Ocean acidification (OA) science has rapidly developed since 2005; however, international action remains limited. This chapter explains the complex scientific background of OA to non-scientists. OA is measured on a logarithmic pH scale, with oceans becoming 40 per cent more acidic since pre-industrial times. Three groups of compounds contribute to acidification: CO2 (the primary driver), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and sulphur oxides (SOx). These substances enter the oceans through various means, such as anthropogenic emissions, geoengineering, coastal activities, and scrubber effluents from ships. Additional ocean stressors, such as climate change, pollution, and overfishing, compound the effects of OA, making adaptation more challenging. OA threatens calcifying organisms such as corals and oysters, disrupts food webs, and impacts human ecosystem services valued at potentially $1 trillion annually by 2100. Adaptation options include blue carbon ecosystems, marine protected areas, and fisheries management. The issue encompasses ocean, atmosphere, and land systems across multiple timescales and spatial levels, necessitating diverse governance approaches that address both global CO2 emissions and local stressors.

The introduction justifies telling the story of the forgotten bully Louis Bieral. His life was extraordinary not only because of his interactions with famous people, but also because of his wide range of adventures. Moreover, his brutal career helps us understand the importance of private, nonlethal violence to the operation of nineteenth-century America.

Completing the arc from the desire to assert membership and rights as an handicapé, the final chapter considers how disabled Kinois turned away from this identity to pursue one of becoming a responsable, someone ‘responsible [for others]’. While controversial, begging and brokering gave access to hard-won economic resources that made it possible to have and care for children. Aspiring to such responsibilities, disabled people showed that integrating economic and social values was both means and ends. By successfully fulfilling the responsibilities of parenthood – the comparatively stable, higher value of social respectability that was once considered impossible for disabled people to achieve – they sought to become ‘valuable people’ (batu ya valeur). Claiming full adult personhood, they both conformed to and transformed the measurement of this highest regime of personhood, enjoining a debate over whether it is good to have many or fewer, well-supported children. Between action and aspiration, a testing and critiquing disposition towards value demonstrates how the extraordinary livelihood strategies of disabled people in the margins of urban society may be a most productive stage from which to examine the emerging debates about what is, or should be, good in society.

The introduction outlines the key themes of the book and offers brief summaries of individual chapters. It offers a brief overview of Keats’s letters and a summary of their publication history, their reception, and their place in his public reputation. The chapter proposes that Keats’s letters can be considered as a body of work in its own right, and that literary criticism needs to develop an epistolary poetics to enable and support a formal critical reading of his correspondence.

Divination was a central element in folk religion, and fortune-tellers played a major social role. Many, though not all, forms of divination aim to tap into the hidden workings of the cosmos through correlative cosmology. Its function is not primarily prognostication but about clarifying the present and reducing uncertainty. In its simplest form, it is based on the eight characters (bazi) relating to one’s date of birth. Of all superstitious beliefs and practices, it was fortune-telling that came under the fiercest ideological attack, especially in the early 1960s. This was because it was seen by the CCP as ‘fatalism’ that paralysed the will of the masses to fight against oppression. Blind fortune-tellers in 1963 sought to revive a trade union and petition the authorities, which led to a clampdown on fortune-tellers of all kinds, who were pressured to reveal their tricks at denunciation meetings. It is clear that many fortune-tellers continued to ply their trade quietly throughout the Cultural Revolution decade, and they proved adaptive to changed circumstances.

The Introduction defines the paradigm of anticolonial development, acquaints the reader with the scope of the book, and situates its main contributions in the literatures on education, decolonization, race, and development in Africa. It argues that a Black Atlantic perspective changes how we see decolonization and development in West Africa, by revealing schooling’s essential role in aspirations of African emancipation. The second part of the Introduction details the book’s unique methodological approach of comparison in global perspective. Such comparison allows for dialogue across two different colonial and postcolonial histories (Ghana/British empire and Côte d’Ivoire/French empire), in the process offering a regional history of the global spread of public schooling during the twentieth century.

Chapter 1 tracks frenzy’s trajectory as a medical diagnosis between 1500 and 1700. It offers an introduction to frenzy as it was understood by eight medical practitioners, four of whom came of age in a time of relative stability in English medicine (1560–1640) and four in a time of rapid change (1640–1700). It shows how, from the mid seventeenth century, the old humoral definition of frenzy was altered to fit new medical philosophies – chemical, mechanistic, and corpuscular – and new models of human physiology. Tracing the contours of the disease over two centuries, it highlights points of continuity as well as change. Throughout this period, it argues, theorists from diverse schools explained frenzy’s effects with reference both to the solid structures of the body and the fluids which flowed through them. This chapter argues that it was the devastating effects of brain disease which galvanized medical theorists to seek to explain disorders of the mind as disruptions of material ‘animal spirits’.

In this chapter we shall consider Seifert manifolds with non-orientable base orbifold.

Chapter 4 explores the construction and performance of poetic selfhood in Keats’s letters – and argues that it is in part through letter-writing itself that John Keats becomes a poet. It is in and through letters as much as through the writing of poems that Keats invented for himself a poetic identity (a ‘poetical Character’, as he would call it). The chapter begins by examining Keats’s construction of a poetic self in a number of letters written between April and May 1817 to two mentor-friends, Leigh Hunt and Benjamin Robert Haydon. It then moves to an examination of a cluster of formative letters to and from Keats in the late summer and autumn of 1818, culminating in the presentation of his idea of the poet as ‘camelion’ – as responding to circumstances and changing environments, and ideally as having no ‘identity’ – in a famous letter of October 1818 to Richard Woodhouse.