This chapter enacts a practice of “critical commonplacing” to assemble a new global archive of Romanticism, taking as its examples twentieth- and twenty-first-century remediations from Buenos Aires, New York, and Tokyo. Commonplacing a new Romantic archive finds a model in the world of collecting, which valorizes marginalia, marks, scratches, cut-and-pastes – capturing flashes of ephemera over static texts and images. From Japanese depictions of Mary Shelley’s creature as bakemono, to Julio Cortázar’s biography on John Keats during the Latin American Boom, to Audre Lorde and Diane Di Prima’s schooldays clique “The Branded,” this chapter expands the archive of Romanticism beyond 1780–1830, across different languages and media. Turning away from the anthology and canon, this approach replaces static texts with the dynamic media of seemingly fleeting forms, often ephemeral and ghostly dispersed. Each example showcases the experimental quality of commonplacing, aligned with progressive youth culture, learning, and play.

Chapter 4 further considers how the city informs young women’s means for realising their much hoped-for futures by focusing on how they navigate the social infrastructure that underpins its daily life. Paying particular attention to young women’s friendships with other young women, the chapter details this group’s fears of ‘fake friends’ and the anxieties they have towards those close to them having the potential to cause them (and their futures) harm. As the ethnography shows, mobile phone communication has afforded young women new styles of communication that allow them to overcome the fears of social intimacy, helping them to stay connected with others while maintaining social distance. Enabling young women to remain visible in urban life from the confines of their homes, and to engage in conversation without revealing personal information, mobile phones provide young women with an alternative social life, re-ordering their experiences of the city while enabling them to remain embedded within the social relationships that sustain it.

In this chapter we examine other areas in which the Shrikhande graph has a role to play, including Seidel switching and equiangular line sets (which give rise to our final construction of the Shrikhande graph), design theory, Hadamard matrices and distance-regular graphs.

We begin with a short section indicating a few directions in which the study of the Shrikhande graph has been taken. Most of the detail is omitted, and we refer to the cited papers.

Western philosophy has neglected the body for much of its history, even though it is the body that enables us to have a hold on the world and interact with other people. Beauvoir wrote extensively not about ‘the body’ in general but about the diverse bodies that humans have, and the various phases and states that a single body undergoes. Her presentation of female biology is rather controversial and undoubtedly dated, but her insistence that a body’s characteristics are only good or bad in relation to a particular physical and social environment is still crucial. The ‘facts’ that she borrowed from the science of her time, as well as her views, are placed in dialogue with those of current authors and scientists. The exploration of ageing and sick bodies that she carried out both in general philosophical terms and in her poignant memoirs of Sartre’s last decade and her mother’s last days has lost none of its significance.

In this chapter we consider strongly regular graphs, an important class of graphs for many applications, which include both the Shrikhande graph and the graphs associated with Latin squares, all of which play a part in our story.

This theorem was proved by Erdős, Rényi and Sós in the 1960s. It was an early success for the methods of algebraic graph theory.

We assume that friendship is an irreflexive and symmetric relation on a set of individuals: that is, nobody is his or her own friend, and if A is B’s friend then B is A’s friend. (It may be doubtful if these assumptions are valid in the age of social media – but we are doing mathematics, not sociology.) In other words, the situation is described by a graph, in which the vertices are the individuals and two vertices are joined if they are friends.