Chapter 3 provides the first historical case study of the encounter between American lawyers and German-Jewish Marxists and focusses on collaborative writing practices. It traces the invention of the intelligence report during World War II and describes this genre’s characteristics as paradigmatic for the bureaucratic style of the memorandum culture. Franz Neumann (the intellectual head of the OSS’s Research and Analysis branch) and his grand analysis of Nazi Germany in Behemoth is thus considered in close relationship to his work as intelligence analyst collaborating with his European and American colleagues. In this chapter, I describe the medial infrastructures (index cards, transatlantic microphotography) that were used to analyze the distant enemy, and I ask in a reading of the intelligence report “German Morale after Tunisia” what it meant to “understand” the Nazi enemy in 1943.

The contributors to the present volume take the psychological study of the life story into new directions. Coming from diverse backgrounds like developmental, memory, personality, social, and clinical psychology, they share an interest in life as a frame of reference for biographical narrating and remembering. We have crossed intellectual and life paths at different times in the past 30 years, becoming cherished colleagues and friends. I cannot adequately express how grateful for and delighted I am by the contributions.

In this chapter, I provide a more textured picture of corruption in China’s courts. First, I find that the scale of judicial corruption in China is larger than was reported by the SPC. Second, I unpack judicial corruption with a four-filter scheme, separating prevalent conducts from the less prevalent and then provide a statistical description of the more prevalent types of misconduct, using a self-compiled dataset. I find that the predominant type of judicial corruption is the abuse of judicial discretion for self-enrichment. This type of corruption is ubiquitous in China’s courts, regardless of the type of the court where a judge serves, the type of the case concerned, and the stage of a litigation process where corruption takes place. My findings render some popular explanations of judicial corruption in China incomplete, which prompts further investigation of judicial decision-making in these courts in the next chapter.

In face of the difficulty of establishing clear biological boundaries between sleep and the other forms of impaired consciousness, the sociological and anthropological analyses can provide hints as to where those limits were set in real life. The terminological analysis suggested a common feature that persisted throughout the different authors and periods: different levels of consciousness (from drowsy to hyperactive, and from delirium to koma) where always related to the impairment of mental capacities, regardless of the way in which each medical writer grouped or understood them.

The analysis of total loss of consciousness illustrates the varied ways in which the different authors resolved - in their corresponding periods and contexts - the tension between body and soul. Despite their diverse approaches, all the medical writers under scrutiny took for granted the existence of a soul, its intervention in this kind of conditions, and its bonds to the body as determiner of the clinical presentation. Particularly, they grappled to organise the mental capacities and explain how they were affected in the different forms of impaired consciousness.

The critique of realism dominant in the 1970s and 1980s should be understood in the context of the longer history of anti-realism that accompanied the rise of literary modernism. Misconceptions about realism deriving from three sources within the larger frame of discourse of French theory: the modernist rejection of realism as an outmoded form; general claims about language, representation, and knowledge, making it harder to see the validity of the realist project; explicit attacks on realism, which need to be read as an argument with Lukács and the version of Marxism he represented. It is my hypothesis that the conception of realism as an epistemological problem is rooted these three tendencies, and once those positions are no longer assumed, then it can be shown that realism entails no special epistemological pleading and does not offer or require any particular philosophy of knowledge. Questions regarding realism’s truth should (and, if fact usually do) turn on what is represented, rather than on the claim that it has been represented truthfully. Realism should be understood as a set of conventions that emerge in nineteenth- century fiction and which have been recognized by critics since at least the second half of the twentieth century.

Throughout the post-Soviet era the Kremlin grappled with two interrelated questions. Firstly, whether a Ukrainian or (Russia’s preference) a pan-Russian identity would dominate Ukraine. Secondly, whether Ukraine would be part of Europe or (the Kremlin’s preference) the Russian World and Eurasia. Between 1991 and 2013, Ukraine found itself in the ‘grey zone’ where two identities and foreign policy orientations competed, with conflict especially acute in the decade between the 2003-2004 Orange and 2013-2014 Euromaidan Revolutions. Russian imperial nationalists never accepted Ukraine could be a fully independent state. They demanded, lobbied, cajoled and aggressively pursued a Ukraine that would have a semi-sovereign relationship akin to that which exists between Russia and Belarus. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenka is the kind of leader Russia sought to install in Kyiv if its ‘special military operation’ had gone as planned. The roots of Russia’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion lie in the dominance of Ukrainian and marginalisation of pan-Russian identity from 2014. Ukrainian identity became dominant after the marginalisation of pro-Russian forces who had supported a pan-Russian identity, and through the adoption of new legislation in memory politics, language, education, and media, and the goals of NATO and EU membership and closure of Russian television and radio media broadcasting into and inside Ukraine, banning of twelve pro-Russian political parties, and the removal of Russian Orthodox canonical control over Ukraine through autocephaly for the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.