Understanding Plato means having to assimilate concepts. But it also means having to familiarize oneself, in the first place, with dozens of proper names, the names of all those who figure in the Socratic dialogues. The Japanese tried to do this in a remarkably short period of time, between roughly 1900 and 1950. To be sure, most readers remembered only the most outstanding name, Socrates, but, as in Europe, his interlocutors were known to the more cultivated among them. At all events, there was no feeling of revulsion whatever. In Europe, by contrast, Japanese, Chinese, and Indian patronymics tend to arouse so great a sense of foreignness that even comprehension appears to be impossible: The mind becomes fogged, names pile up one after another, who is who is hopelessly unclear; one becomes lost in concatenations of syllables, to the point that trying to separate and remember them seems futile.

Although recent scholarship emphasizes William Burroughs’s impact on rock musicians, his significance for performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson has not been explicated. She absorbed Burroughs’ works when asked to appear at the Nova Convention, a celebration of the writer in New York City in 1978. Based on archival research, this article reveals that “The Language of the Future,” Anderson’s Nova piece, was inspired by Burroughs’ The Ticket That Exploded for its rendering of electronic miscommunication and technological collapse. Anderson credited Burroughs for stimulating a new direction in her career. After meeting him at Nova, she adopted an androgynous performance persona, composed an homage song entitled “Language Is a Virus” as the central theme of United States (a six-hour multimedia presentation that cemented her reputation), and toured with Burroughs and poet John Giorno. The relationship was never personally close but remained intellectually significant until Burroughs’ death.

Chapter 4 centres on the restitutive and injurious properties of documentary practices. Test veterans sought out state documents in order to locate evidence of radiation exposure and its evidentiary omission. I track three legal disputes originating in the UK before the Pension Appeals Tribunal, the British Information Commissioner, and the European Court of Human Rights in which test veterans sought to hold the state to account for failing to document injury and risk. Despite a lack of success in securing restitution, and a sense of compounding harm and injury endured across these claims, their claims nonetheless produced paper trails of the state’s moral failure and its lack of restitutive care. These legal disputes moreover brought to light the existence and contours of a secretive archive, clarified democratic avenues for accessing documents held within the state’s grip, and legally asserted the positive duties of the state to ensure the right of claimants to access health records.

Chapter 2 turns to the second betrayal. This chapter scales down into the personal accounts of test veterans post-service lives, when emergent illnesses eluded explanation and social recognition, and private shame and debility stalled their lives. I show how unsettled memories and unsettled illnesses coalesced with the slow-moving invisibility of radiation in ways that negatively impacted their families and their well-being. Claim-making thus began as prefigurative struggles driven by delegitimating encounters with medical actors, and the accumulating acts of sharing service memories in veteran spaces. This chapter charts how in these practices test veterans and their family members became claim-makers, a collectivity that produced the possibilities for political and legal action.

In this chapter we present a streamlined version of the original proof of Ando. We also discuss in full detail the well-known fact that the commutant lifting theorem and Ando’s dilation theorem are equivalent to each other. Interestingly, while a minimal isomeric lift of a given commuting contractive pair is not unique (up to a natural notion of unitary equivalence of lifts), we show that the unitary part in the Berger–Coburn–Lebow decomposition of every minimal isometric lift of a commuting contractive pair is unique up to unitary equivalence. We also present a class of commuting contractive pairs for which any two minimal isometric lifts are unique. This chapter also constructs a canonical commuting unitary pair corresponding to a commuting contractive pair. The canonical unitary pair plays a key role in later chapters.

To scholarship on contemporary Europe, this business history of European political economy challenges the linear teleology of European integration and reinforces its historical contingency in four ways. First, my narrative provincializes the Single Market by framing market integration as part of a long historical process, inflected by global events and affected by global actors like multinationals. Second, a focus on firms pluralizes the actors involved in market integration, expanding the scope of agency from nation states and supranational institutions to interest associations, companies, and even individual executives. Third, granular analyses of a wide range of firms problematize business influence on the market by uncovering instances in which business interests eclipsed those of the demos and by demonstrating the broad spectrum of firm perspectives on regional market integration – from active proponents to “business Eurosceptics." Fourth, engagement with arguments about the market’s winners and losers and the need for reform politicizes the history of market integration and situates this book among present debates about the future of regulating and doing business in Europe.

Financial companies are increasingly leveraging financial technology (fintech) to monopolize financial data, ostensibly to maximize profit for their clients and enhance their power in society. This trend both exposes the serious limitations of individual consent models of data protection and undermines the nature of financial data as a shared resource by excluding data contributors from its governance. This chapter posits that consumer associations, acting as data trusts, can play a crucial role in overseeing financial data-opolies while fostering the development of the community governance of data. Beyond addressing privacy harms, these associations can promote the attainment of important social goods, including the prevention of predatory and discriminatory lending and the expansion of access to financial capital. By leveraging and shaping both formal and informal rules-in-use that may facilitate these efforts, consumer data trusts can ultimately enhance the legitimacy of financial data commons. A discussion of BlackRock’s Aladdin platform and a European consumer association’s lawsuit against Meta illustrates the argument.

