Thursday's Notes

Pankaj Mishra, "Watch This Man," LRB, 3 November, reviews Niall Ferguson's Civilisation: The West and the Rest.

Theodore K. Rabb, "Love letter to a painting," TLS, 26 October, reviews Carola Hicks's Girl in a Green Gown: The history and mystery of the Arnolfini portrait.

John Markoff, "How Revolutionary Tools Cracked a 1700s Code," NYT, 24 October: "a team of Swedish and American linguists has applied statistics-based translation techniques to crack one of the most stubborn of codes: the Copiale Cipher, a hand-lettered 105-page manuscript that appears to date from the late 18th century."

Alan Wolfe, "One Right," The Book, 27 October, reviews Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.

Jay Merrick, "Russia's aesthetic revolution: How Soviet building still influences today's architects," Independent, 21 October, reviews "Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-35," an exhibit at London's Royal Academy of Arts.

The NYT's "Room for Debate" asks: "Do Good Debaters Make Good Presidents?" There are answers from H. W. Brands, Robert Dallek, David Gergen, Alonzo Hamby, Joan Hoff, Kathleen Hall Jameson, Jon Meacham, and Richard Reeves.