Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800) was a pioneering writer, literary critic, businesswoman and salon hostess. Her vast correspondence with leading politicians, intellectuals, writers and artists spans nearly the whole of the eighteenth century and represents an important historical corpus for literary and historical scholars.

Montagu was prolific in her letter writing. From her teens until her eighties, she dedicated some hours every day to composing letters, be they virtual essays about literature and the arts to British intellectuals, business letters to the stewards of her estates and architects of her mansions, or personal letters to her extended family. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a limited selection of her letters was published, but they were heavily edited and censored, and at times inaccurately transcribed. Until now, most scholarship on the Bluestockings has had to rely on these unsatisfactory sources.

The surviving letters are scattered through a variety of archives, with the vast majority in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, which holds 6,923 documentary items, including letters from Montagu's correspondents. There are hundreds more Montagu letters in the British Library, the Bodleian Library, and in UK and US universities. To date, EMCO has identified twenty-five libraries and special collections that hold letters by Elizabeth Montagu, as well as letters in private collections. This makes it difficult for researchers to access the complete collection.

The concert on 7 February included Haydn's Symphony no. 102, two choruses from Handel's Samson and Alexander's Feast, and two arias from Rinaldo and Scipione sung by Pauline Viardot, who also sang an aria from [Mozart’s] Così fan tutte. It ended with Prosper Dérivis and the chorus in the excerpt from [Gluck’s] Iphigénie en Tauride.

Hunters know how distressing and irritating it is to walk on ploughed land in pouring rain, when you’ve already gone twenty miles, when your game bag and your stomach are empty after you’ve had the stupidity to miss a deer; and when water has seeped into your gun barrel, the dogs insist, despite this concatenation of daunting circumstances, on finding the scent of any number of game. You come and go, up to your knees in mud, stumbling with every movement. But a dog has stopped dead, you must keep going; a hare breaks cover, you fire, the gun jams! The rain falls even more heavily! And not a tree to shelter you, not a drop of brandy to warm you up; the flask broke when you fell in the last ditch! And you think of the jokes waiting for you when you get back: ‘Some hunter! He covered thirty miles on foot and brought back a chaffinch!’ etc., etc.

Well, all that's nothing compared with the trouble critics have with various concert notices, the most positive and instant result of which is to upset everybody. You have to say something about a work, new or old, about a singer or an instrumentalist.

Here, in the first two paragraphs of a much longer review, is Berlioz once more campaigning for composers’ rights … for which a useful German word is ‘Werktreue’.

Let's climb the Capitol and give thanks to the gods! A great event took place in the first part of this concert. It was a veritable proclamation of principle; someone had the nerve to recognize that performers owe fidelity and respect to the great masters; that it is not their job, as interpreters, to alter and distort the original offered for their interpretation. Finally, to sum up, here was the brutal frankness of confessing this awkward but unarguable fact: there is no conductor, violinist, flautist, horn player, nor even a drummer, capable of giving Beethoven lessons in orchestration. Maybe one day it’ll happen: but for the moment this precious teacher is nowhere to be found.

Indeed, let the future decide, for better or worse! Let's go for it! ‘Fortune favours the brave!’ Whoever risks nothing has nothing! After all, the public won't eat us: LET's PLAY THE FIFTH SYMPHONY WITHOUT CORRECTIONS; let's keep the contrabasses at the start of the Scherzo; be prepared! It's twenty-two years they’ve been kept on the leash, those wretched contrabasses; twenty-two years during which the Société des concerts of the Paris Conservatoire have been giving Europe the fine example of enlightened support to the glory of poor Beethoven, who had used basses there to such poor effect and what's more, impossible to play. But now, let's see what that’ll produce, let's light the fuse of this bomb.

At Makerere University creative writing was used as a compensation for the shortcomings in its curriculum, a consequence of its liberal Englishness and the Great Tradition. Although curricular reforms and the travel of its alumni to the University of Leeds awakened them to the limitations of the school, the overall outcome was not as radical as the Nairobi Revolution, which called for the abolition of the English Department, even with Ngugi the Makerere alumnus and the Nairobi Revolution leader as an active participant. Although Ngugi was in many ways a product of liberal humanism and the English-language syllabus, he was, as early as the 1962 Conference of African Writers at Makerere, alert to the absence of African languages writers at the conference, and that was in spite of the fact that his participation was on the strength of his writing and publication in Penpoint, the Makerere school magazine. The staging of Ngugi’s The Black Hermit at the National Theatre in 1962 and David Cook’s founding of the ‘Makerere Free Traveling Theatre’ marked the initial fissures within the tightly controlled liberal Englishness and the Great Tradition at the Makerere school, that would lead to the name change and curriculum transformation similar to that of Nairobi before it.

Before Drab there was Winters. In the 1930s, Yvor Winters (1900–68) was Stanford's most famous English professor. A poet and critic, Winters was married to Janet Lewis, whose novel The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941) was partly based on a false conviction that was overturned after Winters wrote a pamphlet about the case, a murder on the Stanford campus. “Poetry,” famously, “makes nothing happen,” but poets do, sometimes. Winters was also a moralist. His favorite Wordsworth poem, one of his colleagues told me, was not “Daffodils” or “Tintern Abbey,” but “Ode to Duty.” He was friends, for a time, with Hart Crane, but the friendship foundered because Winters didn't think that Crane was taking his social responsibility, as a poet, seriously. It's almost unimaginable today, but in 1939 Winters persuaded Chicago's Poetry magazine, where he had multiple contacts, to publish a three-part essay, “The 16th Century Lyric in English.” It argued that the best poets of the 1500s were not, in fact, Sidney and Spenser – whose charms are “obvious” though “often superficial” – but the school of poets that C. S. Lewis would later label Drab: Barnabe Googe, George Turberville and, soaring over them all like an eagle, George Gascoigne, whose masterpiece, “Gascoigne's Woodmanship,” Winters pronounced “unsurpassed in the century except by a few of the sonnets of Shakespeare.”

