The items in this concert of 21 March were Mozart's Symphony no. 40 in G minor (K.550), two movements from Mendelssohn's oratorio Saint Paul, a concertino by Vogt for oboe and orchestra, played by Verroust, the ‘Dies irae’ from Cherubini's Requiem in C minor and Beethoven's Second Symphony.

Mozart's Symphony in G minor, as usual, gave the greatest pleasure, and the minuet was encored. The excerpts from Mendelssohn's oratorio Saint Paul were as yet unknown to me, and I’m at a loss to understand why there's been such a delay in bringing this fine work to Paris when England, Germany, and even some cities in regional France have given complete performances of it some time ago. Whatever the reason, the two extracts brought to us last Sunday are admirable compositions. The first chorus in E-flat, accompanied by a repeated pattern on the first violins, is couched in a calm and a purity that are truly angelic; if this is not religious music, then such a thing has never existed. The harmony is silky, the style of the melody, tender and suave, lends a further charm to the timbre of the cellos, and the incessant accompaniment of the first violins decorates the ensemble, without disturbing its gentle gravity. The form of the work is also highly distinguished: the orchestra and choir are not always combined, sometimes the orchestra is silent, allowing the voices to sing unaccompanied, and sometimes on the contrary it's the orchestra that's heard on its own. Then there are those effects of half-tint and pianissimo which only the greatest composers know how to obtain from such large forces. In a word, this choral work is, in my view, a true masterpiece, a product of inspiration and technique, beautiful, irreproachable, complete.

Irish traditional music is performed by people of all genders, ethnicities, sexualities, and abilities, but a quick perusal of a festival lineup, an array of CDs, or a few live instrumental music sessions would imply that the craft is primarily the preserve of white heterosexual cisgender men. This book will correct that error in perception. In any study of a contemporary music scene, readers deserve the authority of one whose status is that of long-time participant-observer. Joanne Cusack, a gifted performer on the button accordion and long-time participant in multiple Irish music scenes, has used her skills in observation, description, and analysis to understand the multiple approaches that women have taken to be heard and to connect with other musicians.

Women in Irish Traditional Music is very much of-the-moment in terms of its analysis. It does so with compelling, effective language that clearly grasps the specific policies and social mechanisms holding women in an uneasy in-between position regardless of their playing abilities or their status within the community. Everyone who has been to an instrumental music session has observed or experienced some of what Joanne Cusack describes, but few know the specifics of how the professional Irish traditional music world works from an educated insider viewpoint.

What sets this book apart from others is its focus on specific case studies concerning women, its direct engagement of the reader, and its refreshing look at some of the unique challenges faced by women.

Coastal policing – firmly focused on the idea of ‘prevention’ – was a set of institutions and actors designed to deal with contingencies, that is to say, incidences and potential events beyond the immediate grasp of central authorities, such as smuggling or military invasion. This, however, is not to say that these incidences were not to some extent directly or indirectly influenced by policies implemented by these same authorities. In terms of imperial policies (both within the British archipelago and beyond) and relative to the politics of warfare, many effects materially – though often unintentionally – interfered with regular arrangements of coastal policing. Trade politics and tariff systems directly affected Customs business in the ports of Ireland, Scotland and England. Underneath these fiscal concerns, these policies also impacted on the forms and patterns of Customs activity. Imperial trading routes, the channelling of goods by mercantilist policies, and the micro-logistics of their transport (both lawful and clandestine) and their warehousing affected both the spatial organization and the practical requirements of Customs policing and control in technical and procedural terms. This is also true for the repercussions of wartime arrangements throughout the period. Concerns over coastal defences in particular reordered government priorities vis-à-vis the coast to the disadvantage of the regular peacetime functions and arrangements of the Customs. At the same time, preventive officers became themselves part of the war machinery for the purposes of anti-espionage provisions, the works of the press gangs, or – in the case of the cruisers conscripted by the Admiralty – naval combat.

Graph bootstrap percolation is a discrete-time process capturing the spread of a virus on the edges of Kn. Given an initial set G ⊆ Kn of infected edges, the transmission of the virus is governed by a fixed graph H: in each round of the process, any edge e of Kn that is the last uninfected edge in a copy of H in Kn gets infected as well. Once infected, edges remain infected forever. The process was introduced by Bollobás in 1968 in the context of weak saturation and has since inspired a vast array of beautiful mathematics. The main focus of this survey is the extremal question of how long the infection process can last before stabilising. We give an exposition of our recent systematic study of this maximum running time and the inuence of the infection rule H. The topic turns out to possess a wide variety of interesting behaviour, with connections to additive, extremal, and probabilistic combinatorics. Along the way, we encounter a number of surprises and attractive open problems.

This chapter explores how Ngugi in his creative works draws on the Mau Mau war for content and inspiration not only because it affected him directly but also due to its symbolic significance in the pursuit of human dignity and the solidarity that it built among Kenyan communities. By looking back at the effects of colonialism and the experiences of the struggle for independence, the chapter argues, Ngugi tries to make sense of that past because he was a product of that violent history. The chapter explores what it has meant for Ngugi to write under the shadow of nationalism and to fictionalise the traumatic experiences of his childhood. In the process, the chapter shows how the narrative of Mau Mau recurs in the postcolonial period and how Ngugi’s understanding of nationalism changes over time even as the organising principles of land, freedom and justice have remained constant.

