Elke Schmitter's 2000 novel Frau Sartoris (Mrs. Sartoris, 2003) begins and ends with the same scene: a hit-and-run accident, in which the eponymous protagonist deliberately kills her sixteen-year-old daughter's abusive lover, the nightclub owner and pimp Willroth. For the main character, the murder is an act of female self-assertion and an attempt at establishing agency in a male-dominated society. Reading Schmitter's novel through a lens offered by works that trace the gendered history, psychology, and moral dimension of anger, through Sara Ahmed's and Audre Lorde's notions of anger as a possible catalyst for social change, and through Amia Srinivasan's concept of “apt anger,” highlights the diverse societal and emotional factors that fuel and shape Margarethe Sartoris's anger. These include gender normativity and double moral standards for men's and women's sexualities, motherhood, class, and competing notions of marriage and love, as well as feelings of guilt, vulnerability, helplessness, and humiliation effected by these circumstances. Set in West Germany during the decades following the Second World War, Margarethe's development from romantic young woman to middle-aged adulterer and eventually murderer pinpoints the frustrations and emotional distress the period's gender inequality evoked in many women— an inequality on which second-wave feminism shed light at the time and that despite continued efforts has affected German society to this day. An analysis of the transformation of Margarethe's emotional state from selfdestructive, ineffectual depression to the kind of fury that enables murder contributes to the ongoing debates about the effects of gender inequality on women and the social, psychological, and existential conditions necessary for female subjectivity and authenticity. At the same time, Schmitter's novel raises the question of the legitimacy of a sense of female subjectivity achieved through a kind of vengeful fury that drives the furious individual to suspend moral considerations.

With these lyrics, written by poet and writer Emanuel Harussi (1903–1979) and set to music by composer and pianist Nahum Nardi (1901–1977), the satirical theater Ha’Matate (The Broom) debuted in Tel Aviv in April 1928. This frisky song served as the theater's anthem and manifest. As performances progressed, new stanzas were added while the last lines were retained as the refrain.

Even now, almost a hundred years later, the song's satirical message still stings and bites. The verses from the third program criticized the vagaries of the municipality of Tel Aviv, where the right went left, and the left went right, and circumcision was compulsory; the lyrics of the fourth program refer to the Land of Israel as “occupied territory”; and the final verses scolded local theater critics, who were rich in pretense and poor in talent. Between the 1920s and 1950s, a unique and diverse arena of theaters and theatrical companies evolved in the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine, known as the Yishuv. Among these, theaters that were called “cabarets,” “light stage,” or “satirical theaters” were Ha’Kumkum (The Kettle), the literary cabaret Tevat Noaḥ (Noah's Ark), or cabaret-cafes such as Semadar (Grape Blossom).

In 1862, fifteen-year-old Dorothea Bernecker applied to become a deaconess at the Kaiserswerth Institute near Düsseldorf, where Protestant women from across Europe had been trained as teachers and nurses for vocational and missionary work since 1836.1 After being rejected on account of her young age and fragile health, she applied again four years later. In the Lebenslauf, or curriculum vitae that she submitted the second time, she wrote of how the initial rejection had made her look at her weakened body with sadness. Then, she went on to describe how she had learned to accept her weakness and find happiness in knowing that her Redeemer lives. This time, she was admitted and began her training on October 31, 1866 (Reformation Day).

The crux of Dorothea's emotional testimony is uncomplicated: physical and worldly despair could be cured through religious piety and redemption. Following the theological arc of Lutheran redemption narratives, it is only when Dorothea accepts her state of helplessness that God's grace can transform the emotional experience of her life. Her writing conveys the basic emotions of sadness and happiness, which perhaps is a reflection of her youth and inexperience, though other Lebensläufe draw upon a broader range of lived experiences to develop more complicated feelings of suffering and grief, familial and Christian love, humility and pride. Dorothea's real life, like those of many deaconess probationers, did not reach an idealized or miraculous state of grace.

The repertoire of the London season 1734 to 1735

It is not without a certain irony that Nikisch's predecessor at the Royal Opera in Budapest was none other than his former subordinate in Leipzig: Gustav Mahler. Mahler's move to Budapest was in no small measure prompted by rivalry issues with Nikisch over the conducting of Leipzig's Ring cycle. Whilst not without its difficulties, Mahler's two-year stint at the Hungarian Royal Opera was marked by some notable achievements, including going some way towards the establishment of a Hungarian national opera. Predictably, however, his tenure quickly foundered as the irresistible force of his tempestuous creativity came up against the immovable object of the theatre management in the person of Hungarian nationalist sympathiser Count Géza von Zichy (1849-1924). Zichy's appointment as Intendant came with increased powers that directly challenged Mahler's own. This Mahler could not tolerate, and he resigned from his post at the end of March 1891.

Mahler's departure was followed by a two-year hiatus during which Zichy tightened his grip on all aspects of the Opera's administration before, on 9 April 1893, the Hungarian press announced Nikisch's appointment as Music Director, some three weeks prior to his final appearance as Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.2 On 6 June the press reported that Nikisch had visited Count Zichy at his country estate in Tetélen to discuss future plans.3 Money, Nikisch was told, was tight, and even at this early stage his ambitions were likely to be tempered by severe financial constraints.

