In The Guardian, Mark Wilding tells the story of the Feltham book heist and the evolution of book theft:

Everything went exactly to plan. Late on the evening of 29 January 2017, Daniel David and Victor Opariuc parked up and made their way towards the Frontier Forwarding customs warehouse in Feltham, less than a mile from Heathrow. After cutting a hole in the fence, the men made their way to the side of the building and scaled a wall to the roof. There, they cut through a skylight and lowered themselves on to shelving inside the building. The warehouse burglar alarms stayed silent; the men had carefully avoided tripping motion sensors positioned by the doors.

Once inside, with several lookouts posted around the surrounding industrial estate, the men took their time. Over the next five hours and 15 minutes, they broke padlocks off packing cases and placed items inside 16 large holdalls taken from inside the warehouse. The men escaped the same way they had entered: out through the skylight and back into the night.

About 12 hours later, Alessandro Meda Riquier received a phone call from his shipping company. Riquier was at home in Italy when he learned that 52 valuable books that were meant to be on their way to a major trade fair in the US had been stolen. Riquier was one of three book dealers affected by the theft. In total, around 240 books and manuscripts were taken, including works by Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci and the 18th-century Spanish painter Francisco de Goya. The total value was estimated at more than £2.5m.

In other news: John le Carré has died. He was 89.

Evelyn Waugh loved Perry Mason: “In a 1949 interview with Harvey Breit in The New York Times, when asked the name of his favorite writer, Waugh replied “The best American writer is, of course, Erle Stanley Gardner…Do I really mean that? By all means.” According to his wife Laura, he read every single one of Gardner’s books, and considered a comparison to Mason to be the sincerest compliment, writing to his agent D.A. Peters, ‘You grow more like Perry Mason daily. I know no higher praise.’”

Why did so many doctors become Nazis? Ashley K. Fernandes explores: “Medicine and law are intimately connected to one another, and, since the professionalization of medicine in the United States and Europe in the latter half of the 19th century, even more so. One discipline that connects both is moral philosophy; for both law and medicine involve reason and the will, directed toward the good of the person. Thus, the story of the Holocaust is a tragedy that unfolded because of the corruption of moral philosophy first, and medicine and law second.”

Robert Rauschenberg in black and white: “In the first decades of the twentieth century, few Americans living in rural areas ventured very far from home. Many people never saw a big city or a landscape farther than fifty miles from the one in which they were born. Sons of privilege traveled, usually by train, to go to college. Wealthy families sailed to Europe for the Grand Tour. Ordinary people stayed home on the farm or minded the store. For hardscrabble families like Robert Rauschenberg’s, travel, when it happened, was often courtesy of the US military.”

The surprising conservatism of Paul Kingsnorth’s Alexandria: “A profoundly traditional view of human nature lurks just below the surface of Kingsnorth’s fiction. In Alexandria, taboos and customs are vital guardrails against our darker impulses, the same impulses that nearly destroyed the planet some 900 years ago. This apocalyptic pessimism echoes the Catholic science fiction of Walter Miller, who imagined a community of monks painstakingly preserving scientific knowledge after a nuclear holocaust in A Canticle for Leibowitz. Miller’s book ends with humanity rediscovering science, ignoring the church’s warnings, and promptly destroying the world all over again. The apocalyptic visions of Miller and Kingsnorth are quite different from each other, but both authors take a dim view of technological advancement and humanity’s capacity for collective restraint.”

Park MacDougald reviews Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America: “The first thing to say about Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America is that it has been misclassified. It is listed as a work of nonfiction, and thanks to some creative gaming of Amazon’s genre tags, it is, as of my writing, America’s No. 1-selling new release in “economic history” (the audiobook version is No. 2). But it is properly speaking a work of fantasy. Indeed, in its intricate, quasi-sociological discussion of a world that does not exist but that possesses an uncanny resemblance to our own, it resembles the work of Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino. Unfortunately, not only Oluo herself but most of her reviewers appear to have missed the trick and are laboring under the delusion she is describing reality.”

Photos: Virginia