More Noted Things

Maurice Earls,"History is to Blame," Dublin Review of Books, Spring, is an essay on the life and times of Samuel Pepys. It draws on James and Ben Long's The Plot Against Samuel Pepys, Robert Latham, ed., The Diaries of Samuel Pepys: A Selection, and Edward Vallance's The Glorious Revolution: 1688 – Britain's Fight for Liberty. Edward Vallance blogs at Edward Vallance and Samuel Pepys blogs at Samuel Pepys. Hat tip.

Christopher Hitchens,"Just Causes," Foreign Affairs, September/October, reviews Gary J. Bass's Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention.

Sean Wilentz's"A Liberal's Lament," Newsweek, 23 August, to which I linked yesterday, may have been the day's favorite target of criticism. See, for example: Kevin Drum's"One Last Shot," Kevin Drum, 25 August, and comments there; Scott Lemieux,"A Sycophant's Lament," Lawyers, Guns and Money, 25 August, and comments there; and publius,"The Continuing Decline of Sean Wilentz," Obsidian Wings, 24 August, and comments there. Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.

David Greenberg's"The Write Stuff," Slate, 25 August, revisits Joe Biden's plagiarism of a Neil Kinnock speech in 1988. Greenberg is right to remind us that it was genuinely troublesome because Biden not only borrowed Kinnock's words without attribution, but he assumed Kinnock's persona without acknowledging it. See also: Jonathan Beecher Field,"Why Doesn't Plagiarism Matter?" IHE, 26 August.

Finally, Another Damned Medievalist at Blogenspiel has a list of"You Might Be A Medievalist If ...." My favorites:"... -Your secondary sources are somebody else's primary sources,""... -Everyone else on your conference panel has taken holy orders," and"... -You call the renaissance ‘a dirty lie.'"