Manjushree Thapa's The Tutor of History (2001), set in post-1990s Nepal, portrays characters pursuing romantic and economic desires amid democratic and market reforms. This chapter examines desire, choice, and action in Thapa's novel to explore how democracy challenges traditional power structures and empowers women. Thapa's novel presents a democratic ethos that extends beyond formal institutions to everyday experience. By examining how democratic practices shape the experiences of gendered “others,” I argue that the novel envisions women as active citizens shaping a more equitable society.

The Tutor of History follows an election in a small Nepali town and a courtship between Binita, a widow who runs a teashop while caring for her daughter and cousin, and Rishi, a history teacher and communist activist. The romance links the election campaign with domesticity, connecting democratic practices to private life and public opinion to private desires. The characters hope that democracy's transformative potential will challenge entrenched power structures, empower marginalized women, and foster inclusive development. Desire in the novel erupts from “the gaps in history” that fail to remember marginalized others (Thapa 2001: 57). When Binita and Rishi express their amorous desire for each other, their romantic desire presents them with an opportunity to start a new life that is free from the oppressions brought to a widowed woman by the past, tradition, and orthodoxy. The novel imagines women as full citizens in a democracy where universal suffrage allows them to dream of and choose new ways of living. Desire, choice, and action thus become tools for political and personal transformation. The novel envisions a democracy where individuals can pursue their desires without coercion from the state or institutions tied to gender, caste, and class.

This chapter explores how victimhood identities threaten liberal democracies from within. It identifies three atypical forms: (1) dominant group self-victimisation, (2) enduring intergenerational victimhood narratives and (3) victimhood culture within the progressive left. Existing research often overlooks these phenomena, focusing instead on genuine victims of oppression. Using the lens of ressentiment, we distinguish ressentimentful victimhood – driven by moral superiority, resentment and peer validation – from paradigmatic victimhood, grounded in empathy and solidarity. We argue that neoliberal socio-economic and ideological conditions nurture ressentiment, making victimhood identities attractive. Ressentimentful victimhood manifests as disruption of empathy, moral elitism, rumination, competition, collective narcissism and the inability to forgive, reinforcing self-pity and moral hypermnesia. In contrast, paradigmatic victimhood fosters inclusive identities, empathy towards others and democratic reintegration through restorative justice. By distinguishing these types, we present ressentimentful victimhood as a destabilising moral stance that erodes democratic solidarity while distinguishing it from paradigmatic forms that sustain social cohesion.

Which of the following statements is true regarding monoclonal B-cell lymphocytosis (MBL)?

It is proposed that spirituality and psychiatry, commonly held to be separate concerns, are in fact deeply entangled and inseparable. Meaning-making, an important concern of spirituality, is important to human well-being and needs to be taken more seriously by psychiatry. The damage done by historical antagonisms between psychiatry and religion needs to be undone by affirmation of spiritual concerns within psychiatric practice and by closer partnerships between psychiatry and faith communities. Professional boundaries need to be understood not as protecting psychiatry as secular space (which many religious patients find hostile to their spiritual concerns) but as protecting safe therapeutic space within which psychological recovery and spiritual growth may occur. Psychiatrists need to develop an interest in clinical theology, as a way of understanding the ordinary theological concerns of patients (including their ‘atheologies’). Psychiatry needs to be more spiritually attentive – to shed light on what patients desire spiritually and psychologically – rather than focussing only on the metaphorical shadows of psychopathology. Psychiatry needs to keep spirituality in mind.

In the present book, we are interested in studying composition operators

This chapter analyses the relationship between loneliness and antagonistic political emotions. Loneliness is commonly defined as a painful experience resulting from a discrepancy between desired and actual relationships. Philosophical literature highlights its impact on self-perception, agency and possibilities for connection, yet its political dimensions remain largely overlooked. To address this gap, I examine the case of a lone-actor terrorist whose loneliness motivates a search for meaning within a radicalised community. In this context, loneliness combines with emotions such as vengeful anger and envy. This raises key philosophical questions: How should loneliness be understood? Can it count as a political emotion on its own or only when coupled with other affective states? How does loneliness interact with antagonistic emotions? I call hostile loneliness the affective state in which loneliness conditions the emergence of aggressive and oppositional emotions. These emotions enable lonely individuals to reclaim agency and pursue radical social and political change. They become fully political when taken up collectively and expressed by a community.

