We returned to Japan in the summer of 2013, me now back at pre-cancer weight, and the girls with Birmingham accents. This chapter brings the narrative to a close.

Chapter 2 turns to the evidence of royal diplomas produced by the kings of Mercia and Wessex during the reigns of Æthelwulf, Berhtwulf and Burgred. With Æthelwulf’s diplomas, we find the earliest clear evidence for centralised production of diplomas for an Anglo-Saxon king. It is in this centralised West Saxon context, furthermore, that Old English boundary clauses are likely to have been established as a royal diplomatic feature. Contemporary Mercian diplomas lack evidence for comparable production processes. Novelty nevertheless is apparent: with a royal diploma in Old English, and in the literary flair of diplomas issued for the community at Breedon-on-the-Hill. Overall, the continued importance of the Latin charter tradition for both Mercian and West Saxon kings is clear, yet there was space for experimentation, innovation and reflection on the qualities and potencies that specific languages could carry. Moreover, people were increasingly interested in the performative potential of charter production, as an opportunity for ritual action that would generate and reaffirm authority for participants.

Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) is a psychiatric condition marked by severe symptoms in the premenstrual phase, including affective, cognitive and physical changes. It is triggered by fluctuations in allopregnanolone, a metabolite of progesterone that acts as a GABA-A receptor modulator. Diagnosis relies on prospective symptom tracking across menstrual cycles. Although suicidality is not part of the diagnostic criteria, an association with PMDD has been observed. The evidence base for managing premenstrual disorders includes lifestyle changes, certain supplements, cognitive behavioural therapy, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, combined hormonal contraception and gonadotrophin-releasing hormone analogues. Surgical removal of the ovaries may benefit individuals with severe, treatment-resistant PMDD. Evidence around premenstrual exacerbation or cyclical changes in other mental disorders remains sparse. However, encouraging individuals to track their cycles and identify symptom patterns can support personalised care planning. Menstruation per se can be a challenge to certain populations and disentangling this from psychological response to hormonal changes is key.

It’s not often that football friendlies signal war – especially between allies. The game in London between Arsenal and Dynamo Moscow, part of a tour of Britain by the Soviets in November 1945, was meant to celebrate the recent victory over Nazism. But things went badly wrong. Arsenal cheated by fielding ringers like England’s ‘wizard winger’ Stanley Matthews. The game started violently – and got worse. The thick London fog didn’t help, confusing the players and making it virtually impossible for officials and spectators to see the action. After Dynamo’s 4–3 thrilling victory, both sides accused each other of bringing football into disrepute. George Orwell bemoaned the ‘orgies of hatred’ engendered by such encounters, coining his famous phrase that international sport was ‘war minus the shooting’. This chapter investigates football’s role in helping trigger the Cold War in the mid- to late-1940s. It details Dynamo Moscow’s fractious, often comical tour of Britain in the autumn of 1945. It paints a picture of two cultures on collision course, despite the spectators’ amazement at the Soviets’ revolutionary style of play and the visitors’ enthusiasm for British football culture.

After finishing Sons and Lovers Lawrence wrote a ‘Foreword’ in which he tried, in an elusive, oracular mode, to clarify, for his own and Edward Garnett’s benefit, the broader cultural, almost cosmological directions that he understood the novel to have pinpointed. This document initiated a series of remarkable philosophical excursuses on Lawrence’s part in the 1910s responding at first to Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche, and, after mid-1914, the Italian Futurists. In these essays the cosmological would be wrestled into commerce with the everyday. The space thereby opened up for fiction gave Lawrence the opportunity to render the inner movements of deep and unacknowledged urges rather than externally dramatising them in the clear air of realism. His stories of mid-1913, ‘The Prussian Officer’ and ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’, as well as earlier ones revised in mid-1914 for the Prussian Officer collection, demonstrate the development. A performative habit of pushing emotions and states of being to clarifying end-points emerged, nowhere more compellingly than in the revised versions of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ and ‘Daughters of the Vicar’.

The aim of this chapter is twofold: we first give a full description of those weights β = (βn)n≥0 such that the composition operators Cϕ are bounded on the weighted Hardy space H2(β) for all symbols ϕ (analytic self-maps of D).

This introduction examines the central role of antagonistic political emotions in contemporary politics, challenging traditional assumptions about what makes emotions antagonistic. While emotions like anger, hatred and contempt are typically viewed as paradigmatically antagonistic, this volume demonstrates how seemingly positive emotions of allegiance – such as admiration and pride – can function antagonistically, and how non-hostile emotions like loneliness and doubt can drive political polarisation. We argue that antagonistic political emotions operate dialectically, placing us simultaneously for, against and together. Drawing on insights from political philosophy, social psychology and emotion theory, the introduction structures the edited volume into five key themes: (i) emotional politics and political emotions, (ii) hostile antagonistic political emotions, (iii) complicating antagonistic narratives, (iv) unmasking antagonism and (v) spaces of antagonism.

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.

Chapter 3 centres on case selection and methodological considerations. The discussion opens up with a brief analysis that details how the MENA is understudied from both a climate and gender representation perspective, before moving on to a discussion of why it is important to study representation and climate change in authoritarian settings, i.e., not only in the MENA, but broadly speaking. The discussion in the first part of the chapter also covers the status of the MENA as a so-called ‘climate change hot-spot’. A considerable section of the case selection rationale in chapter 3 is dedicated to the study of gender and climate change within the MENA, which illustrates how the MENA case aligns with studies elsewhere in the Global South, i.e., focusing on women at the micro level and their vulnerability. The final (second) part of the chapter goes into detail with the methodology after briefly outlining the approaches favoured in the extant academic literature, coving both qualitative and quantitative methods.