This chapter examines what the designs of coins may tell us about the communities that commissioned them. Religious designs featured predominantly, often the presiding deity of a city or a design which referred to it. Mythology and topography also played an important role, often rooting coinages in their localities, and there were references to events or contemporary personalities. Comparisons can be made in relation to artistic work in other fields, such as gems, with a special reference to those who were involved in their creation – the engravers of the dies from which the coins were struck. The engraving of coin dies appears to have been regarded as an artistic exercise, and the appearance of signatures on coins offers a window onto part of the chaîne opératoire of coin production.

This book has uncovered the role of multinational enterprises in the making of the Single European market by uncovering both firm strategies in the new business environment of an internal market as well as firm mobilization against to various dimensions of market governance. Together, the business cases covered in this book add a new, granular perspective to European political economy, not focused on the theoretical framework of capitalism, but on business strategy that constitutes its praxis. They also demonstrated the very different ways multinationals approached market integration and the Commission’s efforts to establish market regulations for the benefit of consumers and workers, with automakers most enthusiastic about the industrial focus of the market’s design, banks more interested in the new opportunities of market enlargement and its regulation than in deeper market integration, and commerce mobilizing against the threats of producer consolidation and the social dimensions of the Single Market.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’ complex role as a prophetic figure in American literature, tracing how he simultaneously embraces and subverts this identity. Drawing upon Puritan and Romantic traditions of the poet-prophet, the chapter situates Burroughs alongside figures like Walt Whitman, yet distinguishes him through his irreverent and often satirical stance. Burroughs’ prophetic persona was partly constructed by contemporaries such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and is shaped by his fascination with Hassan Sabbah, a mystical figure whose image he reclaims in opposition to American control systems. The chapter examines how Burroughs’ predictions – ranging from pandemics to terrorism – reflect both visionary insight and societal anxieties. Furthermore, his cut-up technique, developed with Brion Gysin, is interpreted as a form of literary sorcery akin to cleromancy, blending satire with shamanic prophecy. Ultimately, Burroughs emerges as a prophet who deconstructs prophecy, offering a self-aware critique of authority, language, and cultural mythmaking.

To conclude, I turn to Tessa, a test veteran widow, and her uneasy reflections on the claim-making process. Recognizing the double-edged nature of seeking justice, its enlivening and injurious potential, she asks that we take seriously the enduring challenges of injury claims, that we continue to interrogate how and why contemporary institutions turn justice making into pathways for ongoing harm. An exploration of the injurious nature of law is, I argue, crucial for understanding both the political origins of injury, and possible meaningful political responses to injury. This in turn reveals the necessity of reimagining injury in ways that can account for the historical, political, social, and institutional harms that accrue from our very systems of redress. That nuclear injuries have proven so difficult to respond to without enacting further harm must inform our current approaches to nuclear risk and disarmament, and necessitates a reimagining of injury law. Such a reckoning offers us possibilities to prioritize new modes of collective responsibility, care, and justice in the aftermath of radiation exposure and other invisible environmental harms.

The aim of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) is the uncovering, in the discourse type under study, of what we call nonobvious meaning, that is, meaning which might not be readily available to naked-eye perusal. By combining the quantitative approach, that is, statistical overviews of large amounts of the discourse in question with the more qualitative approach typical of discourse analysis, that is, the close analysis of particular stretches of discourse, it may be possible to access such nonobvious meanings. This chapter describes a set of CADS case studies into the facework performed during media and political interaction, from early work on White House press briefings to contrastive examinations of the facework typical of the US State Department and Chinese Foreign Ministry briefings which envisage not just the study of interpersonal im/politeness but also the performance of ‘national facework’. The facework involved in all these settings is multifaceted and complex. Firstly it is not always collaborative, indeed it is often downright competitive, and impoliteness is not uncommon, and it also comprises a mixture of personal, group and vicarious facework. The corpora employed in these studies are also multimedia in that videos of the briefings are also mostly available alongside the transcripts.

This chapter examines the libertarian and reactionary elements in William Burroughs’ life and work, placing them in dialogue with the twenty-first-century alt-right’s attempts to reclaim him as a prophetic figure. Florian Zappe interrogates the paradox of Burroughs as both icon of the countercultural avant-garde and a card-carrying NRA member who espoused conspiratorial, anti-statist, and sometimes openly bigoted views. The chapter traces how alt-right figures – from internet provocateurs to fringe ideologues – have co-opted Burroughs’ anti-establishment ethos and aesthetic of transgression, often through decontextualized misreadings that ignore his literary complexity and formal irony. Zappe explores Burroughs’ ambivalence toward political systems, his rejection of ideological coherence, and his commitment to aesthetic resistance rather than activism. Ultimately, the chapter argues that while Burroughs’ work harbors troubling reactionary tropes, it defies fascist instrumentalization by resisting ideological fixity and embracing an anarchic pluralism that places him far outside the alt-right’s monolithic vision of power.

Chapter 1 attends to the historical context of British bomb testing through an exploration of contrasting accounts of nuclear risk. It juxtaposes archival and official narratives of military risk management with test veterans’ own memories of hazardous events. This reveals the jarring mismatch that test veterans experienced when encountering official records detailing moments their younger selves experienced first-hand. I explore how radiation measurement technologies, material infrastructures, and a military culture of hierarchical trust negated the perception of risk, yet still left room for servicemen to experience doubt and fear. This chapter also places the harms to service personnel in the wider colonial context of racial hierarchies and the theft of lands, revealing how stories of Indigenous injury became uncertain undercurrents within test veterans’ own narratives.