Brexit has cast a long shadow over the UK economy, with its impact masked by the COVID-19 pandemic and the crisis in Ukraine. Disentangling those effects is not straightforward, but that is the aim of the papers contained in this Special Issue. This Special Issue draws upon excellent contributions from some leading academic and policy-oriented researchers, all expert in the macroeconomic impacts of Brexit.

The ‘Only connect!’ that serves as epigraph to Forster's Howards End tolerates a variety of interpretations; but the very idea of a connection, or a relating of one thing with another, is conceptually deep. One form of connection is when something is about a thing, representing or symbolizing that thing. When we think of someone, or discuss something, we connect to them, or to it.

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein asks, ‘What makes my image of him into an image of him? […] Isn't my question like this: “What makes this sentence a sentence that has to do with him?”’ Wittgenstein thus notes the ramifications of his question: what makes her name hers? In virtue of what is this thought about them a thought about them? The issue he highlights has been with us since Plato's Cratylus and its history is unified by a presupposition: whatever makes it that (i) a bit of language (like a name or a sentence or any linguistic symbol) is about something is, fundamentally, also what makes it that (ii) a thought (or idea or image) is about a thing. The story of aboutness will be uniform, simplex, or so the presupposition has it.

But the history of the issue has been one of failure: we still don't adequately understand the nature of representation. I will propose and develop a perspective that rejects the presupposition and explains the failure: there is more than one way for a thing to be about something. Representation comes, ultimately, in varieties.

This research article describes an investigation into the udder health, bacterial isolation and antimicrobial sensitivity of three staphylococcal species isolated from the milk of non-dairy goats, suckling their kids, on two smallholder farms in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Udder lesions were visually noted in 21 of 34 goats and two goats had palpable abnormalities. Collected milk samples grew a total of 11 bacterial organisms and the most frequently isolated organism was Staphylococcus chromogenes. Selected isolates of S. aureus, caprae and simulans from both farms were tested by antimicrobial sensitivity testing for 23 antimicrobials and all isolates showed antimicrobial resistance to doxycycline and tetracycline. Less common resistance was shown to ampicillin, chloramphenicol, penicillin and rifampicin. This preliminary study confirms the presence of udder lesions and mastitis bacteria in non-dairy goats in Hong Kong, along with the first information on the antimicrobial profile of three common Staphylococcus species bacteria affecting goats.

During the month of Ramadan, on Tuesday, June 26, 1787, two hours after the afternoon prayer, or about 5:30 p.m., an “alarmingly dreadful event” (ḥāditha mahūla muz‘ija) occurred in Cairo. An explosion ripped through the heart of the city's commercial district, sparking a massive fire, toppling buildings, killing dozens, and pulsing buckling ripples and emotional shockwaves through the city. Late 18th-century urbanization produced countless such disasters around the world. This one occurred at a particularly trying time for Cairo, and Egypt generally, and serves as a barometer of Egyptian society and the economy in this period.

Many of the good things which make human life worthwhile are essentially social, cannot be enjoyed by one person unless they are enjoyed together with others. And it is obvious that thinking in terms of the first-person plural, we/us, plays a large part in everyday life as people consider puzzlements (‘What should we do?’) and remark on the success of what they decided on (‘That worked out really well for us!’). Analytic philosophers should accept this at face value, recognising that human beings are often co-subjects with each other, that there is irreducible plural intentionality. The paper explores how the existence of plural intentionality manifests itself in our concepts and ways of proceeding and how attempted ‘analysis’ of what goes on as the assemblage of many interlocking instances of singular intentionality distorts and misleads.