The Starehe Boys’ Centre and School in Nairobi is an undoubted success story of charitable aid and development. It was founded in 1959 by Geoffrey Griffin, a former soldier with the King’s African Rifles who declined to renew his commission so disillusioned was he with the abuses perpetrated by the British forces during the Mau Mau Emergency. It has gone on to become one of Kenya’s most successful schools. Its pupils, who might otherwise have failed to receive anything but the most rudimentary education, have assumed leading positions in business, politics, medicine and higher education. Yet the purpose of charitable humanitarianism was to provide assistance to ultimately self-sustaining initiatives. At Starehe, charity was the ends as well as the means of humanitarian intervention. British charities continued to back it until the 1990s when it set up its own charity to ensure donations kept flowing. Starehe therefore serves as a case study for the more general phenomenon of how charity obtained an unintended permanent presence in development work in Africa.

This manifesto emphasises the need to move beyond traditional, siloed approaches to education and embrace transdisciplinarity, particularly in the context of the rapidly changing modern world. Transdisciplinary is about collaborating across the sciences and arts, and including the diverse voices beyond the academic, including those of children and families. The manifesto argues that this can help us move beyond simply preparing for a predicted future and instead enable us to actively shape it together. It explores the concept of transdisciplinary creativities, arguing that knowledge and understanding are not limited to language and traditional academic disciplines and that embodied experiences and engaging multiple senses are crucial for effective learning. This approach challenges the separation between humans and the natural world, recognising the interconnectedness of all things, and proposes that education becomes a process of ‘making-with’, where humans and non-humans engage in collaborative knowledge production.

This chapter takes up the complex and fluid topic of gender in relation to Arthurian romance. It explores the intersections of gender with chivalry, emotion and agency in the twelfth-century romances of Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France and their fourteenth-century English reworkings; the gendered treatment of desire, constraint and identity in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale; and finally the formative role of gender across Arthur’s reign in Malory’s Morte Darthur. Engagement with gender roles, emotional experience and the place and predicament of women is built into Arthurian romance from its inception, reflecting courtly interests in the nuances of behaviour and feeling. Medieval Arthurian romances repeatedly treat women as wielding profound power, including through unorthodox means of magic, but they also address the constraints of gender roles for women. Malory’s Morte Darthur illuminates the crucial part played by gender in the narrative of the rise and fall of Arthur’s kingdom, and the conflict between heterosexual and homosocial relations.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

World-gothic as a project (where the hyphen indicates a world-systems relational perspective) is not meant to simply expand our horizon, by studying gothic that arises beyond the culture industries of the United States and Europe; it looks to redraw the terms and frames of reference used. A world-gothic approach does not simply seek to highlight non-American-European productions within already existing Eurocentric literary categories, lineages of influence, and definition by generic traits. World-gothic looks instead to change our perspective of how we understand gothic, even for those works already long studied and taught. Using the example of the undead, this chapter examines the time and place of gothic as registering the spasms of the capitalist world-system.

This chapter considers Arthuriana in two distinct linguistic zones: the Celtic languages (excluding Welsh) and Older Scots.  The Arthur of the ‘Gaelic world’ is a figure associated with marvellous, and sometimes comic, adventures – the overtly political themes that persist in Welsh and English writing are usually absent. In the Cornish and Breton regions, Arthur appears in politically complex hagiographical and prophetic material. Older Scots also offers complex and consistent engagement with politics, though from a different vantage point. Here, the dual themes of sovereignty and advice to princes are closely related both to one another and to the long and complex history of contemporary Anglo-Scots political and literary relations. At issue too are crucial questions of geography and national identity.

This chapter presents some foundational methods for bounding random processes. We begin with the chaining technique and prove the Dudley inequality, which bounds a random process using covering numbers. Applications include Monte Carlo integration and uniform bounds for empirical processes. We then develop VC (Vapnik– Chervonenkis) theory, offering combinatorial insights into random processes and applying it to statistical learning. Building on chaining, we introduce generic chaining to obtain optimal two-sided bounds using Talagrand’s g2 functional. A key consequence is the Talagrand comparison inequality, a generalization of the Sudakov–Fernique inequality for sub-Gaussian processes. This is used to derive the Chevet inequality, a powerful tool for analyzing random bilinear forms over general sets. Exercises explore the Lipschitz law of large numbers in higher dimensions, one-bit quantization, and the small ball method for heavy-tailed random matrices.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

Tracing back to the uncertain origins of the Tristan legend, this chapter deals first with the earliest written forms of the story of Tristan and Isolde. It then describes the spread of the story throughout Europe, its gradual Arthurianisation, and discusses the place it may have occupied in courtly literature. The Prose Tristan concludes the rivalry between Tristan and Lancelot initiated by Chrétien de Troyes. At the same time, it completes Tristan’s integration into the canon of the Arthurian cycle. In later romances, Tristan is then regarded as equal to Lancelot on the battlefield, and the greatest of the knight-poets.

According to Bernard Manin, historically, representative government, based on the election of representatives, was conceived as an alternative to “direct democracy”, an ancient regime granting a central place to sortition. This chapter offers an alternative reading of the origins of representative government. In the wake of the French Revolution, Madame de Staël, Sismonde de Sismondi and Benjamin Constant – key members of the “Coppet Group” – theorized representative government not as an alternative to “direct democracy” but as an alternative to what the revolutionaries, from 1793 onward, called “representative democracy.” Recovering these French origins of representative government invites us to reconsider the historical relationship between representative democracy and representative government as well as the presumed connection between public opinion and democracy. These two points are explored in the chapter’s conclusion.

The period between 1500 and 1700 is sometimes associated with a dip in Arthur’s popularity. In fact, this was a time of Arthurian reinvention, rather than decline: if Arthur did not appear quite as frequently, his appearances nevertheless reached a new peak in terms of their creativity and variety. Increased scepticism surrounding Arthur had a freeing effect, allowing him to be invoked in new and different contexts, from satire to archery shows, and pre-existing Arthurian narratives and geographies were revised. Perhaps unexpectedly, Arthur’s diversification seems to have peaked during the years when Arthur’s narrative was the most potentially dangerous, such as England’s Interregnum and the early Restoration years. At the same time, popular medieval Arthuriana continued to be consumed in manuscript and print; and many local Arthurian traditions were first recorded and brought to wider knowledge during these years.

Describes the Economic Section’s activities in the final 18 months of World War II.

Chapter 3 engages with the thesis that transnationalisation of law has taken place in the development of Internet regulations, since it was invented in the 1990s. Is it true that a transnational law is developing that is largely free from state influence? What does a factual analysis reveal about the relationship between non-state governance and state regulation in addressing pressing social problems related to the ‘network of networks’? How do approaches to content and technology regulation differ between the United States and the EU? Net neutrality serves as a case study for an in-depth examination of the transnationalisation thesis in the context of the technological preconditions of free speech. In addition to the debates on net neutrality in the United States and the EU, this chapter also analyses the debate in India using the example of Meta Free Basics, which illustrates how the actions of large technology companies can lead to restrictions on freedom of expression. Does the history of net neutrality in these three jurisdictions, where regulatory solutions have been found along national territorial lines, confirm that there is a risk of developing a ‘splinternet’ and speak against a transnationalisation of the law?

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.