Two main lines of argument have shaped the overall structure of the book.

According to the first, skills’ distinctive learnability, control, and flexibility accord them a central status in theory of intentional action, of intelligence, and of talents; such central status is evidence that skill is a natural kind. For social beings like us, skills’ distinctive flexibility makes for the possibility of cumulative culture, thereby accounting also for the collective dimension of our intelligence. All in all, skills afford us a unique perspective on both intelligence and intentional agency.

The earliest successful and sustained venture in the promulgation of a Western-style, liberal arts education in colonial India that continued into the postcolonial period, the Hindu College—established in 1817 and later renamed in 1855 as the Presidency College—is the subject of this book. The institution made extraordinary contributions to both education and public life. We examine critically the ideas that shaped the institutional imagination of this enterprise, its historical development, the multifarious challenges it faced along the way, and the ways that teachers and students experienced and memorialized the institution. We map the traffic of ideas that led to Presidency College's flourishing and the interventions and experiments that contributed to its distinct image as a “center for excellence” but without the neoliberal associations with which the expression is loaded in modern-day academic parlance. We also analyze the ways in which the college became the preeminent birthplace ground of a modern middle class and a harbinger of secular values in colonial and postcolonial Indian modernity.

Histories of educational institutions in the erstwhile colonized parts of the world are inevitably caught up in concerns about the implications of colonial modernity for their academic vision, functioning, and agenda. If earlier histories from the 1960s to 1970s critically addressed decisions of the colonial state in India favoring Orientalist or Anglicist policies in education and their fallout on the colonized, recent work has focused closely on individual educational institutions where these debates were played out.

The introduction traces the history of legal discrimination against women in the UK, from exclusion in university education and voting rights to the legal profession. Courts presumed sex-based distinctions as default, requiring parliamentary intervention for reforms including women’s suffrage, equal pay, and the protection of women from sex discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace. The Sex Discrimination Act 1975 prohibited discrimination while allowing exceptions for protection of women, including single-sex spaces. These legal developments operated on a tacit understanding of sex as biological sex, which can be distinguished from emerging concepts of gender as a system of social norms overlayed on biological sex and gender identity as an individuals internalised experience of these norms. The chapter then provides a descriptive overview of the Equality Act 2010 as a resource for readers unfamiliar with its structure and core principles.

In February 1924, Mamie Hodges of San Antonio, Texas, addressed a letter to the US Children’s Bureau. In the letter, she described an all too typical set of circumstances. Hodges was a young mother teetering on the brink of poverty. At the time she wrote to the Bureau, she and her husband had nearly paid off their home. However, a new discovery made Hodges fear for her family’s future: she was pregnant. Again.1

The WHO Laboratory Manual for the Examination and Processing of Human Sperm, sixth edition, introduces several important advancements over the previous edition, including an updated and comprehensive laboratory technical guide for performing semen analysis, recognition that the lower 5th percentile values of basic semen parameters are insufficient to distinguish fertile from infertile men, and the incorporation of advanced diagnostic tests such as sperm DNA fragmentation (SDF), oxidative stress (OS), and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) testing. These updates reflect significant progress in standardizing laboratory procedures and expanding the analytical scope of male fertility assessment. However, despite these strengths, the manual has some limitations which include absence of clinical guidelines to accompany the laboratory protocols, removal of reference limits, underrepresentation of the reference population, and lack of information from source studies. This gap leaves clinicians without practical direction on when to advise a test, interpreting test results and integrating them into patient management. Addressing these shortfalls would enhance the manual’s utility by bridging the divide between laboratory data and clinical decision making in the male infertility evaluation.

Post-mortem imaging is an indispensable tool in the investigation of suspicious childhood deaths, particularly for identifying fractures and intracranial hemorrhages. It offers significant logistical advantages over traditional autopsies, including cost-effectiveness and rapid image acquisition. However, its application requires close collaboration between radiologists, pathologists and forensic experts, and is rarely used as a standalone approach. This chapter delves into the role of post-mortem imaging, with a primary focus on post-mortem CT and some coverage of post-mortem MRI and novel techniques of micro-CT and linear slot scanning.

The chapter discusses key medicolegal considerations, imaging protocols, common findings and interpretation challenges and the importance of maintaining strict chain-of-custody protocols. As post-mortem imaging continues to gain traction, we underscore the need for standardized imaging protocols and enhanced support for multidisciplinary teams to safeguard the well-being of professionals conducting these sensitive examinations.