The town was in flames.

The narrow streets leading to the moat and the first terrace belched smoke and embers, flames devouring the densely clustered thatched houses and licking at the castle walls. From the west, from the harbour gate, the screams and clamour of vicious battle and the dull blows of a battering ram smashing against the walls grew ever louder. Their attackers had surrounded them unexpectedly, shattering the barricades which had been held by no more than a few soldiers, a handful of townsmen carrying halberds and some crossbowmen from the guild. Their horses, decked out in flowing black caparisons, flew over the barricades like spectres, their riders’ bright, glistening blades sowing death amongst the fleeing defenders.

Ciri felt the knight who carried her before him on his saddle abruptly spur his horse. She heard his cry. ‘Hold on’, he shouted. ‘Hold on!’

Other knights wearing the colours of Cintra overtook them, sparring, even in full flight, with the Nilfgaardians. Ciri caught a glimpse of the skirmish from the corner of her eye – the crazed swirl of blue-gold and black cloaks amidst the clash of steel, the clatter of blades against shields, the neighing of horses –

Shouts. No, not shouts. Screams.

A moat, narrow streets, densely clustered thatched houses, castle walls – already in the first two sentences of this extract we have the typical scenery of a medieval town with its castle and ditch appearing before our inner eye. The fire, the screams and the clamour of vicious battle, the battering ram smashing against the walls are linguistic signs which help us to create a pictorial representation of the scene: the capture of a stronghold by means of fighting. The vocabulary leaves no doubt about the question of where and when this is happening: sometime in the Middle Ages, in a European town or city by the sea or riverside.

The pencil sketch on the second page of this book, drawn by Joseph Mallord William Turner in 1808, pictures a sparse coastal scene. A dimly visible line of Martello towers in the background, stark white cliffs, the shoreline, and a tumultuous towering sky. In the foreground the broken hull of a boat, two figures toiling on the road, and two riders rapidly approaching. What is depicted here is in many ways typical of the southern English coastal scenery of the time. It is what Turner could have seen, and probably did see, on the coast near Bexhill not long after 1800. According to Stopford Brooke, one of its interpreters, the scene portrays “the human life and work and sorrow of the sea-shore”. The “two swift-riding men” are identified as officers of the Customs and the Martello towers form a vivid reminder of the Napoleonic threats of invasion during the wars that ended in 1815. To the English observer of the nineteenth century such as Brooke, the scene's deeper meaning is clear: “It is”, he claimed, in the “guardianship of England that the sentiment of the subject lies, and the central tower, all in light, fixes our feeling on this thought.” The storm, moreover, “defends England also, nor is the great chalk cliff without its aspect of defiance”. But if that is so, then wherein lies the sorrow of the sea-shore?

The seacoast occupies a near mythical place in English and British national identity. Incidentally, it also points to a profound contradiction at the heart of this identity. From Shakespeare's “rocky shore” that “beats back the envious siege” to Churchill's call to fighting on the beaches, the seacoast is a strong reference to British insularity.

‘The exciting thing about the renewal in the 20th century is that it is being achieved through the people’. So argued a lay writer in a mid-1970s issue of Goodnews, the English Catholic charismatic magazine. He asserted:

The Goodnews article echoed various Second Vatican Council utterances about the diversity and oneness of ministry in the Church, including Apostolicam Actuositatem, the ‘Decree of the Apostolate of the Laity’ (1965), with its description of the laity's ‘apostolate of evangelization and sanctification’. Identifying antecedents in the Liturgical Movement and Cursillo, the writer in Goodnews claimed such movements represented a profound shift in the recognition and empowerment of the laity in the Church.

This chapter reviews the recent history of quantitative easing and tightening in the US, focusing on the impact on financial markets.

The clocks in the nearby villages had just struck six when Egon and Franziska, accompanied only by Andras, rode off for Nagy-Vasar. To their right and left were fields and meadows; only occasionally did a copse of birches mixed with firs interrupt the plain that stretched down to the lake. They were half an hour away at most; they would arrive in good time for the seven o’clock boat, even if they rode at a walk.