INTRODUCTION

This case arose in the parish of Bo’ness (Borrowstounness, formerly Kinneil). Much of it concerned healing rituals and prognosis. Janet Drysdale was a magical practitioner, described as a ‘wife’ who ‘could cure’ Janet Barclay's sick child. She used some conventional (if perhaps magical) rituals for this, notably involving south-running water, of which various details were given. She added a further dimension of magical beliefs with the ‘good nightbours’ – the fairies. These fairies were dangerous. Barclay's servant Katherine Currie ritually buried the sick child's shirt as Drysdale instructed, but heard ‘much speaking’ above her head, and afterwards became feverish with fear. Drysdale told another woman that Currie could have been ‘torn to pieces’, and added advice about the ‘blasting’ that had caused the child's illness. However, she said, the ‘speaking’ indicated that the child would recover – which he did.

But someone told the kirk session about the healing of Barclay's child with a ‘charme’ – a term that the church authorities often regarded as designating a superstitious practice or worse. The minister, John Brand, questioned Barclay, who in turn told him about Drysdale. This led to an elaborate enquiry. The minister and elders visited, summoned and questioned various servants and neighbours, and of course Drysdale herself, in order to piece together all the details of the story as thoroughly as they could. Then they referred the case up to the presbytery.

Neither the kirk session nor the presbytery used the word ‘witchcraft’. The one thing that makes Drysdale's case into a ‘witchcraft’ case is the presbytery’s reported recommendation at this point to ‘give her up to the magistrate’, evidently for criminal prosecution that must have been intended to be for witchcraft.

For Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the crises of post-independence Africa cannot be understood without an understanding of neo-colonialism as a political dynamic that sabotaged the freedom dreams of Africa and the Global South at large. This chapter reflects on neo-colonialism as a framework for understanding his insights on postcolonial African realities. I locate Ngugi’s views on neo-colonialism within the context of his dynamic intellectual biography, tracking the range of factors, agents, institutions and events that were instrumental in shaping his views of neo-colonialism and the postcolonial crises that haunt us – a core concern across his oeuvre. The first section of this chapter tracks the influences and trajectories of thought that shaped Ngugi’s views on the postcolonial context as a neo-colonial one. Section two turns to the imprint of postcolonial crises and neo-colonialism in Ngugi’s writing, noting the centrality of gender and the family in codifying his critique of postcolonial states as systems in the grip of neo-colonial control. The closing section underscores the continued relevance of Ngugi’s perspectives on neo-colonialism in making sense of contemporary postcolonial realities, through a brief exploration of the extractive impulse behind the romance of digital labour, as the latest iteration in neoliberal capital’s lengthy extractivist approach to African lifeworlds.

During this same half hour the countess was sitting at a desk at her balcony window, writing a letter to Fessler. She had taken her pen in hand a while ago, but the entrancing view before her caused her to set it back down again. High above the hillsides clad in vineyards and forests, silvery clouds were drifting, while in the valley below, the heat of the day had already settled in, growing more oppressive with every moment. A small pennant that marked the shooting range drooped from its flagpole and only stirred when there was a passing breeze. But suddenly came the sound of a single drum stroke, as if at random, and the countess, thus interrupted in her musings, took up her pen again and wrote:

Dear Friend,

There have been some changes to my existence here since last week, and since yesterday we have been living the high life. Egon Asperg arrived early in the morning and with him young Pejevics, who had been in England for several weeks for the racing, as you may know. I was heartily glad and resolved to spend a pleasant day with them, but would have failed in this, had I not been able to recruit as auxiliaries the two young ladies whom I mentioned to you recently. Two young actresses are naturally more interesting than an aunt of nearly seventy. And now more than ever. For those things which for us constitute life itself seem to have died out in the hearts of the current generation, more comprehensively than in the previous one. My brother treats them with mockery, at least; Count Egon, only with silence and indifference. But I am not accusing, only reporting.

The biblical encounter examined in this chapter takes place in littera, initiated by New Testament allusions, quotations, and exegesis, a rhetorical move that entails a certain conception of historical time unrolled through narrative. From Christian credos to anti-Jewish vitriol, that textual encounter resonates through characters, speech, and plot, and ultimately encompasses the unfinished work as a whole. By his unexpected insertion of religious matter into the territory occupied by the matter of Britain, Chrétien de Troyes effectively reimagines Arthurian romance as he invented it. I will argue that the particular character of Grail romances within the larger field of this most protean genre follows from that incongruous meeting of courtly and Christian discourses, combined for the first time in Le Conte du Graal (c. 1181–91), the last of Chrétien's five romances. The romancer's unsettling inclusion of religious issues within Arthurian narrative occurs during a period when biblical exegesis in both Christian and Jewish traditions takes a new turn, more focused on the Bible's literal and historical sense.

This chapter traces the process by which villages became cities and city-states, which grew in some places into larger-scale states and empires, with a focus on the social institutions and cultural norms that facilitated these developments, including hereditary dynasties, hierarchical families, and notions of ethnicity. Writing and other means of recording information were invented to serve the needs of people who lived close to one another in cities and states. Oral rituals of worship, healing, and celebration in which everyone participated grew into religions, philosophies, and branches of knowledge presided over by specialists, including Judaism and Confucian thought. Social differences became formalized in systems that divided enslaved and free, or that grouped people into castes or orders, distinctions that were maintained through marriage and cultural ideologies. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity were created and then expanded in the cosmopolitan worlds of classical empires, shaping family life and social practices.