I consider the complete retranslation of Thomas Mann's fifty-eight Deutsche Hörer! radio addresses (1940 to 1945; fifty-nine if we include the “Address to Americans of German Descent”)––undertaken by three experts in comparative literature from California State University, Long Beach, Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts––to be a matter of particular urgency in our present international political and societal crisis. Perhaps the most important question regards what attention this translation will attract in the United States today: this plea, ultimately more humanistic than political, from a German author who had emigrated to the USA to his former countrymen who had stayed at home in the Nazi Reich.

Will the significance of the new translations be limited to fresh research projects by a few literary scholars, or perhaps to the interest of a handful of private Thomas Mann admirers? I do not think so. No doubt, the grave social and political wounds that the United States in particular has suffered in the course of recent decades, both in terms of foreign and domestic policy, cannot be compared in any way with the utter moral collapse that was the Nazi empire, which is the subject of Thomas Mann's speeches. But our nation––I was after all born in and am a citizen of the United States––which has fallen into a lamentable, strife-torn, and imperiled state, faces an extremely unsettled and precarious future.

INTRODUCTION

In Shetland, 31 persons were accused of witchcraft during the period 1602–1725: 23 women and eight men. The percentage of accused men in Shetland was 26 per cent, which is higher than for Scotland in general, and also higher than for Orkney. In the group of men, six were accused early, during the period 1602–16. Then there was a long pause until Magnus Laurenson was accused in 1674. Some of the records of his pre-trial investigation are preserved. The interrogators were all major landowners: Gilbert Neven of Windhouse, a justice of the peace; Robert Hunter of Lunna, chamberlain of Shetland; John Mitchell of Berrie, a collector of excise; and John Forrester, another chamberlain. The document below is their petition demanding that Laurenson should be tried. There is however no record of a formal trial for him.

Most of the witchcraft trials in Shetland deal with traditional witchcraft, maleficium, causing human illness and death or animal illness and death. In the earliest witchcraft trials in Shetland, neither the Devil nor the Devil’s pact are mentioned. There was a change in 1616, when new and learned demonological ideas came to the fore in a triple trial. A range of demonological ideas were confessed, all known from cases on the Scottish mainland: the Devil's pact, the Devil's mark, the Devil's child, a promise from the Devil, and sex with the Devil. However, in Shetland such notions did not last for a long time. Ideas related to demonology did not get a foothold there.

Magnus Laurenson is mentioned twice in court records, first in 1674 – a year when there were no other witchcraft trials in Shetland – and again in 1677. He lived in Gonfirth, in the north-west of Mainland, and was a practising healer.

The presence of a specific ‘proto-melodramatic’ culture prior to the arrival of melodrama in German-speaking countries should invite us to reconsider the argument according to which the Benda model brought to perfection Rousseau's rudimentary integration of music, while its poetic aspect remained specifically exemplary of the Sturm und Drang. Certainly, the rhetorical treatment of these librettos was in tune with the Sturm und Drang, but solely ascribing it to this German trend is only half of the answer. The expansion of the French style entrecoupé into the Sturm und Drang drama, allowing for a unique combination of pantomime, declamation, and music, was also a consequence of the theatrical culture that had developed around Lessing in Hamburg in the 1760s. In Goethe's Clavigo (1774), the hero's desperate final monologue applies a rhetoric that can be described as melodramatic, its many interjections interwoven with musical ritornelli: ‘Marie! Marie! Take me with you! Take me with you! Grim music is heard from inside. They are starting to walk to the tomb! – Stop! Stop! Don't close the casket! Let me see her one last time! […] The music continues. She's calling! I’m coming! – What fear grips me! What trembling holds me back! The music starts up for the third time and continues.’2 These outbursts and short sentences create a stylised texture for the fragmentary, the incomplete, powerfully triggering the Darstellung.

This poetics of incompletion was dictated by a conception of declamation in which the myth of immediacy, of the spontaneity of inspiration, could be fully acted out.

