Why is treatment with psychopharmacology, which made such dramatic advances 50 years ago, now in a prolonged state of suspended animation?

Rossini's Le Siège de Corinthe, a revision of Maometto II, was first given at the Paris Opéra on 9 October 1826. The revival took place on 22 October 1838. Although, as noted above, Berlioz was no lover of ‘dilettanti’, his initially low opinion of Rossini had been revised upwards, especially after getting to know Guillaume Tell; Rossini could not be held responsible for the works of his many imitators. This extract translates the first six paragraphs of Berlioz's review.

This was the first Rossini opera to have been staged at our Académie royale de musique. At its first appearance it unleashed a storm against the Opéra's director: he was bitterly reproached for putting on the stage of the French Opéra, a stage essentially devoted to the dramatic and the serious, the work of an Italian who had made an opera of Le Barbier de Séville.

There were only two things the defenders of the national, dramatic genre forgot. The first is that the main works that had for thirty years underpinned the repertoire of our great theatre, and that created its character of grandeur and lyricism, were composed by Italians and one German: Piccinni, Sacchini, Spontini, and Gluck are not Frenchmen. The second point which should not be forgotten is that Il barbiere di Siviglia, given the supreme skill with which each of its characters is drawn and developed, was the best guarantee any composer could have given of his understanding of staging and the finesse of his feeling for drama. What's more, this same Barbier had been furiously whistled at by the Romans, which must be considered a fairly good recommendation of its composer.

How and why do African leaders cooperate through regional intergovernmental organizations (RIOs) to manage political and security threats? The central argument of this book is that particularly in regions prone to coups d’état and intrastate conflicts, heads of state concerned with their personal survival often treat RIOs as bases for organizing, in essence, mutual protection clubs. Heads of state adapt RIOs’ competencies in an effort to protect themselves and stabilize like-minded, cooperative leaders in their neighborhood. The mutual aid theory in this book centers on common expectations, reciprocity between leaders, and the positioning of RIOs as the international community’s designated first responders to crises. This chapter provides a summary of the argument, situates the book’s contributions to the field, and concludes with an overview of the remainder of the book.

THE FISH SCRIBE

The Fish Scribe is in many ways a typical early fifteen-century scribe. He is atypical because we know where he worked and for whom he worked. More important, fifteen of his manuscripts have been preserved, twelve at Peterhouse, three at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Te Fish Scribe was William Dyngley's principal scribe, active in Cambridge during the first third of the fifteen century. He was the sole scribe of eight manuscripts and the primary textwriter in seven others (Table 4.1). He has not been unnoticed. Parkes observed that Dyngley's books were ‘copied in a superior grade of handwriting’, and both cataloguers of the Peterhouse manuscripts spoke well of his hand. For James his work was ‘fairly written’. Tomson cited the ‘proficient anglicana formata’ in MS 110 and a script ‘close to bookhand’ in MS 154, citing the ‘fish scribe’ by name in MSS 193 and 203. The Rouses were the first to so identify him because of his ‘readily noticeable’ catchwords enclosed in a fish. The fish drawn in text ink was later overdrawn in red or yellow, the colour shift identifying diferent stints of finishing work (Fig. 4.1a). The Rouses suggested that the fish was a pike, presumably because of the elongated shape.

Stein’s method for distributional approximation was originally developed in the context of normal approximation. It is appropriate for use with network statistics, such as subgraph counts, when the typical counts are large; (compound) Poisson approximation is most useful in sparse networks, normal approximation when networks are denser. In this chapter, Stein’s method for estimating the error in normal approximation, measured with respect to the bounded Wasserstein distance, is outlined. A Stein equation, a first-order ordinary differential equation is derived, and some properties of its solutions are established. Direct application of these results leads to a general bound on the approximation error, which is then applied in the classical context of sums of independent random variables. Then, both local and size bias coupling approaches are developed. The local approach, which uses a double decomposition, is illustrated by application to the number of triangles in the Bernoulli random graph; the calculations are typically more involved than for Poisson approximation. The coupling approach is applied to the distribution of the sample mean in simple random sampling.

January 15, 1943

German Listeners!

A somber anniversary needs to be marked: ten years of National Socialism. What have they brought the German people? There is only one answer that tells it all: the war, this war, the way it stands today and the way it will end for the German people. Hitler's war, in which your sons bleed to death by the millions, and which will leave the continent— including Germany—a wasteland. When you are asked what was accomplished during this decade, you can trace everything back to the war. From the start, everything pointed toward this war, everything steered toward its realization. Everything else, whatever lying name it was given, beginning with the lying name of the movement itself, all of it was nothing but a rehearsal and systematic restructuring toward the ineludible and ruinous misadventure of this war, which your Führer, of course, had imagined very differently than how it looks now. A desperate struggle, in which Germany feels compelled to heap one unpardonable atrocity onto another, and the physical and moral fallout of which it will have to bear for who knows how long.

All of the so-called benefits that the regime is supposed to have reaped for Germany show their true face in the light of this accomplishment. Their absurdity is thereby revealed even to those who, in their utter wretchedness, ever saw anything else in them but deceit, madness, and infamy. One hears that Hitler liberated Germany from joblessness. Yes—by building up the military. National Socialism—that means solving social questions with war.

