From the mid-twentieth century, Pablo Neruda was the most well-known Latin American poet in the Arab world. Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab published poems by Pablo Neruda in a collection of his own translations, Qasa’id Mukhtara min al-Shi‘r al-‘Alami al-Hadith (Selected Poems from Modern World Poetry) in 1955. In 1975, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1942–2008) published “Dhahibun Ila al-Qasida – Ila Bablu Niruda” (“On the Way to the Poem – To Pablo Neruda”), a poem dedicated to Pablo Neruda (1904–1973). Years later, Darwish visited Neruda’s home in Isla Negra, Chile, in 1990, and thereafter composed another poem, which begins: “In Pablo Neruda’s home, on the Pacific / coast, I remembered Yannis Ritsos / at his house.” Drawing on the translation, circulation, and reception of Neruda in the Arab world, this essay will explore the relationship of Arab writers to Neruda and little-known Arab Latin American engagements within internationalist networks of Global South solidarity and nationalist politics.

Chapter 1 demonstrates how several patristic and Carolingian biblical commentators develop ecclesiological readings of the foremothers of Jesus listed in the genealogy of Matthew’s gospel (Matt 1.1–18). This history of exegesis demonstrates that a high view of the Church as Christ’s preexistent consort developed from an early stage of Nicene-orthodox Christianity as an alternative to Jerome’s condemnatory views of biblical women perceived as sexually deviant – Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.

This chapter explores Pablo Neruda’s militant trajectory, asserting that his political commitment was not merely circumstantial but permeated his entire poetic oeuvre. Divided into two sections, the first section scrutinizes the political implications of his work, discernible from Residencia en la tierra onward, where societal issues arising from the crisis of capitalist modernity culminate in a robust Marxist commitment. The second part employs the Foucauldian concept of “parrhesia” to analyze Neruda’s actions and work, emphasizing his explicit commitment in Chile. There, he supported Allende’s socialist government and confronted the challenges of Pinochet’s subsequent neoliberal dictatorship. This analysis underscores the integral connection between Neruda’s political engagement and his lyrical creations, contributing to the recognition of the inseparable political dimension within his poetic work.

This chapter looks at Neruda’s memoirs as an attempt to find a whole in different parts of his self. He embraces his own contradictions, without falling into self-aggrandizement. Instead, the chapter argues, he presents a complex self, at times heroic, other times not at all. In Confieso que he vivido (I Confess I Have Lived), he admits that, as a human being, he is many Pablo Nerudas, and some of these have faults. He felt the need to clarify and correct the way in which the world saw him in human terms. In part, this reveals, of course, the profundity of his debt to the American poet Walt Whitman, who asked his readers to accept him with all his “contradictions.”

Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf became friends in the 1930s, when the two were widely considered the pre-eminent women modernist novelists in the British Isles. Younger writers at the time, like literary critics later, compared the two women; yet in their private writings, both of them dwelt on their divergent personal characteristics. This underlines the importance of the notion of character to both Woolf’s and Bowen’s fictional projects. In her pivotal experimental essays and fictions of the early 1920s, Woolf returned to the idea of two people sitting opposite in a railway carriage to explore the ways in which the variety and intricacy of subjectivity could never be fully plumbed by another. Bowen, who admitted to being influenced by Woolf, used the same railway-carriage thought experiment in her own essays on the writer’s craft. Although Bowen understood character largely in terms of Woolfian notions of the vast complexity of subjectivity, she demonstrates in her own novels, particularly The House in Paris and To the North, that character needed to be delimited by more notions from previous eras that depend on the broader strokes of caricature to ascertain another’s personality.

Academic history, in the sense of being based in academic institutions such as universities, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Before the nineteenth century, history was not taught as a separate subject for undergraduates. This chapter looks at the historical profession, its predilections and traditions. It examines the Whig interpretation of history to illustrate the relationship between historiography and a prevalent culture because of its central role in the period when the historical profession began to establish itself in England and because of its continuing popular and political influence. The critique that demolished the Whig influence in academic circles is discussed to illustrate the supposedly professional objectivity that displaced it and which was subsequently challenged by more relativist approaches. The chapter concludes with an appreciation of the most recent debates between so-called traditionalist and various postmodern positions.

The ability to construct a clear coherent case, supported by argument, evidence and references is an obviously valuable skill, as is recognised in the subject benchmarking statement for History, drawn up by the Quality Assurance Agency. This chapter focuses on the issues of planning and structuring in the process of writing an essay and explains what plagiarism is. It offers a guide to the writing of academic history at undergraduate level, to the skills involved, and contrasts this with the non-academic uses of history. A crucial starting point when approaching an essay question is to identify the historical debate to which it directly or indirectly refers. The chapter examines the wider benefits of developing an aptitude for writing essays. The knowledge gained by history students and the skills and aptitudes that they develop as they learn to write historically have a significance that extends well beyond the seminar room.

This conclusion chapter summarises the main lines of developments in British historiography, the relationships between those developments and academic practice. In the nineteenth century, when history was established as an academic profession, the notion of objectivity was often described as a matter of 'science'. Such was the prestige of the natural sciences that 'science' was regarded as an objective ideal to which all branches of learning aspired. The chapter suggests that historians must see the variety and the ever-changing nature of historiography as a strength, not a weakness, and that they should not resign from their task of interpreting the history of human actions. Of course history is about the past, but historiography is always responsive to present interest and needs. It is a human artefact, so inevitably it is a part of the intellectual life of the society that produces it.

This chapter provides a guide to reading historiographical texts, looking at the relationship between 'facts' and 'theories', and at 'meta-narrative' and causation. The examples are chosen to illustrate the problems inherent in the idea of there being an easy distinction between fact and theory. They include the empiricist-Marxist debate on the French Revolution, class and English social history, and imperialism in the context of globalisation. Historians can be excused for feeling very ambivalent about the relationship between narrative and historical explanation. Narrative often appears to be the lazy way of avoiding a selection of material or the application of reason to a historical problem. Narration can be taken to imply a causal connection between events that are narrated consecutively. A successful narrative always has to have an analytical structure as well; and, in historiography, an analytical approach has an implied narrative, if it is to have any meaning.