David Morgan,"The Permanence of Persia," TLS, 4 February, reviews Michael Axworthy's Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran.

Steven Gunn,"What should we think of Henry VIII?" TLS, 4 February, reviews David Starkey's Henry: Virtuous Prince and Lucy Wooding's Henry VIII.

Jan Swafford,"Great Composers, Lousy Reviews," Slate, 3 February, revisits madly negative reviews of classical composers. Hat tip.

Andrew Steele,"Boom, bust and Harper," Globe and Mail, 2 February, tracks the history of party systems in the United States and Canada. Hat tip.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto,"Where next??" TLS, 4 February, reviews Raymond John Howgego's Encyclopedia of Exploration, 1850 to 1940.

Gillian Beer,"We Are Family," Guardian, 31 January, reviews Steve Jones's Darwin's Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England and Adrian Desmond's and James Moore's Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins.

Peter Campbell,"At the Natural History Museum," LRB, 29 January, reviews"Darwin Big Idea," an exhibit at London's Natural History Museum.

Janet Maslin,"Sometimes One Man Can Live Two Lives," NYT, 4 February, reviews Martha A. Sandweiss's Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line.

A. N. Wilson,"The Paradox Who Was Chesterton," TLS, 28 January, reviews William Oddie's Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The making of GKC, 1874–1908.