Midweek Notes

Alex Clark,"The lost art of editing," Guardian, 11 February, reports that fine, line-by-line editing is simply no longer done by editors at publishing houses.

Adam Kirsch,"Known and Unknown," Tablet, 15 February, reviews Timothy Beal's The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book.

Daniel Stolte,"Experts determine age of book 'nobody can read'," physorg.com, 10 February, announces results of carbon dating of the Voynich manuscript. Decoding the text could make the career of a medievalist or early modernist.

Laura Marsh,"Drugs and Words," The Book, 15 February, reviews Robert Morrison's The English Opium Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey.

Dwight Garner,"Carter, Reagan and Freaky Times," NYT, 15 February, reviews Dominic Sandbrook's Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right. Michael C. Moynihan,"When the Tea Party Began," WSJ, 12 February, says the book is larded with borderline plagiarism, a mash-up of older secondary sources.

Christopher Benfey,"The Embroiderer," TNR, 10 February, Jonathan Yardley for the Washington Post, 11 February, and Michael Dirda,"Wanderer Fantasy," bookforum, Feb/Mar, review Nicholas Shakespeare, ed., Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin.