Brahms's return to Vienna coincided with the first Viennese visit of Robert von Hornstein (1833–1890), a Swabian-born composer whose one-act operetta Die Pagen von Versailles (The pages of Versailles) was given its premiere at the city's Carltheater on October 13, 1863. In his memoirs, Hornstein discusses at length the many pleasant interactions he had during this visit with Vienna's leading musical figures. He spent a good deal of time in particular in the company of the music critic Eduard Hanslick and his friends. It is probable, therefore, that Brahms, who was already on Du-terms with Hanslick, was among those who made Hornstein's acquaintance.

What is beyond doubt is that Brahms would have been familiar with Hanslick's high regard for the visitor's music. In his review of the first performance of Die Pagen von Versailles, the critic wrote:

We were interested in this new work because not long ago we were convinced by this composer's songbooks that a pleasing, popular talent has appeared here, which is as if it were made for the badly neglected field of the light-hearted Singspiel. The first three of Hornstein's [four] Soldatenlieder, op. 28—“Hans Ziethen” [no. 2], “Seidlitz” [no. 1] and “Grenadierlied” [no. 3]— astounded us with their simple popular power, which is so seldom encountered in our days of refined and over-refined composition.

This chapter examines how key issues in the design and implementation of UK QE were addressed not by the Monetary Policy Committee but by the executive managers of the Bank of England. It also discusses accountability for the probably huge budgetary costs of the QE programme.

According to McAuliffe, “The ‘hard graft’ of feminist activism continued into the twenty-first century, where new challenges arose and old unfinished battles continued”. Access and the right to safe abortion, equal representation in politics and positions of decision making, same-sex marriage, and action to combat male violence, sexism, racism, and discrimination are all examples of continued battles in twenty-first-century Irish society. To prohibit discrimination in the provision of goods, services, accommodation, and education, The Equal Status Acts were enacted from 2000–2018. In terms of significant political milestones, in the same year Mary McAleese began her second term as Uachtarán na hÉireann in 2004, Mary Coughlan became the first woman to become Minister for Agriculture, demonstrating changing attitudes towards women in an otherwise very traditional field. Four years later, during the start of a major economic recession and depression in 2008, Mary Coughlan went on to become Ireland's second female Tánaiste, succeeding Mary Harney, who was first elected in 1997.2 In 2010, the “50/50” campaign was launched to help change the demographic of Dáil Éireann. And, before President Mary McAleese finished her second term in office, she welcomed Queen Elizabeth II on her first ever state visit to Ireland in May 2011. This was a defining moment in Irish history, evidencing significant sociocultural and political progress since the enactment of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

This chapter mediates on the creation and afterlives of enslaved and formerly enslaved people’s emotional testimonies. Engaging with debates over archival silences, this chapter argues that power has entered the production of knowledge relating to US slavery, limiting access to sources that emphasise enslaved people’s complex emotional lives. Revealing how racist attitudes shaped the creation and evaluation of the Works Progress Administration interviews produced by Black interviewers, this chapter also notes that these sources were archived as part of a white institutional project at the Library of Congress. In contrast, Lorenzo Dow Turner’s interviews, papers and photographs, which emphasise the complex emotional legacy of slavery, are scattered across various archives, limiting historians’ access to the emotional narrative portrayed within them. Despite the silences in relation to slavery and emotion, this chapter argues that the archive is still rich for researching enslaved people’s emotional lives if we privilege Black source producers, explore smaller repositories, use sound and image archives, utilise imaginative methodologies, and recognise and utilise our own emotions in our research.

When the count had risen and taken cordial leave of her, Franziska walked from the sofa to the window. The fresh air flowing in did her good, and she sat on the sill and looked at the goings-on in the street. But images of a far different kind passed before her mind's eye: a castle and a lake, broad steps and corridors, hunting parties, forest and plains, and fine gentlemen with their ladies, who were whispering and laughing discreetly. They looked each other up and down, and she met their haughtiness with an equally haughty gaze of her own.

She was still lost in such visions when Hannah approached from the doorway. She smoothed Franziska's hair back with a familiar gesture, and then said, “So: it's going to happen.”

“Were you listening?”

