Modern History Notes
Christopher Benfey,"Cézanne's Card Players," Slate, 17 February, is a slide show essay about Cézanne's painting. It draws on"Cézanne's Card Players," an exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and London's The Courtauld Gallery. Blake Gopnik,"Picasso Unplugged," Daily Beast, 21 February, reviews"Picasso Guitars: 1912-1914," an exhibit at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Barton Swaim,"Use Value," New Criterion, February, looks back at H. W. Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage: The Classic First Edition.
Martin Rubin reviews Rachel Polansky's Molotov's Magic Lantern: Travels in Russian History for the LA Times, 20 February.
David Sharrock,"The road to Wigan Pier, 75 years on," Guardian, 20 February, traces Eric Blair's emergence as George Orwell.
William Logan,"Deal with the Devil," NYT, 18 February, reviews Elizabeth Bishop's Poems, Bishop's Prose, and Joelle Biele, ed., Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence.
David Stelfox,"Alan Lomax: Voices from the past," The National, 18 February, reviews John F. Szwed's Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World.
Scott McLemee,"Things fall apart," The National, 18 February, reviews Daniel T. Rogers's Age of Fracture.
Jeffrey Goldberg,"Niall Ferguson's Deeply Unconvincing Obama Attack," Atlantic, 15 April, tackles Ferguson,"Niall Ferguson Blasts Obama's Foreign Policy," Daily Beast, 13 February. William Skidelsky in the Guardian, 20 February, explains Ferguson's argument that"Westerners don't understand how vulnerable freedom is."