The excerpts mentioned above are part of a debate, which took place in 1984–1985, on the arguable failure of political parties and the emergence of groups referred to as non-party political formations. Defending the emergence of these groups, Sethi argues that the formation of such groups was necessitated because political parties had been ‘side-tracking the issues of direct concern to the people’. In contrast, Karat, on behalf of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI[M]), argued that non-party groups played into an ‘imperialist strategy’ and were anti-left.

Against the backdrop of the existing scholarship on masculinities, this chapter examines iterations of masculinity in South Asian literature, particularly in literature from Nepal. As such, the chapter analyzes Yogesh Raj's 2018 Madan Puraskār winning novel, Rahahār (Defeat at War), and Laxmi Prasad Devkota's poem “Pāgal,” or “Crazy,” published in 1953. The choice of these two literary works is partly subjective, and partly because they not only fit the topic of hegemonic masculinity and its other seamlessly, but there is scant scholarship on these works that is available to a wider audience. Even though Raj's novel revolves around the Kathmandu Valley of the eighteenth century and showcases social and gender dynamics during that time frame, the novel also demonstrates a continuum of masculinity at work, and not just orthodox or primitive masculinity as one would assume given the story's timeline. While the Gorkhali forces of King Prithivi Narayan Shah embody aspects of primitive or orthodox masculinity, King Ranajit Malla of Bhaktapur not only practices heterodox masculinity, but he also comes close to what some critics call “cacodoxy,” that is, an iteration of masculinity that overlaps with elements of femininity. As the ironic title of the novel suggests, King Ranajit practices supple forms of masculinity during his long reign of the Bhaktapur city-state, and, after his defeat at the hands of the Gorkhali, he accepts his position of a defeated king, begging the victor to grant him one last wish, namely to go to Kanshi, the present-day city of Varanasi in India.

The sonnet has been in wide use among African American poets since the late nineteenth century. This chapter traces the African American sonnet from its emergence through the Harlem Renaissance in order to understand the popularity of a form often associated with white European literature. It shows that the sonnet initially was a means for Black writers to get published in the genteel quality magazines which shaped literary and political debates around the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, the sonnet served as a vehicle for community building and as a forum in which foundational questions of Black poetics could be negotiated. Discussing writers from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, the chapter identifies four impulses that guided African American approaches to the sonnet form: the contests over the commemoration of the Civil War; the subversive appropriation of genteel poetic conventions; the self-confident political protest of the Harlem Renaissance; and the quest for a vernacular modernist idiom.

The chapter tells the spellbinding story of the 1954 World Cup final, the first major showdown in football’s Cold War and one of the greatest shocks in World Cup history, as West Germany beat Hungary 3–2 in the Miracle of Bern. The Magical Magyars, captained by Ferenc Puskás, were red-hot favourites, having gone four years unbeaten. They took an early two-goal lead, then succumbed to the West Germans in controversial circumstances. The result played a pivotal role in strengthening that great anchor of Western power in Cold War Europe, the Federal Republic of Germany. And it destabilised communist Hungary, prompting riots on the streets and planting the seeds for the 1956 Revolution. The chapter takes in Hungary’s famous 6–3 drubbing of England at Wembley in November 1953, which put communist football on the map. It provides colourful portraits of coaches and players like Puskás, Gustáv Sebes, Sepp Herberger and Fritz Walter. It explains how the Hungarians revolutionised world football but got things wrong in the final, reveals the part the Magical Magyars played in Hungary’s 1956 Revolution and outlines the Miracle of Bern’s enduring impact on German football culture.

The contemporary proliferation of ‘reimagining’ as a cultural practice has evolved from a largely personal or artistic pursuit into a broader societal and technological phenomenon. A diverse range of actors – artists, political actors, corporations, advocacy organizations, and minority communities – now routinely engage in the reworking of popular works, symbols, and culturally significant designs. Against the backdrop of the shift from a linear economic model toward a circular economy, this chapter contends that a substantive recalibration of IP law is required. It argues that reimagining practices should be protected from excessive control by IP rights-holders through both legislative and judicial intervention. In doing so, the chapter contributes to ongoing debates concerning the appropriate equilibrium between exclusive IP rights and the fundamental right to freedom of expression.