Eric Ormsby,"The Boundless Chaos of Living Speech," New York Sun, 16 November, and Jonathan Yardley,"Amazingly Enough, The First Great Dictionary was Basically the Work of One Man," Washington Post, 13 November, recall that this is the 250th anniversary year of the publication of Dr. Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language. Thanks to Arts and Letters Daily for the tip.

Curtis Sittenfield,"Yes, Virginia," New York Times, 20 November, reviews Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life.

From Modern Age, here's a roundup of some recent work on modern American conservatism: Eric E. Erikson,"Solzhenitzen, Russell Kirk, and the Moral Imagination," Winter 2005, an essay in Kirk's honor; Gerald J. Russello,"The Need for Self-Scrutiny," Winter 2005, reviews Joseph Scotchie, ed., The Paleo-Conservatives: New Voices of the Old Right and Gregory L. Schneider, ed., Conservatism in America Since 1930; and George H. Nash,"A Conservative Historian's Memoir," Spring 2005, reviews Forrest McDonald's Recovering the Past: A Historian's Memoir. From National Review, a series of tributes to William Buckley in anticipation of his 80th birthday. Thanks to Alfredo Perez at Political Theory Daily Review for the tip.