Daisy Banks interviews "Thomas Penn on Henry VII," The Browser, 7 November, for his recommendation of five essential books on the English monarch. Owen Matthews, "Catherine, the Great Human Being," Daily Beast, 6 November, reviews Robert Massie's Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman.

Natasha Lehrer, "Friendship in the time of the Resistance," TLS, 7 November, reviews Caroline Moorehead's A Train in Winter: A story of resistance, friendship and survival. It's a study of women of the French resistance in Nazi concentration camps.

Robert Zaretsky, "Camus the Jew," Tablet, 7 November, draws on Zaretsky's Albert Camus: Elements of a Life.

Louis Menand, "Getting Real: George F. Kennan's Cold War," New Yorker, 14 November, is an intellectual sketch stimulated by John Lewis Gaddis's new biography of Kennan. Joshua Kurlantzick, "The End of the Innocents," Foreign Policy, 3 November, tracks the struggle of Jim Thompson with the CIA in southeast Asia. Kurlantzick's book, The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American Way of War, will be published in November.