The British Labour Party is unique among social democratic parties in the way that over the past generation programmatic change has, rather than being incremental, been sudden and sharp, taking the form of paradigm shifts, as the term is understood by Peter Hall. This brief survey of the party over the last thirty years uncovers four actual or attempted paradigm displacements under the leaderships of Tony Blair, Ed Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn, and Keir Starmer. The chapter argues that Labour’s propensity for paradigm shifts is due to two principal factors: fluctuations in social learning processes and instabilities in institutional settings, in particular the structure of power within the party. It finds that the learning process, while to a degree evidence-based, is inherently both subjective and political, with much depending on how problems are framed and the lessons of the past interpreted. But the most important variable explaining why Labour is prone to a greater extent than other social democratic parties to ideological volatility is the fluidity of its power structure which, in turn, reflects its institutional structure, especially its pluralist and federal character.

The conclusion summarizes the book’s core arguments – specifically, that studying the reception of ancient architecture at the world’s fairs at Chicago, Nashville, Omaha, St. Louis, and San Francisco furthers our understanding of the complex and possibly conflicting and contradictory ways in which the ancient world and its architecture were understood in the United States between 1893 and 1915. The appropriation of classical architecture for museums and fine art galleries emerges as a major theme. While classical architecture could be used to justify empire and institutional racism, it could also symbolize democracy and cultural sophistication. The fluidity and flexibility of ancient architecture underscore why it was so widely and creatively adapted in the United States. The physical legacy of these fairs – the buildings that survived and the parks – is also considered. In addition, the conclusion discusses the decline of ancient architecture as one of the most potent ways in which fair organizers expressed their cultural, political, and economic goals; the rejection of historical forms was vital to the birth of architectural Modernism. In sum, neo-antique architecture at American world’s fairs helped the nation and various cities to forge imagined ties to a glorious past, frame the present, and envisage the future.

This essay examines various forms of transactional relationships, from marriage and concubinage to brothel prostitution and the informal exchange of sex for sustenance. It considers the life of famous musician Barbara Strozzi, institutional attempts to manage prostitution through legislation and charity, and the negotiation of transactional sex amongst the city’s poorest residents. Byars demonstrates that early modern Venetians saw sexuality as both necessary and dangerous, fleshes out the porous boundaries on the spectrum between marriage and prostitution, and explores how women navigated the socioeconomic systems that commodified them.

The inspiration for this paper is a piece published by Richard Green in 1999: ‘Tragedy and the Spectacle of the Mind: Messenger Speeches, Actors, Narrative, and Audience Imagination in Fourth-Century bce Vase-Painting’,1 which elegantly illustrates the productive interconnections that his work has often traced between artefacts and texts. Green discusses the presence, on many South Italian (mainly Tarentine) vases which deal with tragic subjects, of a figure usually to be identified as a family retainer, who is typically elderly and bent, carries a staff, and ‘makes the speaking gesture with his right hand’.2 This is his regular pose: he is telling the awful story of the events represented on the vase.

If we’re trying to come up with a theory to explain the sound of footsteps behind you, a feeling of a presence, lights that you can’t explain, or the psychic who knows everything about you, we might be tempted to say that supernatural forces are at work. But we also know that each one of these instances can be easily explained with neuroscience and psychology. This is what I’ve attempted to do in this book.

Legg draws on Charles Peirce’s semiotics to help explain the semantic limitations of genAI software. Early AI developers were stymied by the assumption that meanings are discrete, abstract, and internal and by an approach that disallowed the growth of meaning. Legg describes some of the progress on AI that has been made in recent years but argues that some of its remaining weaknesses stem from a failure to understand that semiosis occurs in three fundamentally different ways: symbolicity, indexicality, and iconicity. Contemporary genAI systems never go beyond symbolicity to instantiate indexical signs, which are required to point to the world external to those systems, and they are not sufficiently constrained by iconic signs, especially those that would bring logical structure. Legg also critically considers claims that genAI will enable new achievements with regard to knowledge and truth, as well as claims that it will further erode our collective grasp on truth. Drawing on Peirce’s realism his view of inquiry as essentially social, Legg explains how we can reconceive reality, truth, and knowledge so as to avoid mistaking the texts created by genAI for genuine knowledge.