But the very first grove to which they came made them pause. In the middle of the woods they thought they could see a fiery glow between the trees, and hear the sound of many different voices. A fight, it seemed.

“We have to go see what it is,” Egon called, quickly turning his horse aside as Andras and Franziska followed him through the white trunks of the birches. But they found nothing, and finally, after much searching, returned to the main road.

“I was really hoping,” said Egon, “that we would find another child to bring to Toldy, a foster child.”

“Which he very probably would have rejoiced at, in his happiness over his own child.”

“Yes, undoubtedly. For one of the many unexplained riddles of existence is where ordinary people, the so-called disinherited of society, derive their tender affections.”

“The same place as everyone else does, or ought to, I should think—from the heart.”

Berlioz had devoted part of a JD feuilleton (10 November1837) to the concerts given by Johann Strauss senior in Paris: ‘It's curious that the arrival of a German orchestra, whose pretentions barely extend beyond playing waltzes, should be a musical event of such great importance…The name Strauss was known to us thanks to the music publishers who have brought out his waltzes in their thousands, and to Musard who has played some of them, but that was all; and of the orchestra's precision, fire, intelligence, and rare feeling for rhythm, we had absolutely no idea’.

While the final rehearsals of La Fée aux roses were taking place at the Opéra- Comique in Paris, the city of Vienna was mourning one of its favourite artists. Strauss has just died. This melancholy organizer of balls, during which his orchestra would deliver such ardent melodies, such abundant joy, and sometimes also such outbursts of passion and tenderness that they brought tears to the eyes, has just laid down his pen and his bow. I am not one of those who say: ‘It's not important; it's just one waltz-monger less!’ I say it is important, because Strauss was an artist in every respect. Some of his rivals turn lovely operatic music into appalling dance music; he on the other hand wrote such charming things for his dance orchestra that they could have made the fortune of many an opera.

INTRODUCTION

The text edited below is the financial accounts for the trial and execution of a small group of witches in the town of Peebles in 1629. Expenses are listed for various officials in the local court, for the cost of obtaining a commission from the privy council, and for materials and labour costs for the pyre. The execution method may have been unusual. Other information enables us to identify the executed persons as Susanna Elphinstone, John Graham and (probably) Margaret Johnstone.

Serial witch-hunting in Peebles seems to have begun in October 1628, a time when panic over witchcraft was gathering pace in numerous Scottish localities. On the 21st, Marion Greig was suspected of witchcraft by the presbytery of Peebles. John Syd, minister of Newlands, and David Plenderleith, burgess of Peebles, stood surety for her that she would appear when summoned. This investigation evidently turned up the names of further suspects, since on 3 February 1629 the privy council issued a commission of justiciary to James Williamson, provost of Peebles, Alexander Muir and Patrick Thomson, bailies of Peebles, and four named lairds, to try Marion Greig, Isobel Rutherford alias Graham, and Katherine Young, for witchcraft. No record survives of their trial, but they may well have been tried and executed. The accounts edited below show that Isobel Graham, as she was then known, made a ‘confessioun aganes the rest of the wiches’ that was used in the later prosecutions.

The presbytery of Peebles then seems to have stepped up its involvement. In June 1629, we learn from the privy council records that the presbytery gave in a list of twenty-seven named people from at least six different parishes who were ‘vehementlie suspect’ for witchcraft. The presbytery seems to have conducted an extensive trawl for suspects.

