This chapter speaks of Sancho’s meaning to me as a Black Briton. It is also about his general place in the pantheon of Black British figures. I write about belonging and Sancho because it is at the heart of the reason to study a life such as his. Knowing about this Black Briton and his eighteenth-century world can impact on Black lives lived in the UK today. Sancho’s legacy is his engagement with the world of his time and the mirror of that engagement in ours. Artistic, political, and domestic history is interwoven with personal views on a figure who made his compromises and his accommodations in a world not designed for him or people like him. My chapter seeks to unearth a little talked about and less known subject, which is Britain’s deep and exceptionally involved participation in the human trafficking of millions of Black people from the continent of Africa. I conclude with highlighting the positive, contemporary manifestations of interest in Sancho and his world.

This chapter provides an examination of the documentary evidence for Charles Ignatius Sancho’s life and career as a servant in the household of the Dukes of Montagu. It is based on archive sources, with particular focus on the archive of the Duke of Buccleuch and the papers of his ancestors, John 2nd Duke of Montagu (1690–1749) and George Duke of Montagu (1712–1790).

Pindar’s epinician odes feature narrations of mythical events and references to the realm of myth. There has been a long-standing controversy about how to understand the function of myth within, and its relevance to, these songs, with regard to both their semantic coherence and their relation to festal contexts. Starting from general observations and a brief survey of the main narrations, this chapter explores how Pindar’s use of myth can be conceived as contributing to the praise of the victor, the primary aim of the epinician genre. This investigation focuses on direct comparisons between victors and mythical figures, the victor’s genealogy and place of origin, aetiological references to the past, depictions of the mindset of heroes, metaphorical parallelisms between past and present with regard to both the victory and the odes’ performance, and the intertextual dimension. These uses of myth operate less by directly equating agonistic present and mythical past and more by implying a parallel through indirect means, in either case with the aim of situating, and thereby giving meaning to, the agonistic victory within, and often as the pinnacle of, the history of human civilization.

Using tools from translation studies, this chapter seeks to analyse translations of Pindar in both systematic and historical terms. Metre is chosen as an ordering principle because it allows for an easier classification and understanding of various translation strategies that have been deployed (Holmes’ distinction between ‘analogical’, ‘mimetic’, and ‘organic’ strategies for translating metre turns out to be particularly useful here). But the detailed discussion of select translations – by Cowley, Hölderlin, Boeckh, Tycho Mommsen, and a host of more modern translators – automatically leads to other translatorial challenges posed by this poet, (in)famous since antiquity for his grandeur, variety, and difficulty.

The chapter examines some of the multiple and intriguing ways in which Pindar configures and shapes experiences of time, in an attempt to provide a sketch of what we could call ‘Pindaric temporality’. The discussion revolves around the principal temporalities that feature in Pindar’s epinician corpus (human, divine, Hyperborean), laying particular emphasis on their interrelationship and Pindar’s ‘obsession’ with, and positive portrayal of, time. Even though the focus of the chapter is mainly on the victory odes, it also touches on the distinctive temporality of his cult songs.

Pindar is perhaps the most metapoetic of the early Greek poets: his songs constantly refer self-referentially back to their own circumstances, poetics, and the social relationships that they dramatize and exemplify. This chapter examines some typical tropes used by Pindar and (to a lesser extent) other Greek choral poets to reflect on what they as poets and their poems as songs are doing. More broadly, it looks at the metapoetics and implied poetics of early Greek choral song as reflected and systematized in Pindar’s victory odes. The nature of song; the internal form of the poem; the poetics of genre; and the social relationships between poet, audience, and patron that underlie praise poetry are all given brief consideration.

This chapter considers the comic dimensions of Sancho’s correspondence. Sancho’s humor draws on British national culture to interrogate divisions within the community and to prompt readers to notice lines separating insiders from outsiders. Sancho uses farce to create internal tiers of closeness within his group of affiliates, parody to forge pathways for bonding with strangers, and satire to criticize society while also promoting recognition of commonalities.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It dis

This chapter looks at English in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan – at first sight countries at the periphery of World Englishes research and theory, given the size of their populations, their economic weight, and the impact their varieties and uses of English have had on others. It traces the histories and the present-day sociolinguistic situation of English in the five countries, of which only South Sudan and Uganda share a colonial past of British control. The current chapter also provides an outline of the similarities across and differences between their Englishes and discusses how continuing regional migration and influence from exogenous varieties of English have contributed to their shape and whether Uganda and Ugandan English play an epicentral role in the region.

This chapter traces the alignment between the Victorian novel, the articulation of geological, or “deep” time, and the emergence of the Anthropocene. The Victorian era is usually understood in terms of “uniformitarian” geology, in which Earth changes slowly and gradually, an understanding that has also informed understandings of the novel in the period. By contrast, this chapter unearths a latent “catastrophism” in Victorian fiction, examining geological events and underground spaces that reconfigure the conditions of possibility in works by Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, and Thomas Hardy.