Carlos Arturo Torres (1867–1911) was a journalist, teacher, and statesman. He was born in the Colombian town of Santa Rosa de Viterbo and studied in Tunja, Bogota, and the United Kingdom. After travels in Europe, he taught international law in Bogota, and founded such papers as La Crónica, El Nuevo Tiempo, and La Civilización. He was sent to diplomatic missions in France, England, and Caracas, where he died. He also served as minister of both treasury and finance. Undoubtedly, Idola Fori was his most influential work. He borrowed from Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, who discerned four “idols” that obstruct the truth, including the idols of the forum and the market. Idola Fori was originally published with a prologue by José Enrique Rodó, with whom he has often been compared, and with whom he shared ideas about history and culture. Torres’ work, however, is more deeply grounded in politics, and shows his engagement with contemporary debates about the role of the state, major ideas about economic development, and the tension between individualism and collectivism.

When its armies were finally defeated in May 1945, the vaunted Third Reich lay in waste and smoldering ruin. The air was foul, the cities ablaze, the countryside blighted; forests, fields, and rivers were blasted and defiled. Adolf Hitler, the messianic Führer or leader of the nation, had promised his people a thousand years of prosperity and peace. Instead his 12-year reign left nothing but desolation. Across Europe, the trail of German forces stank with the wreckage of shattered communities, ravaged landscapes, and exterminated lives. The destruction that Nazi Germany inflicted on the continent was unparalleled in human as well as environmental terms.

The bibliography on ancient Greek democracy is vast, although recent trends suggest it may have peaked, at least for now. What follows is necessarily selective. When it comes to overviews of ancient Greek politics and society, for scope, ambition, vivacity, and theoretical sophistication, it is difficult to top de Ste. Croix 1981, a towering life’s work. Everyone should read it, even if only to disagree with it. In a similar vein is Cartledge 2018, focused on democracy specifically. It reaches different conclusions from the ones offered here, in particular regarding the Hellenistic period, but is forceful and engaging. Meier 1990 remains excellent on Greek politics in general. Davies 1993 and O’Neil 1995 are overviews of ancient Greek democracy concentrating on the Classical period. Ma 2024 appeared only after the present manuscript was completed. While I have not been able to incorporate references to this impressive achievement throughout the text, the reader should be aware that it is one of the strongest arguments yet for seeing genuinely democratic practices down through the period of the high Empire (second century ce and beyond).

By 1200, clerks might face homicide charges before royal and church courts. Both jurisdictions recognised similar homicide charges: intentional killing; complicity; self-defence; and accidental death. It has long been argued that English common law was separate from continental Roman and canon law. But this chapter shows that common law and canon law display striking similarities in theory and practice when dealing with homicide charges. This was arguably not a matter of coincidence or ‘common sense’ (Hurnard) but a result of canon law influence on common law; both formed a common legal culture, at least regarding homicide. The only outlier was judicial homicide, a charge only applied to clergy before church jurisdiction and concerning involvement in secular law penalties of death and mutilation. This exception aside, the chapter systematically compares canon and common law theory and practice on each homicide charge. For legal practice, it draws on both royal and church court records and papal penitentiary petitions to exonerate clergy from homicide, which are remarkably similar in their argumentation and narratives to common law jury recommendations for royal pardons for homicide.

The Introduction justifies a new history of ancient Greek democracies based on the proliferation of new archaeological discoveries, advances in scholarship, and the need for an up-to-date synthesis. Democracy was not limited to Classical Athens (480–323 BCE) but spread throughout the Greek world over the fourth through second centuries BCE. Ancient Greek democracies represent a phenomenon specific to the historical and cultural context of the ancient Mediterranean, but they still have much to teach us today.

Over the last 30 years, a number of possible definitions of Sobolev and BV spaces in the metric setting have been proposed by various authors, and a priori it is not known whether they are equivalent. In this monograph, we decided to work with the definition of Newtonian spaces proposed by Shanmugalingam. In this appendix, we present several other approaches present in the literature and comment on their relationship and dependence on the exponent. The first general result concerning the equivalence of the most common definitions of Sobolev spaces was proved by Ambrosio, Gigli, and Savaré in the case p > 1; similar results were subsequently shown for the BV spaces and for the Sobolev space with exponent equal to one. To give a complete historical overview, we present here several variants of definitions and several equivalence results. We also discuss the dependence of the minimal p-weak upper gradient on the exponent. Throughout this appendix, as in the whole monograph, we assume that the metric space is complete, separable, and equipped with a non-negative Borel measure which is finite on bounded subsets.

The introduction begins with the book’s central argument: Egyptian cultural and media institutions have constructed a coherent state project after the 1952 revolution through a praxis of ‘achievement’ (ingāz, pl. ingazāt). Inspired by the anthropology of bureaucracy and the state, the book intervenes in the longstanding historiography on the Nasser era to show how low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats affiliated to the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance have worked to create a unified state-idea after 1952, while constituting a bureaucratic corps on a similar ideological basis. Such bureaucrats, as well as higher-ranking officials and ministers, are central actors in the book’s narrative. The introduction also reviews the book’s main sources and methods, including ethnographic fieldwork, archival visits in institutional repositories and personal libraries, as well as regular dives into the second-hand book market in Cairo.