Sunday's Notes

James Traub,"The Academic Freedom Agenda," NYT, 10 March, and Mike Allen,"Battle brews over Bush library," Politico, 14 March, review the tortured history of George Bush the Younger's effort to build his presidential library, museum, and policy institute at Southern Methodist University. SMU's long had a relatively weak central administration. It is now even weaker.

Amon Shea,"Unwed Language," NYT, 12 March, reviews John McWhorter's Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English.

Holland Cotter,"Passion of the Moment: A Triptych of Masters," NYT, 12 March, and Sebastian Smee,"The art of a rivalry," Boston Globe, 13 March, review"Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese Rivals in Renaissance Venice," at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

Gary J. Bass,"The Prague (Berlin, Paris, Milan) Spring," NYT, reviews Mike Rapport's 1848: Year of Revolution.

Brenda Wineapple,"Sallow, Queer, Sagacious: Lincoln Through the Ages," The Nation, 11 March, reviews Harold Holzer, ed., The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy From 1860 to Now and Barry Schwartz's Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America.

Michael Dirda,"All the Book's a Stage," Washington Post, 12 March, reviews Michael Holroyd's A Strange, Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families.

Finally, The National Book Critics Circle's awards have gone to Dexter Filkin for The Forever War in general nonfiction, to Patrick French, in biography, for The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul, and, in autobiography, to Ariel Sabar for My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq.