Desmond Ryan,"Another job description for Austen and Dickens: Amateur historians," Philadelphia Inquirer, 10 February, reviews David Starkey, ed., Two Histories of England by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.

John Golding,"The Born Rebel Artist," NYRB, 14 February, reviews Petra ten-Doesschate Chu's The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture, Thierry Savatier's L'Origine du monde: Histoire d'un tableau de Gustave Courbet, Linda Nochlin's Courbet, and Gustave Courbet, an exhibit that opens at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in late February.

Scott McLemee's"Objection!" IHE, 13 February, revisits Richard Posner's Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline.

Sharon Howard - 2/13/2008

I don't know about the Dickens one, but you can read Austen's history here:

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/austen/austen.html

It's a wickedly delightful read. I got a copy years ago in a Penguin mini-edition, so I'm not sure it's quite as obscure as the reviewer thinks (in Britain anyway).

(Apparently it's also available in the British Library's Turning the Pages collection, but I can't be arsed to download the plugins just for a pretty version.)