Things Noted Here & There

London High Court's award of £65,000 to Sarah Thornton for a "malicious" review of her book, Seven Days in the Art World, prompts Francis Wheen's "The hunting of the snark," Financial Times, 5 August. "Writers ought to fight with their own weapon – language," Wheen argues. "Thirty years ago I rubbished Clive James's epic (and, as I thought, shamelessly genuflecting) poem about the Prince of Wales, 'Charles Charming's Challenges on the Pathway to the Throne'. James never complained. But a few years later he published a poem that began: 'The book of my enemy has been remaindered/And I am pleased.' And I thought: touché!"
See also: Tim Burke, "Seven Days in the World of Books on Fire," Easily Distracted, 8 August.

Adrian Vermeule, "Power to the People," The Book, 8 August, reviews John P. McCormick's Machiavellian Democracy.

John Allen Paulos, "The Mathematics of Changing Your Mind," NYT, 5 August, reviews Sharon Bertsch McGrayne's The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines and Emerged Triumphant From Two Centuries of Controversy.

Simon Kuper, "Who stole the Mona Lisa?" Financial Times, 5 August, recalls the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. Controversy about sources for this story emerges in the comments.

Maria Russo, "A Frontier Schoolhouse Story," NYT, 24 June; Claire Dederer, "Teach for America, Frontier Edition," Slate, 4 July; and Marie Arana for the Washington Post, 4 August, review Dorothy Wickenden's Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West.

Gareth Cook, "Why did Japan surrender?" Ideas, 7 August, discusses how Tsuyoshi Hasegawa of UC, Santa Barbara, has shifted the discussion of the causes of Japan's surrender in World War II.