His artificial fogs hid Allied battle lines and entire British fleets, his incendiary bullets brought down Zeppelins flying at 20,000 feet, and his flares lit up “an area of three miles radius, as Winston Churchill put it, ‘as bright as Piccadilly’.” He was Frank Brock.

Barton Swaim reviews Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement: “Christopher Caldwell never mentions Donald Trump’s name in The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, but the book offers its own race-related interpretation of the ’16 election. It is a vastly more sophisticated, thoughtful, and generous version than the one spat out by left-liberal pundits in their pique, but Caldwell also believes that that election was mainly about race. ‘By the election year of 2016,’ he writes, ‘Americans would be so scared to speak their mind on matters even tangential to civil rights that their political mood was essentially unreadable. Americans’ grievances against diversity were now bottled up, in a way that was reminiscent of French people’s late-19th-century obsession with reconquering Alsace and Lorraine. (“Think of it always,” the 19th-century French statesman Léon Gambetta had said. “Speak of it never.”)’”

In praise of marginalia and inscriptions: “Even the inscriptions one discovers in one’s home library can delight and surprise. Aunt Mary’s 1988 Christmas greeting to Gretta in my Poetry of Robert Frost is standard fare, but ‘To Bob — You got out! — Sam’ in Padgett Powell’s Aliens of Affection is both evocative and mildly disconcerting.”

Macmillan ends ban of e-book sales to libraries: “‘There are times in life when differences should be put aside,’ reads a brief memo from Macmillan CEO John Sargent addressed to librarians, authors, illustrators, and agents. ‘Effective on Friday (or whenever thereafter our wholesalers can effect the change), Macmillan will return to the library e-book pricing model that was in effect on October 31st, 2019. In addition, we will be lowering some e-book prices on a short term basis to help expand libraries collections in these difficult times. Stay safe.’”

Rare copy of Newton’s Principia Mathematica discovered in Corsica.

Bored? Curate your own virtual exhibit: “For anyone who feels they could do a better job than the art professionals who choose what we see at exhibitions comes a game-changing project: curate your own show. The charity Art UK, which lists every publicly owned oil painting on its online database and is in the process of adding every sculpture, has announced details of a new curation tool.”

Washington’s final years: “Just before he took the oath of office as president of the United States, John Adams glanced at the “serene and unclouded” expression on the face of his predecessor, George Washington, and imagined him thinking: ‘Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be happiest.’ Washington was indeed happy to escape Philadelphia, then the capital of the United States, and return to Mount Vernon, his large but long-neglected estate on the banks of the Potomac. There, in Adams’s words, he hoped to ‘plunge into agriculture and ride away his reflections.’”

The last few recommendations have been added to our reading list. Thanks again for your help with this. Happy reading.

Essay of the Day:

In the Times Literary Supplement, Sarah Lonsdale revisits Rose Macaulay’s Potterism:

“That a new and uncontrollable form of mass media has been let loose, the powers of which we are still struggling to comprehend, was recently made clear when Whitehall set up a unit to counter online disinformation regarding coronavirus. Mistruths, unfounded rumours, “alternative facts”: all are nibbling at our rational thoughts, tearing great holes in our common sense, unpeeling our grasp on reality. The only seemingly reliable facts we have are the mounting figures of infection and deaths. This is a good time, then, to be re-reading a novel about a state of irrationality caused by a new form of mass media which unravelled people’s sense of proportion in a time of national crisis, one hundred years after its first publication: Rose Macaulay’s Potterism. For in Potterism: A Tragi-farcical Tract, to give the novel its full name, Macaulay was writing about the popular press.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Kent

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