Patricia Cohen, "A Lifetime Quest to Finish a Monumental Encyclopedia of Iran," NYT, 12 August, looks at Ehsan Yarshater's vocation.

Perry Anderson, "From Progress to Catastrophe," LRB, 28 July, tracks the history of the historical novel.

Jonathan Yardley reviews Hugh Thomas's The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America for the Washington Post, 11 August.

Michael Korda, "Fascist Fashionista," Daily Beast, 12 August, reviews Hal Vaughn's Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War. Deborah Solomon, "O'Keeffe and Stieglitz: Intimacy at a Distance," NYT, 12 August, reviews Sarah Greenough, ed., My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume I, 1915-1933. Morris Dickstein, "Growing Pains," Tablet, 11 August, profiles Delmore Schwartz. In "Dreamer," Long Story Short, 11 August, Liel Leibovitz interviews Dickstein about Schwartz.

"50th Anniversary Of The Building Of The Berlin Wall," Der Spiegel, 12 August, is an interactive map and photographic exhibit of before and after images of the wall.

Christian Neef, "The Gorbachev Files," Der Spiegel, 11 August, is four-part article: "Secret Papers Reveal Truth Behind Soviet Collapse," "Did Gorbachev Know about Violent Crackdowns?" "Breaking the Ice with 'Helmut'," and "'We Need Money for Current Expenses'."

Finally, congratulations to Stacy Schiff and to Robert Perkinson of the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Her Cleopatra: A Life and his Texas Tough: the Rise of America's Prison Empire have won the PEN American Center's 2011 awards for biography and nonfiction.