This chapter discusses the Paleolithic and Neolithic, thus covering the vast majority of human history. It examines the more complex social structures and cultural forms that plant and animal domestication enabled, as the simple stone hand axes of the Paleolithic were replaced by more specialized tools, small kin groups gave way to ever larger villages, egalitarian foragers became stratified by gender distinctions and divisions of wealth and power, and spirits were transformed into hierarchies of divinities worshipped at permanent human-built structures. The basic social pattern set in early agricultural societies—with most people farming the land and a small elite who lived off their labor—was remarkably resilient, lasting well into the twentieth century for most of the world.

This chapter seeks to examine intellectual streams that have shaped Ngugi’s poetics and what such contexts mean for Ngugi’s radical poetics. Is there a linear relationship and how has Ngugi shaped radical poetics on the continent when it comes to issues such the language of publishing and the decolonisation project? It argues that some of the shifts in Ngugi’s aesthetic and political ideology are linked to Ngugi’s tenure at Leeds University. His exposure to the works of Marx and Fanon and the influence of a group of African scholars at Leeds, and exposure to the radical scholar Arnold Kettle, marked a major shift in Ngugi’s aesthetic and ideological practices. Reading Fanon, in particular, must have transformed Ngugi’s views on a number of issues, ranging from violence for liberation to the nature of neo-colonialism. Fanon’s ideas on the nature and role of the national bourgeoisie, and his notion of the ‘native poet’ as the custodian of national culture, find echoes in Ngugi’s fiction and essays.

This first French performance of the tragedy with Mendelssohn's incidental music was on 21 May. As this is a play, not an opera, the characters spoke their lines, sometimes accompanied by the orchestra; the music is almost entirely for double chorus and orchestra.

It was an excellent occasion, whose literary value I leave to a more expert pen than mine to assess. I will allow myself merely to say that I was, like all the artists in the audience, profoundly moved by the powerful ideas of this Shakespeare of antiquity. I found it beautiful, noble, and touching and wept as much as is permitted without making oneself ridiculous. I applauded Bocage and Mlle Bourbier with all my might, as well as Mendelssohn's music, the choir, and the innovative, imposing stage production. Certainly the director of the Odéon, by giving new life to Sophocles, has done our culture a favour by demonstrating, by way of this famous example, that those men of today gifted with dramatic genius have simply been following the path of the classical playwrights in portraying nature and truth. This upsets certain people, it's true, who had different views about Sophocles and who now find him as vulgar as Shakespeare because he uses the right words. But why worry? Most audiences these days are quite happy that Tiresias should talk of ‘dogs’ and ‘crows’, and that when Creon learns of Eurydice's death he responds simply ‘O my poor wife!’, instead of following classical practice, as janitors do, with ‘O my unfortunate spouse!’

What shocks most people over this production is the intervention by the chorus, singing in response to the actors’ dialogues.

The writings of Caesarius (470–542), bishop of Arles from 502 and papal vicar for Gaul from 514, had a powerful influence on Anglo-Saxon thought and literature, both English and Latin, Insular and Continental. To mention just some of the best-known examples, a long sequence of phrases from his Sermo 18 on good works is incorporated into the chapter on converting to God in Alcuin's De virtutibus et vitiis. The chilling ‘dry bones speak’ exemplum in his Sermo 31, based on an ancient memento mori distich inscribed on Roman tombs (‘What thou art now, famous in the world, traveller, I have been, and what I am now, thou shalt be’) was adapted by the authors of at least six Old English homilies. His Sermo 33 was the very first text of any kind to articulate a clear distinc tion between voluntary charitable almsgiving (elemosina) and divinely mandated regular tithing (decimae), a distinction that had a far-reaching impact on tithing legislation, including the English law code known as I Athelstan. His denunciation of those who give heed to omens or who seek out sorcerers, soothsayers and fortune-tellers, as expressed in his Sermo 54, is quoted by Boniface in a letter to Pope Zacharias dated 742 and is translated by Ælfric in his sermon On Auguries. The dramatic Doomsday address of Christ to sinners before they are cast into hell in his Sermo 57, an address now often referred to as Christ's Ego te, homo speech, is repurposed in at least six Old English homilies and in the Exeter Book poem Christ III.

