Modern History Notes
Kerry Brown reviews Michael Dillon's China: A Modern History for the THE, 21 October.
Daniel Mendelsohn,"Oscar Wilde, Classics Scholar," NYRB, 11 November, reviews Wilde's The Women of Homer edited by Thomas Wright and Donald Mead; and Thomas Wright's Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde.
Anne Applebaum,"The Worst of the Madness," NYRB, 11 November, Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and Norman M. Naimark's Stalin's Genocides.
Lorin Stein, the new editor of the Paris Review, has made the full run of its highly regarded interview series with important writers available online for the first time. The series began with E. M. Forster in 1953.
Frank Dikötter,"Chinese History: The Great Leap Backward," History Today, 20 October, reports on what is being learned as Chinese archives begin to shed light on Mao's era. Thanks to Chris Bray and Jesse Walker at Reason's Hit and Run.
"The War Logs," NYT, 22 October,"Greatest Data Leak in US Military History," Der Spiegel, 22 October, and"Iraq war logs: UN calls on Obama to investigate human rights abuses," Guardian, 23 October, are first attempts to evaluate the historical significance of information from the 400,000 documents newly released by WikiLeaks.