Now “Gascoigne's Woodmanship” is a fine poem, a fine poem. But if you had told undergraduate me that Tudor poetry had nothing better to offer than “Gascoigne's Woodmanship,” I would have closed my eyes and thought of Milton.

The sixteenth-century copies of the Espill vary in appearance and use. Some are in near perfect condition, such as BITECA copid 1546 (Valencia, 1561), which is currently housed at the Biblioteca de la Casa Ducal de Alba in Madrid, and bears no signs of readers’ annotations, as if it had sat untouched in the Biblioteca's collection for a long time. Many copies exhibit sparse to modest signs of wear and use, while others are extremely worn, such as BITECA copid 3249 (Valencia, 1531), held at the Arxiu Municipal de Castelló de la Plana, which presents wormholes and readers’ notes. Copid 1546 is marked by opulent, modernist binding in red leather. It is decorated with gold leaf and preserved in a rigid red box, while copid 3249 is bound simply in flexible parchment without ornamentation, except for the book's author and title on the spine, “Roig Llibre de les dones.” Previous owners of the ornate copid 1546 include an anonymous person in 1753 and two others, as indicated by three ex-libris: “Do fr[…] M[…]o[…] 1753,” “Vincencius Borras” (Vicentius Borras?), and the intellectual Vicente Castañeda Alcover (b. 1884–d. 1958), who held a doctorate in law, was a member of the Real Academia de la Historia, and hailed from a family with roots in Valencia, among other biographical details.

This succinct entry for October 1, 1853, in Robert Schumann's Haushaltbuch (his household diary) marks the beginning of one of the most celebrated friendships in music history. Its outlines can be found in every book on either Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann or Johannes Brahms, and it has acquired an almost mythic quality. Brahms was twenty and a complete unknown when he turned up on 30 September 1853 more or less unannounced at the Düsseldorf doorstep of the famous composer and his equally famous pianist wife. They weren't in, so he came back the next day, played for them, enchanted them (hence “a genius”), and Robert shortly afterwards announced the arrival of the “young eaglet” to the world in a front-page essay in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. This article alone could justifiably claim to be the best-known text on music from the mid-19th century. Less than five months later, however, Robert's mental health collapsed. He was placed in an asylum and prevented from seeing his wife again until shortly before his death, two years afterward. Brahms meanwhile rushed back to Düsseldorf to help Clara through the trauma of her husband's incarceration. He fell in love with her and poured his passion into his First Piano Concerto.

The Chung–Lu network model is a multiplicative vertex weighted model, analogous to the Erdős–Rényi mixture model, in which the weights of the vertices may take arbitrary positive values. If the weights are restricted to being drawn from a fixed, finite set, the model is precisely equivalent to an Erdős–Rényi mixture model. Having arbitrary choices of weights allows rather general distributions for the number of neighbours of a vertex. In the Bernoulli random graph, this distribution is constrained to being close to Poisson, and, in particular, cannot have long tails, which makes unlikely that occasional vertices have very large numbers of neighbours, as is often observed in practice. The generality of the possible choices of weights makes the arguments more difficult than for Bernoulli models, since the approximation of the neighbourhoods is no longer as accurate. Despite this, it is possible to match the distribution of local neighbourhoods to those of a suitably chosen branching process, to prove a threshold theorem for the existence of a giant component and a subgraph threshold theorem for the numbers of small subgraphs, and to approximate the distribution of the shortest path length between two vertices having particular weights.

What did King Charles the Great or ‘Charlemagne’ (768–814) think of English kings? As his vassals, if we go by his extant letters to the most powerful among them, Offa of Mercia (757–96). In one letter, he asks Offa to have a priest escorted back to his bishop in Ireland. In the other, probably written in early April 796, he alludes to a past ‘foedus’ [treaty] and acknowledges that he is at last replying to the ‘epistolis quae diversis siquidem temporibus per missorum vestrorum manus nobis delatae sunt’ [letters which have been brought to us at various times by the hands of your messengers]. Answering Offa's questions on trade, he reveals here that he has sent some exiles to safety in Rome. Finally, speaking like a king to his margrave, Charlemagne announces that, from treasures recently given him by Lord Jesus (from his victory in Pannonia), he has sent dalmatics and palls to churches in Mercia and Northumbria, and to Offa ‘unum balteum et unum gladium Huniscum et dua pallia sirica’ [a belt, a Hunnish sword, and two silk cloaks]. In return, he asks Offa to organise regular prayers ‘pro nobis nostrisque fidelibus, immo et pro cuncto populo christiano’ [for us and our faithful servants, indeed for all the people of Christ]. Thereafter he calls him the doughtiest patriot and most devout defender of the faith.

No other correspondence with English kings survives from Charles, king of France and patrician of Lombardy and Rome and later crowned emperor in St Peter's on Christmas Day 800.

There is a rich history of domino tilings in two dimensions. Through a variety of techniques, we can answer questions such as: how many tilings are there of a given region, or what does the space of all tilings look like? These questions and their answers become significantly more difficult in dimension three and above. Despite this curse of dimensionality, there have been exciting recent advances in the theory. Here we briefly review foundational results of two-dimensional domino tilings and highlight where challenges arise when generalizing to higher dimensions. We then survey results in higher dimensional domino tilings, focusing on the question of connectivity of the space of tilings, and the open problems that still remain.