The rebellion of princely heirs against their crowned fathers was a relatively common, though not frequent, phenomenon in medieval European politics. While the early fourteenth century was a period when the guiding principles for the legitimate exercise of power and the prerequisites for royal succession were being clarified and defined, it was also punctuated by periodic episodes of armed conflict between European kings and their first-born (primogenitus) sons. Owing to differences both geographical and chronological, there is considerable variation in both the quantity and the quality of the surviving sources for the study of these uprisings. Nonetheless, through the comparative analysis of this material, historians have identified shared ideas and traditions, together with the individual specificities and peculiarities associated with differing royal customs and accepted practices of power, that enabled contemporaries to tailor their discourses and justifications when addressing contrasting circumstances and audiences.

INTRODUCTION

This case came to the attention of the authorities in April 1590 when James Kinnaird and his wife Janet Henderson, in Auchlinsky in the parish of Glendevon, southern Perthshire, were discovered to have some magical objects: nine grains of wheat, a piece of rowan tree, and the joint of a man's finger. This information may have emerged during a commissioner's visitation of the presbytery or diocese. The presbytery of Stirling summoned Kinnaird, who testified that the objects belonged to Isobel Watson. Possibly she had provided them to help Kinnaird's wife in childbirth. Kinnaird brought Watson with him to the presbytery, whose attention was immediately focused on her.

Watson said that she was aged about sixty. She seems to have grown up in Muthill and spent her young adulthood in Perth. Her husband, a fisherman, had died three years after the Reformation, thus in about 1563, and since then she had begged for a living, mainly in the Glendevon area.2 She was a magical practitioner and apparently a midwife, healing people and finding lost and stolen goods. What particularly attracted the presbytery's attention, however, was Watson's account of her visions of fairies and visits to fairyland – visions that, she said, she had experienced since the age of eighteen.

These visions included some extraordinary folkloric detail, making this case one of Scotland's most valuable sources of material for fairy belief. Perceptive discussions of it have been published by Michael F. Graham and P. G. Maxwell-Stuart.3 Just a few points may be picked out here.

In the crisis of his career, when his country demanded the most of him, Sir John Ogle (1569–1640) was in despair. The most experienced soldier in Charles I's Council of War, he was charged in 1625 with assembling and preparing an army for England's war with Spain. The work, Ogle acknowledged, was ‘knotty and full of encumbrance’, yet crucial for the kingdom's safety and honour. Ogle's professional preparation was adequate for the task, but he was ‘perplexed’ in his heart and ‘distracted’ in his judgement to the point that he could not complete it. At risk to his reputation and fortune, with consequences for England's military readiness, he pleaded to be released. Ogle's correspondence from 1625 reveals a man deeply troubled by the pull of duty, the snares of ambition, and the ordeal of melancholy. His personal problems and the demands of public service intersected. While recruiting, equipping, and training the largest land force assembled since 1588, he was plagued by ‘mists of darkness’ and self-doubt that resembled a nervous breakdown. Ogle soldiered on, in mounting distress, until his torment of mind got the better of him.

Contemporaries knew Sir John Ogle as an experienced warrior and a talented administrator. He had achieved distinction in military service in the Netherlands, and was well connected at the highest levels of government. In 1625 he would seem to have been at the peak of his powers. Yet within a year he was the subject of pity. Few places outside creative literature and medical casebooks tell such a tale of mental collapse

A Career Soldier

Born in 1569, not just a younger son, but the youngest of five sons of a Lincolnshire gentleman, John Ogle was forced to seek his fortune in the world.

Collier's political works between 1689 and 1696 could provide the missing piece of the puzzle for understanding the political meaning of his anti-stage tracts. Yet this is not to suggest that the content of his anti-stage works can be correlated directly with contemporary political theories. As far as Collier was concerned, his works on politics and drama were not political treatises and dramatic criticism but different types of conduct books. He observed human affairs, whether political or non-political, in drama or in reality, from the same perspective.

Collier's anti-stage pamphlets are the products of the system of his thought, which took shape in his political debates with pro-Revolution writers and was for the first time formulated in written form in his preface to A Short View in 1698. This system, which I call the ‘rectification of names’, can be summarized in his own words: ‘As Good and Evil are different in Themselves, so they ought to be differently Mark’d.’ This sentence, as discussed in Chapter 1, contains a syllogism, a smuggled premise, and a prescribed action. The syllogism of the standard approach of conduct writing, which ‘promoted’ right ‘principles’ of behaviour, is as follows: All principles of good and evil are different; practice follows principle; therefore, all the practice of good and evil is different. To the syllogism, Collier added a non sequitur that principle follows practice and thereby modified the conclusion as a prescribed action: mark the principles and practice of good and evil differently.

The Fünf Lieder für Männerchor (Five songs for men's chorus), op. 41, is the only essay Brahms saw fit to publish in a genre that had been a prime medium for the expression of patriotic and liberal-nationalist sentiment dating back to the years of Napoleonic domination of the German lands. Writing in the first edition of George Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1880), Franz Gehring provided a concise description of the social milieu in which the genre had originally flourished:

LIEDERTAFEL, originally a society of men, who met together on fixed evenings for the practice of vocal music in four parts, drinking forming part of the entertainment. They arose during the political depression caused by Napoleon's rule in Germany; and the first, consisting of 24 members only, was founded by Zelter in Berlin, Dec[ember] 28, 1808. Others soon followed at Frankfort [sic] and Leipzig, gradually relaxing the rules as to numbers. Bernhard Klein founded the “Jüngeren Berliner Liedertafel,” which aimed at a higher standard of art.