The perimenopause is an individual experience, influenced by life circumstances, cultural context, family history and narrative. The perimenopause can last many years and women, as well as health professionals, can be poorly prepared for this potentially challenging period. Most people know to expect hot flushes, and maybe genitourinary symptoms. However, if the emotional symptoms, such as, reduced ability to cope, irritability and sudden anger, arise first, years before the expected hot flushes, it can be difficult to understand and have a detrimental effect on a woman’s life. We explore widespread physical symptoms of perimenopause and highlight symptoms that are regulated in the brain: hot flushes, body temperature regulation, sleep disturbances, libido. We focus on emotional symptoms, such as mood changes, depression, anxiety, agitation, irritability, a sense of overwhelm and losing the ability to cope, and explore their impact on suicidality. We briefly look at cognitive symptoms and explore the influence of trauma and the differences in experience by ethnicity and cultural influence. Finally, we look at the experience of premature ovarian insufficiency.

‘Football is a like a religion to me’, Pelé once confessed, ‘I worship the ball and treat it like a god.’ This chapter turns the spotlight on an occasion during the Cold War when football and faith clashed head-on – and god lost. It centres on a friendly match in Dublin in 1955 between teams representing Catholic Ireland and Tito’s Yugoslavia. For most of the Cold War, Yugoslavia was the powerhouse of Eastern European football, renowned for exporting players to the West. Irish sports fans greeted news of the Yugoslavs’ visit with excitement, only for the Archbishop of Dublin, John McQuaid, to spark an almighty row by trying to ban the fixture. McQuaid hated atheistic communism; Tito’s imprisonment of Catholic priests was proof of its evil. In what became a test case for the power of the Catholic Church in Ireland, McQuaid suffered a rare defeat. Despite intense pressure, the Irish Football Association refused to back down and the match went ahead, with Yugoslavia’s great striker Miloš Milutinović bagging a hattrick in a 4–1 win. Ireland lost on the pitch. But through football having put a dent in Catholic authority, many people later claimed the country won off it.

This is by no means the first single-volume survey of the history of Spanish music to appear in English. The editors of and contributors to The Cambridge History of Music in Spain freely admit the debt we owe to illustrious predecessors going back over a century. Prominent among these are Carl Van Vechten, Walter Starkie, Gilbert Chase, and Ann Livermore.

In Australia, divisive debate on the matter of religious freedom has come to the fore following the introduction of marriage equality in 2017 and increasing protections against trans and gender diverse intolerance. This chapter analyses this concern with religious freedom through a social imaginaries framework. Social imaginaries are what facilitate our sense of ‘the world’; here, I illustrate how social context and embodied identity factor into affective and cognitive dissonance between one’s world of experience and their image of ‘the world’. I argue that the rise of religious freedom discourse indicates the emergence of such dissonance among conservative Christians in Australia and that this discourse is a response to the condition of ‘meaning vertigo’. Herein, I elucidate the role of op-eds from Australia’s only national daily broadsheet, The Australian, in constructing a possible path of exit from ‘meaning vertigo’: promulgating the affectively seductive image of Christians as ‘the persecuted faithful’.

Music in the Iberian Peninsula before 1450, co-authored by Carmen Julia Gutiérrez (Universidade Complutense de Madrid) and Manuel Pedro Ferreira (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), takes a comprehensive view of the topic (ignoring later political and cultural borders) while incorporating novel scholarship. The chapter encompasses an overview of liturgy, culture, and politics in Iberia between the 6th−11th centuries, a substantial chapter on the Hispanic rite and its music, and a history of the introduction and establishment of the Roman rite in the Peninsula, including a detailed discussion of sources, notation and repertoire. The authors then concentrate on court and town (until 1350), embracing Andalusian Music (8th−13th centuries), the emergence of the troubadour tradition, the Cantigas de Santa Maria, and the Ars Antiqua polyphony (12th−14th centuries), from the earliest evidence to Parisian and regional traditions. Ars Nova polyphony is dealt with in a section on princely and religious chapels (14th−15th centuries) focusing separately on the kingdoms of Aragon, Navarre, Castile and Portugal. The chapter includes newly devised historical maps and musical examples.

Sons and Lovers (1913) struggles to contain conflicting early directions in Lawrence’s prose fiction: a yearning of his own to show his characters’ psycho-emotional states – dramatically and situationally rendered, as encouraged by his mentors Ford Madox Ford and Edward Garnett – to be also diagnostic of broader cultural crises. Examination of the successive versions of the novel and of its immediate predecessor The Trespasser (1912), novels whose stages of writing, rewriting and revision weave chronologically around one another, helps explain Lawrence’s denigration of artistic form – his mentors’ touchstone – even as he was learning how to master it. His dissatisfaction with the result would push his writing along demanding new paths.

This chapter examines the relationship between ape pointing and recipient attention, an under-explored aspect of primate communication. It is argued that an overly narrow interpretation of the imperative–declarative distinction has led researchers to overlook the attention-directing role of ape pointing. The chapter reviews evidence of attention manipulation in apes and analyses pointing studies for insights into how apes engage with the gaze of others. It is proposed that apes may point with the goal of directing attention, even when intertwined with other motives such as requesting. This chapter provides a framework for future research to explore the complex interplay between pointing and attention in great apes, contributing to our understanding of the evolution of communication and social cognition.

Both John Milton and Andrew Marvell have been revaluated in recent years. Yet this is the first sustained scholarly work to compare the two great seventeenth-century poets. In his new book, which stands as the culmination of a distinguished academic career, Warren Chernaik examines the relationship of the two writers and their complex responses to their troubled times. The poets were close friends, yet the trajectory of their careers and their posthumous reputations differed significantly. As well as taking an active part in the major political and religious upheavals of their times, both poets engaged seriously with classical, Christian, and humanist thought. Combining close readings of their poetry and prose with detailed consideration of historical and intellectual context, Chernaik sheds fresh light on the enduring works of poets whose words still resonate strongly with today’s readers.