Mary Carole McCauley, "Walters researchers decode the secrets of the Archimedes Palimpsest," Baltimore Sun, 14 October, and Edward Rothstein, "Finding Archimedes in the Shadows," NYT, 16 October, feature the Archimedes Palimpsest, on exhibit now in "Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes" at Baltimore's Walters Art Museum.

Scott McLemee, "Mad – or Just Angry?" IHE, 19 October, reviews Aloys Winterling's Caligula: A Biography.

Charles Nickoll for the Guardian, 14 October, and "Masques of beauty and blackness," Spectator, 15 October, review Ian Donaldson's Ben Jonson: A Life.

Jill Lepore, "Forget 9-9-9. Here's a Simple Plan: 1," NYT, 15 October, recalls Henry George, the original man with a plan.

Richard Pipes, "Trotsky the Jew," Tablet, 17 October, reviews Joshua Rubenstein's Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life.

Philip Hensher reviews Max Hastings's All Hell Let Loose: The World at War, 1939-1945 for the Guardian, 13 October. John Gooch, "Mussolini's diaries and the ‘treasure of Dongo'," TLS, 17 October, reviews Mimmo Franzinelli's Autopsia di un Falso: I diari di Mussolini e la manipolazione della storia, I Diari di Mussolini, 1939, Veri o presunti, and Claretta Petacci's Verso il Disastro: Mussolini in guerra, diari, 1939-1940, Mimmo Franzinelli, ed.

Nathan Heller, "What She Said," New Yorker, 24 October, reviews Brian Kellow's Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark and Sanford Schwartz, ed., The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael.

When Matt Yglesias thought he found a Straussian in David Brooks, Ben Alpers was skeptical and Andrew Sullivan took notice. "I know Straussians," Sullivan wrote. "Straussians are friends of mine. David Brooks is not a Straussian."

Karl W. Giberson and Randall J. Stephens, "The Evangelical Rejection of Reason," NYT, 17 October, challenges the anti-intellectual positions of fellow evangelicals. The argument draws on work in their new book, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age.

Finally, congratulations to Stephanie McCurry, who has won the Gilder Lehrman Center's Frederick Douglass Prize for her book, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South.