“No. I never listen. My late father wouldn't tolerate it and said that of all the minor sins, that was one of the worst. If you’re not meant to hear something, then you ought not to hear it, and you shouldn't wish to. I saw the count as he was leaving and could tell from his face.”

“And what do you say to it?”

“Well, Franzl, what should I say?”

“Everything that you’re thinking.”

“I think all kinds of things.”

“Don't hold anything back. I can see that you don't approve—so you can start right in with the ‘why.’ Or are there so many reasons?”

“Yes, Franzl, there are many reasons.”

This chapter explores Ngugi wa Thiong’ o’s literary responses to detention and exile, focusing on the Devil on the Cross (1982) and Wrestling with the Devil (2018). Ngugi articulates his experiences of dislocation and ideological resistance, denouncing oppression and oppressors in explicit ways. The chapter argues that Ngugi’s adoption of allegorical aesthetics and memoir forms is a direct response to the dislocating effects of detention and exile. Physical confinement and psychological anguish often lead writers to adopt pre-set aesthetics and rigid literary forms. Despite the formulaic nature of allegory and the memoir, Ngugi subverts them to articulate a specific ideological vision for a transformed Kenyan society. The memoir and the allegorical novel testify to intellectual resistance against his detractors, and his determination to create despite adversity. Devil on the Cross, conceived and written in prison, exemplifies the allegorical turn, inhabiting and defying his unjust incarceration. Ngugi’s experiences in detention and exile predict the writing he would produce during this period, blurring the lines between physical and psychological confinement. By exploring the intersection of politics, literature and personal experience, this chapter sheds light on Ngugi’s unique literary trajectory and the ways in which adversity can shape artistic expression.

It is difficult today to imagine the impact of the medieval religious landscape on city life. Whether you were pious or not, in medieval Bristol, you were surrounded by religious spaces wherever you went. The Map of Medieval Bristol only features a few of the city's religious institutions. From chapels to parish churches, from hospitals to sprawling compounds like St. Augustine's Abbey, monastic offices and masses were sung and bells rung all over the city many times every day. By the later Middle Ages, you yourself likely attended mass each week, and may have informally spent even more time in parish churches, as they functioned as community spaces in which a wide range of business might be transacted. Each of these religious spaces required a number of books simply to function, and most of them contained a more diverse and specialised collection than minimum needs demanded. While early medieval monks were charged with copying many kinds of text, these most fundamental books, the bible and books of the mass, were highest priority.

Moreover, these were texts that stood the test of time, and individual books could be used and reused for centuries. Yet, this same enduring utility meant that sometimes mass books were used so frequently that they required repair, replacing, and even more occasionally, updating with new liturgical feasts or practices. When chapels and altars multiplied in the late Middle Ages, each of these needed to be fitted out with its own complement of books. Whereas earlier in the Middle Ages, monks copied most books, production secularised in the later Middle Ages, and there was enough demand that some commercial scribes and artists even specialised in religious volumes.

Adolphe Nourrit had taken his own life on 8 March by jumping out of his hotel window in Naples. Despite his successful showing in Bellini's Norma in that city, there were criticisms that his voice was not loud enough, which he took very much to heart; and he was in some despair at having been eclipsed by Gilbert Duprez in major roles at the Paris Opéra.

The sad death of Adolphe Nourrit has filled our whole artistic world with grief and shock, and it's the third catastrophe of this kind we have had to mourn in the last few years. But if the deaths of Louis Robert and Antoine Gros were tragic examples of the power imagination can exercise on unbalanced, unworldly minds, the suicide of our celebrated singer has shown also how the noblest and most legitimate pride can prove fatal when it has developed and grown without any outward sign, until the moment when the shield that was protecting it is removed.^# Nourrit embarked on his career without encountering any of the difficulties of initiation which have proved daunting and persistent for so many others. He was to know them, however; but too late, when his soul had lost the moral strength to resist them and to emerge from them sharper and stronger. Sadly, he was well aware of the dangers of his mentality, leading to a struggle the outcome of which could be predicted in advance. An unbalanced person who recognises his lack of balance accentuates it by thinking about it. Once he learns that he's liable to feel fear, he fears the fear, and at the first storm reason deserts him.

