• It’s too late to stop Richard Beale from doodling in his maths homework—he didn’t get caught until more than two hundred years later: “But there’s one thing we didn’t expect to see. Richard put an eighteenth-century chicken in some trousers.” (The Guardian)

• On Dante Gabriel Rossetti and wombats. (London Review of Books)

• Why has everyone always been obsessed with the Aeneid, a stylish tale about dullards, losers, and embarrassments? (The New Yorker)

• The home where the Bloomsbury Group worked: “There’s something a little uneasy about the site of such artistic and sexual experimentation, the home of people who pushed so forcefully against the establishment, having become a destination for day-trippers, complete with café and gift shop. Under Charleston’s modern guise as a tourist heritage site, it’s easy to overlook just how radically the members of the Bloomsbury Group lived their lives.” (NYR Daily)

• Looking at Margaret Cavendish’s science fiction, which “sheds historical and literary light on conceptions of gender, natural philosophy, political theory, theology, and the life of the author herself in seventeenth-century Europe.” (The Public Domain Review)

• A war over…archives? “All records were then sealed in tin boxes and stored at Mrs. Eberley’s under day and night guard. An attempt to take them by force would have precipitated a civil war.” (Smithsonian.com)

• Archaeologists in Florida are trying to conduct a dig while hurricanes keep pummeling the area. (St. Augustine Record)

• Looking back at the career of Charles White: “Paint is the only weapon I have with which to fight what I resent.” (New York Times)

• This week in obituaries: a quackery historian, Montserrat Caballé, a woman who fought for tenants and prisoners, the first black football player drafted by the NFL, a former Federal Trade Commission chair, and a prolific novelist.