tripoli," NYT, 10 December, reviews Adrian Tinniswood's Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests, and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean.

David Waldstreicher,"All the King's Men," NYT, 10 December, reviews Thomas B. Allen's Tories: Fighting for the King in America's First Civil War; and Eric Foner,"Obama stumbles in Lincoln's footsteps," Guardian, 9 December, stumbles in its analysis.

Michael Wood,"Quashed Quotatoes," LRB, 16 December, reviews James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, edited by Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon Houyhnhnm, and Tim Conley, ed., Joyce's Disciples Disciplined.

Henry Farrell,"The State of Statelessness," American Interest, Jan/Feb, reviews Benedict Anderson's Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination and James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia ; and Orville Schell,"The Final Conflict," NYT, 10 December, reviews Ian Morris's Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future.