Ursula K. Le Guin, "Toward Darkness," Literary Review, September, reviews A. S. Byatt's Ragnarök: The End of the Gods.

Eric Ormsby, "Why Vasco da Gama Went to India," NYT, 9 September, reviews Nigel Cliff's Holy War: How Vasco da Gama's Epic Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries-Old Clash of Civilizations.

Jeremy Paxman reviews Simon Jenkins's A Short History of England for the Guardian, 8 September.

Michael Dirda reviews Andrew Graham-Dixon's Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane for the Washington Post, 7 September.

Holland Cotter, "After Conquest, Subtle Emblems of Protest," NYT, 8 September, reviews "The Art of Dissent in 17th-Century China: Masterpieces of Ming Loyalist Art from the Chih Lo Lou Collection" an exhibit in New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Briefly following up on this recent post, two things: First, the DOJ has replaced the prosecutor who was serving as a commissioner for the Boston College subpoenas, so those subpoenas once again have a government lawyer to carry them forward. Also, the DOJ has asked for extra time to respond to the intervention of BC's Belfast Project researchers, so nothing more will happen in the matter until Sept. 23.

In Bryony Gordon's interview with Niall Ferguson, Telegraph, 8 September, he seems not very likeable. "The real point of me isn't that I'm good looking. It's that I'm clever" appears to be Ferguson's  takeaway line for most readers.

Francis Wheen, "Passing the Buck," Literary Review, September, reviews Charlie Campbell's Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People. Elizabeth Weingarten draws on Elizabeth Abbott's Mistresses: A History of the Other Woman to create a slideshow, "Ten Mistresses Who Changed History," Slate, 31 August.

Robert Reich, consistently a top contender for the honor of being our dumbest public political figure, warns today that Republicans are planning to move backward in history. And get ready to give up your brass helmets, kids, 'cause we're going way back: "A Perry or Bachmann wouldn't just take us back to the 19th century. They'd take us back to the stone age."

That's why Texans pound out their grain with big rocks, in case you were wondering.

But the Perry-Bachmann Overdrive is just the most extreme edge of the GOP nostalgia for the past, as Reich concedes. In fact, he allows, most Republicans are just nostalgic for the days of William McKinley, "when the federal government was small, the Fed and the IRS had yet to be invented, state laws determined worker safety and hours, evolution was still considered contentious, immigrants were almost all European, big corporations and robber barons ran the government, the poor were desperate, and the rich lived like old-world aristocrats."

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

... in a hundred seconds

The Carnival of Genealogy CIX is up at The Catholic Gene!

Charles Homans, "War Games: A Short History," Foreign Policy, Sept/Oct, tracks seven millenia of war games.

Linda Colley reviews Kwasi Kwarteng's Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World for the Guardian, 2 September. Rana Mitter reviews Julia Lovell's The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China for the Guardian, 2 September.

I'm gearing up a new book project on African global perspectives during the era of the Cold War.  Today I've been looking into the exchange of musical forms between West Africa and the wider Atlantic World.  And, well... it's just been EASY.  I mean, really easy, to do the basic research.  Between JSTOR and Amazon, I've downloaded a couple of dozen articles and have a dozen or so books on the way.  Even with being lazy and buying the books (instead of getting them via interlibrary loan), it is costing me less than a one-day expedition to the nearest well stocked African Studies library.   I'm glad that I've been at this business long enough to have undertaken research in the era of printed bibliographies and card catalogs, just so I know how good I've got it now.  I've noticed this dynamic before, mind you, but today it just hit home extra hard.  The sort of things I'm looking up are not terribly well researched, but they are yielding to my boolean logic with minimal effort.  And I like it that way.  It makes it so much easier to be a productive scholar AND help my four-year-old daughter produce her own book on fairies at the same time.

Simon Jenkins, "English history: why we need to understand 1066 and all that," Guardian, 1 September, tackles Richard J. Evans's essay, "The Wonderfulness of Us," LRB, 17 March.

