• Rose Dugdale’s “relative obscurity today seems like an oversight, not least because we enjoy the idea of the brilliant, charismatic art thief, even if it’s usually the product of wishful thinking. We want art thieves to be special because we want art to be special, belonging to some higher category of possession. The person who steals a Vermeer should be doing it for a better reason than to sell it on the black market, or use it as collateral in a drug deal, or ransom it back to its owners. Usually, however, that’s exactly what happens. The people behind spectacular art thefts turn out to be run-of-the-mill criminals stealing for run-of-the-mill reasons.” (London Review of Books)

• “Did Emily Dickinson have a Boston accent?” (Defector)

• On Duncan Grant’s erotic drawings, which “are populated by angelic blonds, satyrs, and lanky, muscular bodies in athletic positions of every kind. There are tiny sailor shirts, fishnet stockings, revealing swimwear, and many brass buttons.” (NewYorker.com)

• On Hilary Mantel the historian. (Boston Review)

• “Lord Elgin paid no British customs tax on Parthenon marbles, letters suggest.” (The Guardian)

• Returned: twenty-nine Benin Bronzes from the Smithsonian. (Artforum)

• “Drone photos reveal an early Mesopotamian city made of marsh islands.” (Science News)

• “Arsenic and Old Lace, the best film ever made about the construction of the Panama Canal, was shot in 1941 but then laid down, like a fine wine or an expiring body, for three years, until the source play finished its Broadway run. Warner Bros. fretted about backing a film they couldn’t immediately profit from, and director Frank Capra would grouse about missing out on three of the war’s box-office boom years, but in 1941 absolutely nobody worried that the film would age badly or that audiences would lose interest in Cary Grant, and such complacency was fully justified, it seems, because here we all are.” (Current)

• This week in obituaries: Angela Lansbury, Bruno Latour, Nikki Finke, Stephanie Dabney, Grace Glueck, Sterling Johnson Jr., Brian Catling, Robert Toll, Walter Dean Burnham, Günter Lamprecht, Silke Otto-Knapp, Robert Kalfin, Eileen Ryan, Kevin Locke, Leonard Kriegel, Douglas Kirkland, Anton Fier, Frank Drake, Judy Tenuta, Robert Skelton, Anita Kerr, Jack Brogan, Art Laboe, Juliet Barker, David Beckwith, and Rolando Cubela.