Berlioz was fairly unusual among European composers of the time in finding the English in general musical, well organized, and willing to pay for their enjoyment. He might have been pleased had he been able to read a passage in Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847) describing a ballad sung by his anti-heroine Becky Sharp: it is ‘not, be it said, very brilliant, in a musical point of view, but contains numberless good-natured, simple appeals to the affections, which people understood better than the milk-and-water lagrime, sospiri, and felicità of the eternal Donizettian music with which we are favoured nowadays’. This article begins with a review of the first appearance of the tenor Claude Marié de l’Isle, omitted here.

The revival of Fernand Cortez, which in any case would have caused a stir quite apart from the strange legal incident that it provoked, drew a large, attentive audience to the Opéra, curious to test the persistence of its onetime admiration. If the composer could have heard, after the second act, the explosion of bravos that filled the hall and the exclamations of praise that were heard in the corridors, in the public foyer, in the wings, in the dressingrooms of the singers and chorus, in the orchestra, and everywhere, I doubt he would have persisted in his opposition. M. Spontini may be assured (I am at least profoundly convinced of this) that the Opéra's administration may perhaps have staged this revival at rather short notice, but also out of total loyalty and with a sincere desire to promote its success.

For the distribution of a count to be close to a Poisson distribution, the events that are counted should typically be almost independent of one another. When counting the number of copies of a small subgraph in a network, it is often the case that the presence of one copy makes it much more likely that other copies share some of the same edges. If this is so, there is a tendency for the copies to occur in clumps. It may well be that the number of clumps has an approximately Poisson distribution, but that the number of copies has a distribution more like that of a sum of a Poisson number of independent random variables, a compound Poisson distribution. Approximation by compound Poisson distributions can also be quantified using Stein’s method. In this chapter, a Stein equation is derived, together with a general estimate of error that is based on it. A local approach is then developed and illustrated using the number of `triangle and whisker’ graphs in the Bernoulli random graph. Another natural question is to address the joint distribution of the counts of a number of different subgraphs in a network. This can be tackled using Stein’s method for Poisson process approximation. The local and coupling approaches to Poisson process approximation are presented and are used in the multivariate context to approximate the joint distribution of short cycles in the Bernoulli random graph.

The structure to be expected in the immediate neighbourhood of a given vertex, in many of the most widely used models of networks, can be matched to that of a suitably chosen branching process. An example of the geometric growth typical of a branching process is furnished by the early stages of the spread of an epidemic disease, as evidenced in the COVID-19 pandemic. The Bernoulli random graph, in turn, can be interpreted as being formally equivalent to the well-established Reed–Frost epidemic model, and the growth of an epidemic more generally can be related to the underlying network of contacts between individuals. In this chapter, branching processes in discrete time are introduced, and their basic properties established. For the Bienaymé–Galton–Watson’ process, moment formulae, the criticality theorem, the distribution of the total population size (in the sub-critical and critical cases) and the asymptotically geometric growth (in the super-critical case) are addressed. In the multitype analogue of the Bienaymé–Galton–Watson’ process, the convergence of the type distribution in the super-critical case is also presented.

The concert at the Conservatoire on 22 April 1838 was the ninth and last of the season. It also included, among other items, excerpts from Méhul's operas Joseph and Le jeune Henri, movements from Beethoven's Septet, and a scene from Mozart's Idomeneo. The short final passage dealing with these is omitted here.

