As you’d expect from an embittered wannabe academic like me, I enjoy immensely reading reviews in which genuine scholars demolish the latest fashionable nonsense published by trend-chasing academic presses.

Here Ben Goldacre casually and rightly puts the boot into an absurd attack on evidence-based medicine—it’s “fascist” apparently.

Here Shalom Lappin does a grand and rigorous job on The Question of Zionism by Jacqueline Rose, a book that combines two fetishes popular with the pretentious and empty-headed: Freudianism and “anti-Zionism”. Even by its own standards the book fails, being peppered with fundamental errors of fact and ignorant of the basic dogmas of the ideologies it so admires. Linking to this is also an excuse for me to point to the latest online edition of Democratiya.

Hey, both the people I’ve linked to have got Jewish-sounding names. Perhaps they’re part of some kind of global conspiracy?