The idea that Japan and Greece might be closely related is of European origin. Coinciding with the modern and demiurgical impulse that seized the Western imagination in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, it was part of a vast reconceptualization of the world in which analogy occupied a fundamental place. One of its first formulations is found in the History of Japan composed by the German physician Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716) and published eleven years after his death. Kaempfer stayed for two years in Nagasaki, working for the Dutch East India Company, and was one of the first Europeans to publish a detailed description of the archipelago following the expulsion of the Jesuits and most other Westerners in the first decades of the seventeenth century. His account is notable above all for unambiguously placing science before religion and personal analysis before collective evangelization.

This chapter traces William Burroughs’ self-imposed exile across the Americas, North Africa, and Europe, arguing that the geographic settings where he lived were integral to the conceptual structure of his work. Rather than treating setting as backdrop or exotic inspiration, Burroughs reimagines place as a set – simultaneously stage, fiction, and experiential filter – through which he explores identity, language, and systems of control. From his ironic travel ethnographies in Junky and The Yage Letters, to the colonial parody of Queer, and the fractured landscapes of Naked Lunch and the cut-up novels, Burroughs engages in a layered literary expatriation that aligns him with, but ultimately distinguishes him from, figures like Bowles, Baldwin, Stein, and Beckett. Focusing on Tangier and Paris as creative epicenters, the chapter argues that Burroughs’ spatial displacements catalyze formal and thematic experimentation. His work reveals a persistent tension between immersive estrangement and mediated construction, exposing alterity not only in foreign cultures, but within language and self.

This chapter outlines the opportunities offered by coinage as a source of evidence to the ancient historian. Different aspects of numismatic terminology and methodology are set out, and different approaches to the use of the characteristics of coinage are outlined. Coinage may be evidence for ‘official practice’ on the part of the wide variety of its issuers in the archaic period. It may be indicative of specific regional and cultural similarities or differences. It is in essence an economic object, and its mobility offers the possibility of mapping ancient economies. But at the same time its designs open up avenues of iconographic interpretation.

This chapter explores the central role of nostalgia, youth, and memory across the works of William Burroughs, challenging his reputation as an anti-sentimental icon of literary transgression. Thom Robinson traces Burroughs’ shifting relationship with nostalgia – from early satirical treatments in The Yage Letters and Naked Lunch, through the melancholic repetitions of the cut-up era, to the queer adolescent utopias of his later novels. These texts, including The Wild Boys, Cities of the Red Night, and The Place of Dead Roads, draw heavily on Burroughs’ own youth, subvert the moral codes of institutions like the Boy Scouts of America, and reimagine coming-of-age as a site of resistance and sexual awakening. Through his admiration for Denton Welch and incorporation of children’s literature tropes, Burroughs ultimately transforms nostalgia from a regressive impulse into a creative, disruptive force – an affective mechanism through which the past might be rescripted in defiance of normative adulthood.

This chapter examines decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) as emergent forms of software or knowledge commons, applying the governing knowledge commons (GKC) framework. It argues that DAOs, characterised by their reliance on blockchain-enabled smart contracts and elimination of hierarchical management, represent a novel form of collective decision-making and governance. The analysis distinguishes between on-chain and off-chain governance models, evaluating their effectiveness in ensuring decentralisation and addressing internal conflicts, with particular emphasis on the unique conflict resolution mechanisms available to DAOs (such as "forking" and "rage-quitting"). An important insight is that the rules-in-use in on-chain governance and off-chain governance are likely to be very different. The chapter also considers the robustness decentralised systems in managing common-pool resources.

Greek Japan. Placed side by side, these two words give the impression of something very strange, a sort of chimera – half-Apollo, half-samurai; half-Venus, half-geisha – set on a ground that is at once white and blue like the Cyclades, dark green and vermillion like Shintō shrines. How could two countries so distant from each other be joined together to form a coherent image, to give birth to a meaningful concept?

This chapter explores William Burroughs’ lifelong engagement with anthropology, from his early academic studies at Harvard and Columbia to his immersive depictions of indigenous and subcultural worlds. David Stephen Calonne charts Burroughs’ fascination with shamanism, Mayan hieroglyphics, animal totems, and visionary experience, arguing that his literary project is rooted in an outsider anthropological impulse that spans both ancient cultures and modern subcultures. Burroughs’ friendship with figures like Hal Chase and his involvement with institutions such as the Sahagún Anthropology Club informed works like The Soft Machine, Ah Pook Is Here, and Junky, which often merge ethnographic observation with mystical speculation. The chapter situates Burroughs alongside figures like Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, and Carlos Castaneda, and highlights the influence of his writings on contemporary anthropologists such as Michael Taussig. Ultimately, Burroughs emerges as an amateur but radical anthropologist, reimagining the potentials of cultural knowledge and visionary consciousness outside the confines of academic orthodoxy.

