Friday's Notes

Daily Mail Reporter,"David Starkey attacks 'pretty girl historians who show off their looks on their book covers'," Daily Mail, 12 April, has Starkey's latest act as"the rudest man in Britain." Their names usually begin and end with"a", he observed, qualifying Amanda Foreman, Lady Antonia Fraser, and Amanda Vickery. Vickery, who has, truth to tell, posed naked with her books, suggested that male historians whose names begin and end in"d" may have feelings of inadequacy.
Correction: Foreman has, truth to tell, posed naked with her books. Vickery suggested that male historians whose names begin and end in"d" may have feelings of inadequacy. Hat tip to Christopher Moore.

Kate Alexander,"Historians decry social studies revisions," Austin American-Statesman, 15 April, reports that 800 professional historians have signed a letter protesting proposed changes in Texas's social studies curriculum standards.

Janet Maslin,"Iowa Swami Who Beguiled the Jazz Age," NYT, 14 April, reviews Robert Love's The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America. Why was this not a chapter in Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday?

Daphne Merkin,"Lovers, Not Victims," The Book, 14 April, reviews Leslie McDowell's Between the Sheets: The Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th-Century Women Writers.

Elif Batuman,"7 unproduced screenplays by famous intellectuals," Salon, 14 April, reports on the aborted work of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Georges Bataille, Winston Churchill, Aldous Huxley, Kasimir Malevich, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

In Gordon G. Chang's"China's Endgame," World Affairs, March/April, the author of The Coming Collapse of China offers a precise of his argument.