History Carnival #24 goes up at The Elfin Ethicist on Wednesday 1 February. Send your nominations of exemplary history posts since 15 January to JonathanWilson*at*letu*dot*edu.

Tim Gardam for The Guardian and Christopher Bray [ed.: that's not the Chris Bray] for The Telegraph review Roger Osborne's Civilization: A New History of the Western World. Thanks to Alfredo Perez at Political Theory Daily Review for the tip.

Henry Ferris interviews Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, and The Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. Natural disasters are behind the birth of both modern Muslim radicalism and America's religious right, Winchester suggests. Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the tip. [More ...]

Anthony Beevor,"War of Words: Dear Franklin ... Dear Joseph," Times Online, 28 January, reviews Susan Butler, ed., My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin (Yale, 2006). Thanks to Richard Jensen's Conservativenet for the tip.

At Political Animal, Kevin Drum takes Professor Niall Ferguson to task for his"Missing the Cold War," LATimes, 30 January.