William Grimes,"Two Views of Life, Enduring, Unyielding," NYT, 26 March, reviews Anthony Pagden's Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West.

Jennifer Howard,"A Question of Evidence, or a Leap of Faith?" CHE, 28 March, follows a debate among Anglo-American scholars over whether Coleridge translated Goethe's Faust.

Christopher Hitchens,"A Revolutionary Simpleton," Atlantic, 25 March, reviews A. David Moody's Ezra Pound: Poet Volume I: The Young Genius 1885-1920.

Paul Collins,"The Book of the Undead: Why Won't Phonebooks Die?" Slate, 21 March, on the history of the telephone directory, claims"... despite being the most popular printed work ever, there's never been a single scholarly monograph on the phone book."

Louis Menand,"The Horror: Congress investigates the comics," New Yorker, 31 March, reviews Bart Beaty's Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture and David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. Hat tip.

Finally, Rob McDougall calls our attention to"The Pickle King of Islamistan," The Opposite End of China, 6 February. It features Khalid (née Bertram) Sheldrake, the"power hungry, toothbrush mustachioed, British ninny" who failed to establish his regime in Xinjiang.