A grounding is when a ship strikes the seabed, while a stranding is when the ship then remains there for some length of time.

Running aground could be one of the most disastrous misadventures to befall a ship, the situation requiring prompt and strong action by the officers as the vessel could quickly break up. Furthermore, as the crisis evolved the crew could become disorderly. Sailing across the open seas of the Bay of Bengal presented few dangers of groundings. But weaving one's way through the Andaman Archipelago, the South China Sea and the straits of the Malay Archipelago was a different matter. It was a beautiful region of verdant tropical islands, sandy beaches and azure seas but presented numerous navigational challenges. Between 1805 and 1819, there were fourteen Protests lodged by British country traders at Malacca relating to groundings or strandings, ten of which occurred in the Malacca Strait or the Singapore Strait.

Surprisingly, in his India Directory, starting from the first edition of 1809–11, Horsburgh downplayed the dangers in the Malacca Strait: ‘To persons unacquainted, Malacca Strait appears an intricate navigation, but as the channels are mostly spacious, with good anchorage, it is certainly not dangerous, if common prudence is observed. Many ships keep under way day and night, in most parts of the strait, and often pass through, without anchoring above once or twice.’

Why then, at the turn of the nineteenth century were vessels still running aground in Malay waters? What were the navigation tools available?

It has been estimated that Winston Churchill ‘published 6.1 million words in thirty-seven books’ – more words than ‘Shakespeare and Dickens combined’. Aware that deeds, however glorious, were ephemeral, he insisted that ‘words are the only things which last forever’. Hence the zeal to compose those words himself. Indeed, David Cannadine has described his ‘extraordinary career’ as ‘one sustained, brightly lit and scarcely interrupted monologue’. That bon mot about leaving the past to history yet being its historian was reprised on several occasions. Lacking any faith in an afterlife, Churchill believed his only guarantee of immortality was personally to inscribe himself into history. And he did that, above all, in six volumes of memoirs on The World Crisis of 1914–23 and then in his more celebrated six-pack on The Second World War. This essay will outline his idiosyncratically collaborative working methods, his learning trajectory between the two works and his unrivalled achievement in transmuting his story into public history.

What we now know as The World Crisis emerged piecemeal between 1923 and 1931, when Churchill was an active politician, including service as Chancellor of the Exchequer for nearly five years. The volumes lack the coherence of the later set, most of which covered his war premiership, but they do reveal some enduring strategic principles and authorial methods.

Legal proceedings concerning Captain Francis Balston and his voyage of 1820 in the Lady Flora are of interest as an illustration of the restrictions under which private trade took place and the sort of legal argument that could be advanced. Although this matter does not involve a Protest at Malacca, Balston had in the past availed himself of the facility, once in 1816 as captain of the James Drummond and again in 1818 when he commanded the Lady Flora.

In 1820 Balston took the Lady Flora, owned by John Palmer, in ballast from Calcutta to Canton under special licence from the EIC to take on a cargo of tea there and bring it back to Calcutta or ‘any intermediate port’. Instead, the ship took on not tea but other goods at Canton, then proceeded to Batavia to take on more cargo and then to the Cape of Good Hope, arriving on 20 January 1821. Here the Comptroller of Customs, Mr Bird, after taking advice and in conjunction with Mr Luson, the EIC Resident, arrested the ship and refused permission to land the cargo, alleging an infringement of the terms of the ship's licence. However, the suit brought by the Fiscal General in the Court of Justice for condemnation of the ship and cargo was lost; the ship was returned to Balston and the cargo unloaded on 27 February.

Not content with this outcome, later described as ‘an indulgence to which … [he] was not entitled’, Balston brought actions against both Bird and Luson for damages resulting from the delay in unloading the cargo.

Performance and theatricality have been prominent throughlines in David Cannadine's studies of institutions and individuals, whether the context has been royal pageantry, class society, imperial spectacle, civic ritual, academic ceremony, oratorical heroics, architectural splendour or family drama. In a similar spirit, this essay considers the consequential theatrics and theatrical consequences of Benjamin Disraeli in nineteenth-century political culture and beyond. Viewing Disraeli as a performer above all else is hardly a new insight. Oscar Wilde, (in)famously performative in his own right, thought Disraeli ‘played a brilliant comedy to a “pit full of Kings”, and was immensely pleased at his own performance’. The ‘ceremonial impresario’ Lord Curzon hailed him as ‘an actor in the guise of a politician’. Historians and biographers have shown great consistency on this point: Robert Blake called Disraeli ‘a superb actor’ and ‘an impresario and an actor manager’; forty years later, William Kuhn showed him using ‘the drama of his personality to woo and win the House’. Indeed, it is difficult to find any account of Disraeli that does not in some way assert that he was an actor.

Perhaps, then, it is no accident that Disraeli's ascent to the top of the proverbial greasy pole happened in the years after 1867, when one commentator observed that the theatre ‘occupied a larger place in the national consciousness’ than early in Victoria's reign. The Victorian era saw the theatre's historic disrepute recede, thanks in part to figures like William Charles Macready, the leading tragedian of the 1830s and 40s, who worked hard to promote an image of professional seriousness and respectability.