In a brief filed with the federal district court in Boston on August 31 (see below), a new party joined the legal conflict between Boston College and the Department of Justice. The new player sharply changed the tone and substance of the exchange, noting the political nature of the underlying investigation and directly accusing the DOJ of serious professional failures. Two and half months ago, in back-to-back posts at Cliopatria, I wrote that the DOJ was engaged in misfeasance, but that they were rounding the corner toward malfeasance. Now someone has placed a version of that argument before the court, and the results suggest the presence of an internal conflict at BC.

Mike Cosgrave is your host for History Carnival CII, "Flights, Riots and Anniversaries."

Philip Pilkington, "What is Debt?" Naked Capitalism, 26 August, interviews David Graeber about his new book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Peter Duffy, "All Mashed Up," The Book, 31 August, reviews John Reader's Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent.

I'm many steps behind the latest in the court fight between Boston College and the Department of Justice (which is acting as a proxy for the PSNI), because I've been traveling while all the good stuff has happened. I'll have much more tomorrow, but for now here's a news story summarizing the latest and most interesting development. Many fascinating things going on here, but note especially the tone of BC's response.

Philip Ball, "Did Einstein discover E = mc2?" Physics World, 23 August, takes up an issue you thought was settled.

Ferdinand Mount, "Too Obviously Cleverer," LRB, 8 September, reviews D. R. Thorpe's Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan and Peter Catterall's The Macmillan Diaries Vol. II: Prime Minister and After 1957-66.

Deborah Blum, "At the Door of the Loony Gas Building" and "Of Dead Bodies and Dirty Streets," Speakeasy Science, 24/25 August, looks at the history of leaded gasoline in the United States.

Michael Kazin has an interesting piece in this week’s New Republic, chastising conservatives such as Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, and Charles Krauthammer for misappropriating the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Kazin notes the comments of such figures praising King’s work, but adds that “such paeans still sound quite bizarre coming from a Right that is opposing even the slightest attempt at stimulating the economy to help people who need jobs, good schools, and medical care.” His essay provides a reminder of King’s left-wing views on economic issues during the 1960s.

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

As Alan Allport has noted, Winston Churchill's famous speech of 20 August 1940 was and is remembered for a 'single, unrepresentative sentence', i.e.:

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

The speech was given during the Battle of Britain, and 'the Few' are universally taken to be the pilots of Fighter Command, the last line of defence against the Luftwaffe. But, as Alan says, Churchill had relatively little to say about the Battle that day -- he did talk about it, but only as part of a general speech on the war situation. I suggested that if you read the line in context, it actually looks like Churchill is talking about Bomber Command, as he doesn't dwell on Fighter Command at all. Here's a fuller extract from Churchill's speech (emphasis added):

The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of world war by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day, but we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks, often under the heaviest fire, often with serious loss, with deliberate, careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power. On no part of the Royal Air Force does the weight of the war fall more heavily than on the daylight bombers who will play an invaluable part in the case of invasion and whose unflinching zeal it has been necessary in the meanwhile on numerous occasions to restrain.

We are able to verify the results of bombing military targets in Germany, not only by reports which reach us through many sources, but also, of course, by photography. I have no hesitation in saying that this process of bombing the military industries and communications of Germany and the air bases and storage depots from which we are attacked, which process will continue upon an ever-increasing scale until the end of the war, and may in another year attain dimensions hitherto undreamed of, affords one at least of the most certain, if not the shortest of all the roads to victory. Even if the Nazi legions stood triumphant on the Black Sea, or indeed upon the Caspian, even if Hitler was at the gates of India, it would profit him nothing if at the same time the entire economic and scientific apparatus of German war power lay shattered and pulverised at home.

So he gives his famous line, but then says in effect 'yes, yes, the fighter pilots are great, but let's talk about the bomber boys, they're ones who might win the war for us'. As Churchill himself might have said, wars are not won by defence. At most, I think he meant the 'few' to include all Britain's pilots, but the phrase soon narrowed to mean those flying fighters alone. For example, the 1942 film The First of the Few was about the genesis of the Spitfire.