Samuel G. Freedman, "The Influence of the Inquisition," NYT, 27 January, reviews Cullen Murphy's God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World. Murphy, "Inside the heresy files," New Humanist, Jan/Feb, is a foretaste of the book.

Helen Castor, "The heart of Englishness?" TLS, 25 January, reviews Adam Nicholson's The Gentry: Stories of the English. John Barrell, "The English pleasures of Vauxhall," TLS, 25 January, reviews David Coke's and Alan Borg's Vauxhall Gardens: A History.

Edward Rothstein, "Life, Liberty and the Fact of Slavery," NYT, 26 January, reviews "Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello: Paradox of Liberty," an exhibit at Washington, DC's National Museum of American History, and a permanent companion, "Landscape of Slavery: Mulberry Row at Monticello," at the sites of labor on Jefferson's plantation near Charlottesville, VA. See also: "Slave images unearthed from the ‘Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello' exhibit at the Smithsonian," a slide show at The Root.

Richard Overy, "Sympathy with the devil," New Statesman, 23 January, reviews Piers Paul Read's The Dreyfus Affair.

Timothy Garton Ash, "In France, genocide has become a political brickbat," Guardian, 18 January, and Ash, "Speech Crimes and France," LA Times, 19 January, warn against attempt to outlaw denial of Armenian genocide.

Stefany Anne Golberg, "Greetings from Here," Smart Set, 18 January, and Tess Lewis, "Dispatches From a Lost Empire," WSJ, 21 January, review Michael Hofmann, ed. & trans., Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters. Hofmann, "Joseph Roth: Going Over the Edge," NYRB, 22 December, is a revised version of the volume's introduction; and the New Yorker, 9 January, has an excerpt from the book.

Alec Ash interviews "Timothy Snyder on Dissent," The Browser, 25 January, for his recommendation of five essential books on the subject. The focus is on Snyder's modern eastern European field.

Adam Gopnik, "The Caging of America," New Yorker, 30 January, reviews William J. Stuntz's The Collapse of American Criminal Justice and Franklin E. Zimring's The City that Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control. Why is it that the land of the free imprisons more people in 2012 than it enslaved in 1860 and than Joseph Stalin imprisoned in 1950?

Finally, congratulations to our former colleague, Manan Ahmed, who has accepted a position at Columbia University in the history of Islam and South Asia.