History the Latest Thing

Ordinarily I leave the Tina Brown mockery to Wonkette and TMFTML, but today's "history is hot" column deserves a shoutout, if for no other reason than:

There's such an outpouring of books from historians at the moment, you can't throw a canape in Manhattan after 6 p.m. without hitting a tweedy scholar wearing the dazed expression that comes with a sudden release from the past.

She gets some good quotes from "tweedy scholars" Niall Ferguson and Simon Schama, but other than that, this is a fairly standard "fake trend" piece. There's always an outpouring of books from historians; the only news, if you can call it that, is that Brown noticed them on the display tables when the buzz over the "inside dopesters," as she calls them, started to die down. And for all her marveling over the usual suspects, she hasn't even noticed the really interesting stuff, like--as mentioned earlier in these pages--Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Brothers In Arms.

Evening update: Ana gets her knocks in.