The novel Das indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb), published in 1918 by the prolific author and screenwriter Thea von Harbou, was adapted into a film on three separate occasions: in 1921, directed by Joe May and co-written by von Harbou and her later spouse Fritz Lang; in 1938 by Richard Eichberg; and, for the last time, by Lang in 1959. The films not only document the Germans’ enduring fascination with India, but each version can also be read as a paradigmatic expression of German film history across three political epochs: the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, and finally, the still-young Federal Republic of Germany. Each version freely adapts the novel differently, with certain shifts in the constellations of characters, lovers, and conflicts, but the main story remains an escape thriller. While a rich bibliography exists on May's and Lang's film adaptations from the perspectives of film history, ideological criticism, and postcolonialism, Eichberg's version has received less scholarly attention. To fill this gap in current academic literature, this chapter focuses on Eichberg's adaptation of von Harbou's novel, providing a reading of its nuanced representations of India that sometimes go beyond the wellworn stereotypes of the country as a highly exoticized and Orientalized space of the German imagination.

Eichberg filmed the story in two parts, the first of which, Der Tiger von Eschnapur (The Tiger of Eschnapur), is a kind of prequel to the actual novel Das indische Grabmal, which constitutes the second part.

Berlioz habitually misspelled the name of Louis Niedermeyer (1809–65), pianist (a pupil of Moscheles), composer, and teacher of Swiss origin. He studied operatic techniques with Rossini in Naples, then settled in Paris in 1823. He was an important pioneer in the development of French song but was unsuccessful as an opera composer. He founded a ‘Society of Vocal and Religious Music’ in 1840 which came to be known as the Niedermeyer School, where Gabriel Fauré studied and Camille Saint-Saëns was a teacher.

Towards the end of last month, this remarkable work was performed in the church of Saint-Eustache through the efforts of the committee of the Association of Musical Artists. I am not to blame if I haven't had the occasion before now to speak about it and give the composer the justice he deserves. But the impression this religious work made on me was not one of those that fades after several days, and I think it is still sufficiently clear in my head for me to write about it without presumption.

I shall abstain totally from touching here on a question that's much in the mind of a small musical sect: a question answered by those followers of the unthinking schism which, on the pretext of making Catholic music, prefers to have religious services without any music at all. First of all, these musical Anabaptists didn't want violins in churches, because violins remind us of theatrical music (as if theatres don't also have voices and, in their orchestras, violas, cellos and contrabasses, etc.). After that, the stops of modern organs, in their opinion, are too varied, too expressive, too beautiful. Then they started to condemn melody, rhythm, and even modern tonality. The moderates among them still allow Palestrina; but the hardliners, the Balfour of Burleys of these new puritans, won't accept anything but unaccompanied plainsong.

This appendix provides information and texts on unofficial publications of prayers before and after the 1688–9 revolution in England, and on Jacobite special days of worship in Scotland during the rebellion of 1715–16.

Williamite prayers, 1688 (England)

The eighteenth-century historian Sir John Dalrymple observed that during the autumn of 1688 ‘the clergy of Holland and of Britain wearied heaven with their prayers … for the success, or the disappointment, of their different Princes’. As William of Orange gathered forces in the United Provinces for an armed intervention in England, James II's government published on 11 October a form of prayer for use in all parishes in England and Wales ‘during this time of publick apprehensions from the danger of invasion’ (see 1688–EIr3). This form contained three prayers, for repentance, for the king and for peace and unity, which as well as appealing for divine favour, were intended to anticipate and counteract Williamite propaganda. This Williamite propaganda developed on a considerable scale and included various printed prayers, as part of the effort to establish a religious as well as a political claim for the prince's cause.

The main Williamite statement, The declaration of his royal highnes William Henry, … prince of Orange, dated 10 October (n.s.: 30 September in the old style used in England) gave as his first reason for armed intervention the ‘preserving of the Protestant religion’. Some versions of this document contained ‘a praier for the present expedition’ (printed below as prayer A). Perhaps 60,000 copies of the declaration were printed in The Hague, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and dispatched to England.

