Carnivals: History Carnival CV is up at Chick History. Military History Carnival #29 is up here at Cliopatria.

Middle Stuff: Blair Worden reviews Thomas Penn's Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England for the Guardian, 25 November. Jed Perl, "The Discoverer," The Book, 1 December, reviews Weston Naef's and Christine Hult-Lewis's Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs.

Later Stuff: Joanna Bourke, "Pity and War Histories," TLS, 30 November, reviews Peter Englund's The Beauty and the Sorrow: An intimate history of the First World War and Max Hastings's All Hell Let Loose: The world at war 1939–45. Matt Novak, "'A Robot Has Shot Its Master': The 1930s hysteria about machines taking jobs and killing people," Slate, 30 November, finds mechanization a threat in the Great Depression. William Giraldi reviews Adam Kirsch's Why Trilling Matters for the Daily Beast, 1 December.

Last Things: Romy Oltuski, "Famous Authors' Harshest Rejection Letters," FlavorWire, 17 November, may salve the wounds inflicted on you by meatheads in editorial offices. Jan Swafford, "Last Notes: the wild, sublime music that composers write on their deathbeds," Slate, 29 November, looks at musicians' last compositions. Finally, congratulations to Siddhartha Mukherjee. His book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, has overcome the challenge from four novels to win the Guardian's First Book Prize for 2011.