This chapter looks at Lucian’s intervention on the genre of comic dialogue through a discussion of one of the Dialogues of the Gods. In the dialogue between Aphrodite and Selene, Lucian imagines a sexy conversation between Aphrodite and Selene. The story of Selene and Endymion is well known, but in antiquity is almost always told in the barest of forms. Lucian tries to fill in the gaps by having Selene tell Aphrodite about her affair, but leads the reader towards the moment of revelation of what Selene does with Endymion only to pull shut the curtain at the last moment. Through this narrative, Lucian plays with the tradition of myth, with the reader’s sense of knowledge and knowingness, and with the erotics of the visual – in a way that amusingly makes the reader complicit with the author’s satiric fun.

Contrary to some accounts, particularly older ones, which portray Clare as a lonely, isolated, and somewhat misanthropic figure, he was a man with a rich social life who had many friends, including literary figures, antiquarians, ornithologists, entomologists, botanists, and artists. Through these friendships, he was abreast of contemporary thought and techniques, and, if only at second hand, he was in touch with the activities of some of the leading naturalists in this country and abroad. This obviously led to an increased knowledge and sophistication in Clare’s understanding of nature, as well as leading to subtle changes in his attitude to the natural world. In particular, it meant that he no longer regarded a love of nature as something to be rather ashamed of, but instead as something which he was able to celebrate.

This chapter periodises the British historiography of international law in five parts. Its first period extends from Robert Ward’s Enquiry into the Foundation and History of the Law of Nations in Europe (1795) to Thomas Erskine Holland’s Oxford inaugural lecture on Alberico Gentili (1874), and traces the gradual professionalisation of the discipline and its historical strain. The second part examines the entanglement of empire and historicism in British international legal historiography from around 1870 to roughly 1920. The third part treats the symbolic coming of age of British international legal historiography, between the founding of the British Yearbook of International Law in 1920, and Hersch Lauterpacht’s pivotal enunciation of the so-called ‘Grotian’ tradition of international law after the Second World War. The fourth part explores the history of international law in the succeeding ‘age of Lauterpacht’ up to c. 1960, when historiographical advances came increasingly from the semi-periphery rather than the centre and from disciplines other than international law. The fifth part takes stock of the transdisciplinary ‘turn’ to the history of international law in the British world and the chapter concludes with reflections on the nascent field of comparative international legal history in the light of British developments over the longue durée.

Until about twenty-five years ago, economic historians (both those in economics departments and in history departments) had little to say about international law. There possible causes of this (beyond the possible insignificance of international law to the project of economic history) are likely the similar intellectual bases for economics and international law prior to the twentieth century, the lack of an accessible archival and intellectual base upon which to conduct the research, and the professional bias of academic historians against writing about events to close to the present. But as time as marched onward, the development of international economic law in the twentieth century has become of increasing interest to historians broadly interested in the history of international institutions and capitalism.

This chapter addresses the repeated appearances of the sublime in Clare’s verse – including his deployment of the word itself – as well as the ambivalent relationship Clare’s understanding and practice of the sublime has to eighteenth-century and Romantic aesthetic discourse. This entails consideration of major theorizations of the sublime in the period prior to Clare and the reception in the English tradition of classical conceptions of literary sublimity or ‘grandeur’. The example of Milton is significant here, as is the genre of epic and Clare’s apparent aversion to it. A number of examples from Clare’s poetry and prose are considered in detail. The chapter concludes with a reading of Clare’s famous ‘I am’ poems, suggesting that they do in fact continue the tradition of Milton’s Satan, his resistance to oppression, and ambivalent insistence on the power of the mind.

This chapter reviews progress in the field of artificial intelligence, and considers the special case of the android: a human-like robot that people would accept as similar to humans in how they perform and behave in society. An android as considered here does not have the purpose to deceive humans into believing that the android is a human. Instead, the android self-identifies as a non-human with its own integrity as a person. To make progress on android intelligence, artificial intelligence research needs to develop computer models of how people engage in relationships, how people explain their experience in terms of stories and how people reason about the things in life that are most significant and meaningful to them. A functional capacity for religious reasoning is important because the intelligent android needs to understand its role and its relationships with other persons. Religious reasoning is taken here not to mean matters of specific confessional faith and belief according to established doctrines but about the cognitive processes involved in negotiating significant values and relationships with tangible and intangible others.