The performance was of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony [no. 3]. The first movement filled me with inexpressible admiration. A feeling of deep, one might say ‘antique’, sadness was dominant throughout, and I have never better understood or admired the grandeur and power of music. On the other hand, when the last chord had sounded and this audience, which passes for the best educated and most responsive of all Paris audiences, seemed to have been so little affected by such an outpouring of nobility, of melancholy, of sublime fury, of grace and pride, I could not help but weep for the unhappiness of the composer who, afire with such enthusiasm, could not make himself understood, even by an elite audience, to the point of elevating them to the heights of his inspiration. It was all the sadder because this same audience, on other occasions, comes alight, their hearts beating and weeping with him. They exhibit true, lively passion for some of his other compositions which, it's true, are equally admirable but not more beautiful than this one: they appreciate the true value of the A minor Adagio of the Seventh Symphony [sic: it is an Allegretto], the Allegretto scherzando of the Eighth, the finale of the Fifth and the scherzo of the Ninth; they even seemed deeply moved by the funeral march of the one mentioned here [the Eroica]; but as for the first movement, it's impossible to be mistaken.

Ngugi wa Thiongo’s third novel, A Grain of Wheat (1967), is a significant text in his novelistic oeuvre in that it is different to what he wrote both before and after it. A Grain of Wheat can be read as an affective pause in which both past and present have a resonance, but the novel also does something altogether different in creating an archive of feeling around the moment of Uhuru. This cultural pause leading up to Uhuru allows Ngugi to trace the trajectories of the past in the present, and the present into the future, through utilising motifs of betrayal, collective imaginary, reconciliation and sacrifice, for instance, which will eventually become permanent features of both the national archive and his later novels. Ngugi reflects the notion of futurity in reading the national archive of Uhuru as harbouring a nascent anti-foundational discourse marked by the very betrayals and redemptions that this novel surfaces through the affective economies of political struggle. The ideological trajectory in Ngugi’s later works can be traced to his depiction of Uhuru at this time with its attendant ambivalences, betrayals and redemptions. In effect, this novel can be read as forming a foundational context to Ngugi’s post-independence imaginative archive.

A week later, they were once again settled in the old Petofy mansion, and on the very next day, the count received a note delivered by Andras, the intermediary between the two wings, in which Judith briefly stated that she had spoken with Franziska. Franziska had not seemed greatly surprised, or at least had been completely calm, and was now awaiting his visit.

It was eleven o’clock when the note came into his hands, and before an hour had passed, he was on his way to Salesiner Street. Life on the fashionable Ringstrasse felt even more carefree than usual today, and as he went from the Old Town into the adjoining district, the building itself, standing there in the midday sunshine, seemed to betoken only happiness and joy.

Upstairs he met Hannah, who, with some slight embarrassment, invited him in. The young lady was at rehearsal; but she would be back very soon.

The room into which Hannah led him was the same one in which Franziska had tried to describe the countess's cercle intime, after that first gathering. There was nothing of the boudoir about it, nothing of that atmosphere of Russian patchouli generally associated with the living arrangements of young actresses. Rather, there was a typically North German simplicity and order and a cleanliness that might have come from Holland itself. On the table by the sofa was a marble bowl with vine leaves and strawberries in it and, next to that, a jewelry stand, left there as if by chance, or perhaps in haste, as if its owner had spent too long getting dressed.

The relationship between land-holding magnates and urban communities in England and Normandy was always fraught but never more so than during war time. Fortified urban centers were key strategic objectives, vital to the projection of military force and the defense of territory, but rulers could not always rely on the citizens’ loyalty as they could with their own garrisons. This essay will analyze incidents when urban communities shifted their loyalty during war time and helped attackers to gain access to their fortifications, often in opposition to the garrison of their own citadel, and the motivations that chroniclers ascribed to them. This will reveal the complex political relationships that existed between rulers and urban citizens and how communities in key strategic locations, such as the Franco-Norman frontier, tried to exploit conflicts between polities for their own gain.

European medieval society had a particular horror of treachery. Famously, the lowest circle of hell in Dante's Inferno is reserved for traitors, where Satan's three mouths chew forever on the bodies of Judas Iscariot, Brutus and Cassius. In a culture structured around the bonds of mutual obligation between lord and vassal, master and servant, king and subject, the person who violated that bond was the most heinous criminal, guilty of attacking the fabric of society itself. Moreover, as these bonds were often confirmed with a religious oath or vow, the traitor offended both the earthly and divine order. Treachery was not just criminal, it was sacrilegious.