Note from the author

This book is written already knowing the many positive and wonderful aspects of the tradition of Irish traditional music. Examples include but are not limited to: a sense of identity, belonging, and community; a space in which to meet new people and new friends – many of whom you perhaps would not have met without the common bond of music making; the unique performance opportunities that can come from participating in the scene, whether as a soloist or as part of an ensemble; and the many potential opportunities for collaboration and creativity with musicians from all genres. I have been fortunate to experience all of these positive aspects and am so grateful for the many friends I have met through participating in the scene and the unique experiences music has opened to me.

However, the aim of this book is not to discuss the many positive aspects of the tradition. While I have presented some alternative discussions and experiences to demonstrate different lived experiences of the scene and industry, the research has purposely focused on those who have been impacted negatively by the industry and scene at various points in their lives/career. In doing this, I have aimed to give those who have been most negatively impacted a platform because while the positive accounts of the commercial Irish traditional music industry and recreational scene are important and should be noted, they have become understood and normalised for years, creating an echo chamber that constantly disputes and minimises those who are pushed to the margins.

In this chapter, I will explore connections that have brought Ngugi and Gakaara together, especially in the use of Gĩkũyũ language in their writings. By talking about these two authors, the chapter acknowledges that their works contribute to the rich tapestry of Gĩkũyũ cultural expression and identity. Gakaara wa Wanjau has had a significant influence on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s writings, particularly in terms of shaping Ngugi’s perspectives on Gĩkũyũ language, culture and identity. Gakaara Wanjau was Ngugi’s predecessor in using the Gĩkũyũ language in his writings in both colonial and postcolonial Kenya and a publisher known for his advocacy of writing in African languages and promoting indigenous cultures. Having established these connections, the chapter then seeks to examine how Ngugi’s aesthetic ideology has evolved under a deliberate return to Gĩkũyũ orature and language, especially in his epic novel Mũrogi wa Kagogo. How has this newly found context shaped Ngugi’s ever changing poetics? Has Ngugi’s attempt to return to Agĩkũyũ oral traditions and language helped him to transcend imprisonment within the European realist genre? What does it mean to write in a mother tongue while living in exile?

Retrieving the forgotten evidence of the relationship between the Girondins, the sans-culottes and the short-lived sans-culotte ministry that took France to war on 20 April 1792 makes it possible to throw new light on the revolution of 10 August 1792. This was the revolution that led to the fall of the French monarchy, the end of the constitutional regime established in 1791 and the proclamation of the first French republic on 5 September 1792. It was also, as in 1789, a mixture of what was expected, but did not happen, and what was unexpected, but really did happen. The part that was expected, but did not happen, was encapsulated by Pétion’s muted ultimatum to the Legislative Assembly on 3 August 1792 with its evocation of Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 and its none-too-hidden message about how a determined legislature could dismiss a discredited king.

This book explores the complex socio-economic and power dynamics that entangled Yoruba migrants and their host communities in northern Nigeria and Ghana between 1900 and 1970. Centered on the cities of Tamale (Ghana) and Kano (Nigeria), it reveals how Yoruba migrants navigated internal and international migration through kinship networks and personal connections, engaging with their host societies and homeland in ways that both empowered and constrained them. Using ethnographic research methods and grounded in an identity politics theoretical framework, this work analyzes the evolution of Yoruba diaspora identities and examines how dual citizenship, once a source of empowerment during the colonial period, transformed into a paradoxical challenge in post-colonial contexts.

The adoption of diaspora identity as a postmodern social theory in this book elucidates the phenomenon of migration across colonial boundaries and highlights the Yoruba communities’ interactions with their homeland for mutual development. Many of the early twentieth-century migrants effectively “absconded” from home, driven by the pursuit of wealth, modernity, and liberation from patriarchal constraints. By the end of World War II, migration had become normalised, with the early pioneers serving as influential role models and esteemed figures in their hometowns. Subsequently, young men and women, fueled by their ambitions or familial encouragement, embarked on their own migration journeys. Numerous migrants completed this cycle, preparing themselves for eventual return and reintegration into their ancestral communities in Southwestern Nigeria.