Assessments of Lucian’s attitude towards philosophy have tended to focus on how much he really knew about philosophy, which school he preferred, and if his texts can be read as philosophy. This chapter argues that Lucian’s attitude is best understood as reflecting the central position philosophy occupied in imperial elite culture. As Lucian satirises elite paideia from within that same paideia, criticising imperial philosophy implied assuming a philosophical stance or appropriating philosophical concepts and vocabulary. Lucian explores themes that were current in philosophical discourse of the Roman Empire, such as the expectation of matching doctrine and deed, salaries for philosophical education, and ancient wisdom. Whilst he shows awareness of technical terminology, his writings are mostly concerned with protreptic and the question if one has to dedicate oneself fully to a philosophical life. His ubiquitous satire, even in works deemed ‘more serious’, does not permit firm conclusions about Lucian’s own ideas and solicits multiple interpretations on the part of the reader.

Clare’s declaration that he ‘found the poems in the fields, and only wrote them down’ is, to some extent, pretence; however quickly he might compose, he corrects and revises from very early on, before he gets any guidance from others. The more he writes, the more he confronts the inevitable problem of repetition: his solutions can be seen in the concentrated echoes and references back and forth between poems. The manuscripts in all their teeming detail demonstrate his determination to get things right. Once publication arrives he has to contend with the conflicting demands of editors, publishers, and supporters; there are vexed questions of taste and politics. As he moves towards The Shepherd’s Calendar, however keen his desire for independence, increasingly the process becomes collaborative. When his life is turned upside down with the move to Northborough in 1832, his deeply personal poems of loss are worked on with extraordinary intensity.

One of Isaiah’s most forceful messages concerns justice, and the sociopolitical conditions necessary to support it. In “The Ethical and Political Vision of Isaiah,” M. Daniel Carroll R. looks at the fundamental themes and vocabulary of the book’s moral vision and surveys approaches that seek to better understand the socioeconomic injustice and politics it condemns. These sins include the greed and malfeasance of governing elites in ancient Judahite society, systemic socioeconomic abuses of agricultural and trade systems, and decisions leading to catastrophic war. At the same time, this prophetic text looks forward to a messianic age of justice and peace under a Spirit-filled king/servant. In closing, Carroll R. looks at how Isaiah’s ethical messages have been received (and resisted) in the pursuit of justice, peace, and ecology.

Attending to the multitude of temporal markers found in Clare’s poetry, this essay argues that his representation of time and his thematic and stylistic experimentation with temporality demonstrate his pivotal place in the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century labouring-class poetry. Finding, having, and protecting time to write – asserting writing as an activity (whether conceived of as ‘work’ or as a pastime) for which one could have or take the time – was fundamental for Clare, his predecessors, and successors, to publish at all. Examining the burgeoning awareness of what E. P. Thompson has named ‘work-time discipline’, the essay traces how awareness and time anxiety impacts artistic self-fashioning for poets such as Robert Dodsley, Mary Leapor, James Woodhouse, and Robert Bloomfield among others. However, Clare’s work remains an important point of transition for understanding how plebeian poets shaped their artistic identities within increasingly constraining notions of work.

The book of Isaiah reflects many of the population movements that took place in the period of its formation. Much biblical scholarship focuses on “the (Babylonian) Exile,” but as C. L. Crouch points out in “Isaiah and Migration,” mass population movements were carried out in the sphere of Israel and Judah by the Assyrians long before the Babylonians overthrew Jerusalem. She also calls attention to the migrations experienced by other nations, and to forces of displacement other than deportation, such as warfare, famine, and natural disasters. She analyzes the literary reception of these numerous involuntary migrations, and the ways in which the prophet and his audiences made sense of them.