Friday's Notes

Orlando Figes admits that he – not his wife – was behind the pseudonymous comments hostile to his peers' work and in praise of his own.

Charlotte Wiedemann,"The scramble for Timbuktu," soundandsight.com, 12 April, reports on the contemporary struggle to control north Africa's medieval heritage.

Charles Nicholl,"Yes, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare," TLS, 21 April, reviews James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

Ari Kelman,"Icons of Oblivion," Nation, 21 April, reviews Mark V. Barrow Jr.'s Nature's Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology and Caroline Fraser's Rewilding the World: Dispatches From the Conservation Revolution.

Michael McDonald,"Hitler Reading," WS, 26 April, reviews Timothy W. Ryback's Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life.

Erik Christiansen and Jeremy Sullivan,"The Challenge Posed by the Tea Party," IHE, 23 April, argues that the movement grows from the failure of historians to reach our audience.

Finally, Cliopatria's History Blogroll continues to expand its list of history blogs in continental languages. They now include thirteen languages: Bulgarian, Catalan, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. The five continental languages with the largest numbers of history blogs are: Spanish, 54; Finnish, 26; German, 22; French, 21; and Swedish, 12.