Joseph Epstein,"Plagiary, It's Crawling All Over Me," Weekly Standard, 6 March, is a charming essay about having been copied without credit."In the realm of plagiarism," says Epstein,"my view is, better a lender than a borrower be. (You can quote me on that.)" Thanks to Jason Broander at MaroonBlog for the tip.

In"Microfilm Mania" at No Great Matter, Fernand Braudel and eb do research by reading microfilm.

At Altercation (scroll down), Eric Rauchway reviews Michael Kazin's A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan.

David Schoenbaum,"Where Fascism Was Stylish and Vicious, If Ineffectual," New York Times, 3 March, reviews R. J. B. Bosworth's Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945.

Morris Dickstein,"Edmund Wilson's Human Interest," TLS, 1 March, reviews Lewis M. Dabney's Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature.

Michael Tomasky,"Reality Time: Three More Years of This? Honest Conservative Intellectuals: Your Country Needs You," American Prospect, 2 March. Yes, alas, and yes.

Scott Shane,"Archivist Urges U.S. to Re-open Classified Files," New York Times, 3 March. Allen Weinstein argues for a limited reversal of the federal government's re-classification program that has withdrawn public access to 55,000 documents since 1999. This kind of thing happens when you let the keystone kops in charge of national security into an archive.