When considering the importance of France in Neruda’s life and works, scholars have chronicled up to nine separate visits, from the anecdotes of amorous adventures to a desperate search for political asylum, friendships and romances, forged and dissolved. This chapter studies the importance of France and its impact on the evolution of Neruda’s artistic values and production through the literary lens of key poems associated with five particular visits to France. Among other poems related to Neruda’s stay in France, this chapter focuses on references to Picasso in Las uvas y el viento (The Grapes and the Wind, 1952) and their collaboration in Toros (Bulls, 1960), where they express their shared love for and faith in Spain.

As business transactions and the global economy become increasingly digitalized, international investment disputes will deal with novel assets in new boundary-defiant contexts. Indeed, jurisdictional arguments and objections will likely require arbitral tribunals to confront with the uneasy task of delineating the ‘localization’ of investments in digital economy assets such as cryptocurrency, non-fungible tokens, and data-related investments. However, given that even more traditional assets have raised a variety of problems relating to territorial nexus and localization, the authors believe that the digital economy emphasizes what are essentially differences in degree rather than in kind. This chapter discusses the complexities that arise in considering the idiosyncrasies of investments in digital economy assets within a traditional territorially defined jurisdictional framework. First, the authors present some of those new digital economy assets and canvass several typical cross-border challenges inherent in international investment arbitration. Second, they question how traditional objections to jurisdiction ratione personae and jurisdiction ratione materiae might be employed when the investments in question relate to those digital developments. Third, the chapter raises questions about states’ jurisdiction to prescribe, and ponders the potential effects for purposes of jurisdiction of states asserting their authority to prescribe over investments or investors outside their territory.

While living in exile in a divided Berlin after the 1973 military coup and Pablo Neruda’s death twelve days later, Antonio Skármeta created his own version of Neruda in Ardiente paciencia (Burning Patience), a humane image of the poet that contrasted with the one-dimensional communist martyr projected after his death. Skármeta wrote the base story for four different media under the same title: a radio drama, a play, a film, and a novel. The story has since been freely adapted by others, such as Michael Radford’s film Il Postino (The Postman), Daniel Catán’s opera, with Plácido Domingo as Neruda, and Rodrigo Sepúlveda’s recent film released by Netflix. Aside from clarifying the confusion in the critical bibliography regarding these multiple stories, this chapter focuses on Skármeta’s two media versions of Ardiente paciencia, the play and the film, to show how a single artistic creation can captivate audiences worldwide.

Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, or White City, marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the “New World” and showcased Chicago’s ambition to be a modern metropolis. While Chicago’s architecture is often labeled as Beaux-Arts or Roman, this chapter argues that the architecture of its key buildings and central spaces embodied the bricolage of the neo-antique. The White City established neo-antique architecture as the preferred architectural idiom for American world’s fairs. This architecture also demonstrated that the United States was now a cultural, economic, and political powerhouse. The lasting impact of the White City’s architecture is evident in urban planning, especially in the City Beautiful movement and in civil buildings built after the fair. Other buildings at the fair, such as Haiti’s pavilion, also utilized classicizing architecture. For Haiti, the ideals of democracy and the cultural cachet of classical culture informed the choice of classical architecture here. Ancient Egyptian architecture also appeared in the form of a replica of the Temple of Luxor, located in the Midway Plaisance, the fair’s entertainment zone, aiming to educate and entertain visitors. The reception of ancient architecture at the White City reflects the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship between nineteenth-century America and the ancient world.

Chapter 8 looks at some of the ways local historians represented their region’s or town’s history and the ways they crafted narratives that placed their local, idealised communities within the history of wider communities. The chapter looks in particular at the ways local historians discussed the historical topography of their regions and towns, the ways they dealt with non-Muslim and pre-Islamic history, and the master narratives they used to build their communities’ histories, in particular the ways in which those narratives differed from the ones often encountered in universal histories. One overarching argument of the book, brought to the fore in this chapter, is that local history-writing was, in the early Islamic centuries at least, not always as distinct from universal history-writing as we are sometimes led to think; and that where differences can be seen, they often concerned the conception of community and the role of elites as much as whether a given work covers the history of one region much more thoroughly than others.

A differentiable manifold, defined with the help of collections of charts, comes with basic notions of calculus before the introduction of the metric. We start with the definitions of vectors as directional derivatives and 1-forms via the natural dual pairing and build up general tensors from these two. Partial derivatives for functions extend to the Lie derivative, while a special subclass of tensors known as differential forms admits the so-called exterior derivative. We develop calculus based on these most basic structures, ending with the Stokes theorem. This sets the stage for the Riemannian geometry, given in two alternate forms in Chapters 4 and 5.