Any research question or application relating to language variation and/or use can be approached from a corpus linguistic perspective. The goals of The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (CHECL) are to survey the breadth of these research questions and applications in relation to the linguistic study of English. The handbook addresses a range of topics, including chapters on lexical variation, grammatical variation, historical change, online language and social media, multimodal corpora, the linguistic description of dialects and registers, and applications to language teaching and translation. In each chapter, authors assess what we have learned from corpus-based investigations to date and provide detailed case studies that illustrate how corpus analyses can be employed for empirical descriptions, documenting surprising patterns of language use that are often unanticipated previously. By bringing together diverse perspectives and cutting-edge research, this volume serves as a comprehensive resource for researchers seeking to understand and apply a corpus-based approach to the study of English.

This chapter extends all the features of the Sz.-Nagy–Foias model theory to the bivariate setting. We introduce the notion of a characteristic triple. The characteristic triple for a commuting contractive pair consists of the Sz.-Nagy–Foias characteristic function for the product of the components of the given commuting contractive pair, the fundamental-operator pair introduced in Chapter 7, and the canonical commuting unitary pair introduced in Chapter 4. The characteristic triple for a commuting contractive pair is shown to be a complete unitary invariant for the commuting contractive pair. Thus the characteristic triple serves as the analogue of the Sz.-Nagy–Foias characteristic function for the univariate case. This chapter also introduces the notion of admissible triples, which is equipped with a natural equivalence relation called "coincidence" inspired by the Sz.-Nagy–Foias notion of coincidence between two contractive analytic functions. It is shown that an admissible triple gives rise to a commuting contractive pair on a functional model space, whose characteristic triple coincides with the prespecified admissible triple. Joint invariant subspaces are characterized.

This chapter examines how commercial firms like the Belgian grocer Delhaize did not initially respond to the Single Market Program in the mid-1980s, but they did mobilize swiftly in the late 1980s to prepare for the "threat" of the new business and regulatory environment of an integrated regional market governed by social and environmental protections. Together with other food retailers, Delhaize formed sectoral clubs and associations to defend its interests: Buying clubs collectivized price negotiating power against producer consolidation and protected profit margins, while interest associations brought distributors and retailers together to influence European policymaking. At the same time, Delhaize and other commercial firms saw in the opening of Eastern Europe a profitable business opportunity, and they expanded quickly into the markets of Poland, Hungary, and the new Czech Republic in the early 1990s. As a result, the case of Delhaize gives us purchase on the complexity of business responses to market integration and demonstrates the diverse paths to regionalization for and against the Single Market.

Timothy S. Murphy explores William Burroughs’ oeuvre as a “singularity” in three overlapping senses: aesthetic uniqueness, philosophical resistance to generalization, and cosmological metaphor. Burroughs’ cut-up novels – Naked Lunch, The Nova Trilogy, and beyond – embody a form of narrative experimentation that resists categorization and disrupts conventional literary logic. Drawing on concepts from astrophysics, Murphy aligns Burroughs’ work with the disruptive force of black holes, novae, and supernovae. Through a close reading of the trilogy’s stellar metaphors, especially the figure of Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin, Murphy argues that Burroughs anticipates a model of narrative that is both destructive and generative – annihilating fixed identities and control structures while offering the possibility of linguistic and ontological renewal. The “Burroughs singularity,” codenamed WSB X-1, represents a continual feedback loop between collapse and creation, producing texts as unstable, irradiated, and transformative as the cosmic phenomena they metaphorically invoke.

Drawing on archival sources from Paribas as well as published statements from bank chairmen Jean-Yves Haberer, Michel François-Poncet and André Lévy-Lang, this chapter examines Paribas in the European economy of the 1980s and 1990s, the evolution of the bank’s business strategy amid the macroeconomic changes of market integration and market openings, and the bank’s perspectives on the Single Market and banking regulation in European economic governance. If carmakers like Volkswagen and BMW expressed enthusiasm about the business opportunities of the Single Market Program for their supply chains, production, and distribution and even supported the EEC’s efforts to develop environmental regulations, merchant banks like Paribas seemed rather ambivalent and even directly opposed to the regulatory and social dimensions of market integration through their lobbying efforts and business interest associations. In the early 1990s, the opening of Central and Eastern Europe presented new investment and growth opportunities making Paribas much more interested in business opportunities in Central and Eastern Europe, the “CEE,” than in the business environment of the EEC and its Single Market.