Mostly 20th Century Notes
Charles Spencer reviews David Starkey's Crown and Country: A History of England through the Monarchy for the Guardian, 23 October.
Adam Kirsch,"Convertito," Tablet, 9 November, reviews John A. Davis's The Jews of San Nicandro, which tells the unlikely story of a community of impoverished Italian Catholics who decided to become Jews during the 1930s and 1940s and who, ultimately, resettled in Israel.
Johann Hari's"The Two Churchills," NYT, 12 August, reviewed Richard Toye's Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made and was republished as Hari,"Not his finest hour: The dark side of Winston Churchill," Independent, 28 October. Oddly, Hari did not correct his mis-identification of Obama's tribal ancestry as Kikuyu. Nonetheless, the review is worth reading either time.
John Richardson,"How Political Was Picasso?" NYRB, 25 November, reviews Louis Delaprée's Morir en Madrid, edited by Martin Minchom, and"Picasso: Peace and Freedom," an exhibit showing at the Tate Liverpool, the Albertina, Vienna, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark.
Michiko Kakutani,"Dispatches and Details From a Life in Literature," NYT, 8 November, and Jonathan Yardley,"Last Letters from a Master," Washington Post, 7 November, review Benjamin Taylor, ed., Saul Bellow: Letters.
Darryl Pinckney,"Jimmy Baldwin: Stirring the Waters," NYRB, 25 November, reviews Baldwin's The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited and with an introduction by Randall Kenan.
Giles Harvey,"Bob Dylan After the Fall," NYRB, 25 November, reviews Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968–2010 and Sean Wilentz's Bob Dylan in America.