Tim Whitemarsh reviews David Abulafia's The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean for the Guardian, 17 June.

Carlin Romano, "A Survey and an Assertion," American Scholar, Summer, reviews James Miller's Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche and Ronald Dworkin's Justice for Hedgehogs.

Andrew Motion reviews A. N. Wilson's Dante in Love for the Guardian, 17 June.

Robert Zaretsky, "David Hume, the Modest Public Intellectual," CHE, 19 June, remembers the historian/philosopher as a model public intellectual.

Joyce E. Chaplin, "When Women Lost the Vote," NYT, 17 June, reviews Mary Beth Norton's Separated By Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World.

Kathryn Harrison, "The Pseudoscience of Hysteria," NYT, 17 June, reviews Asti Hustvedt's Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris.

Mark Mazower, "The Smallest Victims," The Book, 20 June, reviews Tara Zahra's The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II.

Maurice Isserman, "Life of a Psychohistorian," NYT, 17 June, reviews Robert Jay Lifton's Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir. Stephen Metcalf, "The Liberty Scam," Slate, 20 June, explores "why even Robert Nozick, the philosophical father of libertarianism, gave up on the movement he inspired."