By 1849, Berlioz had turned his long-standing proclivity for sarcasm into a fine art, again at the expense of the ‘Droit des pauvres’ and its collector: the poortax levied on income, not only profits, payable by organizers of entertainments including concerts (see also article 34).

‘Why do people go on making instruments?’ you will ask. – Because we’re still teaching musicians in Conservatoires and elsewhere. – But why, you will add, do we persist in teaching music to these poor wretches? – Good Lord, because the habit has been around a long time, because certain music venues still keep their doors open, because a small number of people are determined not to abandon the pleasure they get from music, and still indulge more or less in this excellent art. No doubt the time will come when these eccentrics will be quite rare in France, when all the opera houses will be shut, when Conservatoires no longer exist, and when those musicians who haven't died of hunger will have taken up a useful trade. But the time for this triumph of positive ideas over the empty dreams of poetry and art has not yet arrived; nothing is as tenacious as ancient habits. In any case Athens, Babylon, and Memphis were not demolished in a day. Everything takes time.

Besides, the Opéra is already closed and, if one is to believe the general rumour, its future doesn't look rosy even if it gets to open this winter. We don't know whether the Théâtre-Italien will manage to put on some operas.

Two birth and death processes in continuous time are used in the book. The first is the Yule process, the pure birth process with constant per capita birth rate. The distribution of the number of individuals at any given time is derived, and its asymptotically exponential growth, together with the convergence of the age distribution, are also established. The process is used in the analysis of shortest path lengths in small world processes. The second process is the immigration–death process with constant immigration rate and constant per capita death rate, for which the distribution of the number of individuals at any given time and its distance in total variation from its equilibrium Poisson distribution are investigated. Multitype generalizations are also introduced, in which individuals may have any one of a number of different types. These processes are of purely technical interest and are used in deriving properties of the solutions to the Stein equations associated with the Poisson distribution and its generalizations.

A week later, the church having attributed his violent death to an attack of melancholia, the funeral was in the Augustinian Church, and the Petofy coat of arms stood at the head of the catafalque, which was draped in a black velvet pall with a silver cross. Sitting in a semi-circle around the altar were his next of kin, and more distant mourners from the Asperg and Gundolskirchen families, while the entire nave of the church was agleam with uniforms. With them, a multitude of people. For the departed had at all times practiced works of mercy and had been a Christian in his deeds, however much his words might have denied it. Many people, of course, had come just out of curiosity and related in whispers what they had heard about his death: he had been leaning back in his desk chair, with no signs of outward injury at first glance, or indeed of what had happened, for he died of internal bleeding. There was speculation, too, about what had led to his death: that it had to do with a newly vacant post at court, which in earlier days had always been the preserve of the Petofys. But the emperor had been against it, either because of the young countess, or, even now, because of ‘49 and the revolution. And the old count couldn't get over that. Such was the conversation. Everyone fell silent, though, at the moment when Father Fessler appeared before the altar, and with his characteristic dignity, almost like some prince of the church, began the celebration of the funeral mass. The responsories rang out, and the candles in the crape-wound candleholders burned darker than usual, in the cloud of incense that enveloped them.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s encounters with the works of Caribbean intellectuals – C.L.R. James, George Lamming and Frantz Fanon – helped him crystallize global blackness around the nexus between race and geography vis à vis politics of domination and resistance. Emerging from Ngugi’s encounter with Caribbean life and thought were his pronouncements on the mismatch between aspiration and deprivation of the postcolonial, post-plantation/post-slavery Caribbean inhabitants. Their experiences, variously and collectively, signalled to Ngugi the importance of language as a cultural currency with which the formerly enslaved and/or colonised people could assert their being in and of the world, and negotiate their place in discursive praxes that had for long defaulted to European languages as the most appropriate vehicles of expression. These processes played out against the backdrop of painful histories, which had raptured the Caribbean islanders’ and some Africans’ attachment to cultures, economics and geographies, due to slavery and colonial violence. Ngugi’s encounter with Caribbean history and culture through the creative and critical works of James, Lamming and Fanon rendered the Caribbean a nucleus that Ngugi germinated and nurtured to expound on his earlier thoughts in subsequent collections of essays and memoirs that amplified his concerns with ‘decolonising the mind’ and ‘moving the centre’.