Modern History Notes

Adam Kirsch,"Heirs to the Throne," The Tablet, 13 April, reviews Robert Alter's Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto reviews Nick Bunker's Making Haste from Babylon; The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History for the TLS, 10 April.

Meredith Hindley reviews Dominic Lieven's Russia Against Napolean for the Barnes & Noble Review, 13 April.

In Andrew Odlyzko,"Collective Hallucinations and Inefficient Markets: The British Railway Mania of the 1840s," a mathematician looks at"the greatest technology mania in history." Charles Darwin, John Stewart Mill, and the Bronte sisters invested in it.

A special issue of Common-place, edited by Michael Zakim, concentrates on Hard Times in Ante-bellum America. Jonathan Prude's illustrated essay,"Images of Want" considers"how poverty was, and was not, pictured before the Civil War." Noam Maggor reviews"Bubbles, Panics, & Crashes: A Century of Financial Crises," an exhibit at the Harvard Business School's Baker Library Historical Collections. And much more ...

Simon Heffer,"Don't be afraid of Wagner. He's not a Nazi," Telegraph, 10 April, reviews Michael Tanner's The Faber Pocket Guide to Wagner.