During the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), an unprecedented number of soldiers wrote “military memoirs,” firsthand accounts of the “first total war.” Next to private forms of recording experiences and keeping contact with those at home, such as letters or diaries, these memoirs were part of a larger shift in the relations between the army and civil society: soldiers wrote, at least partly, to change what non-combatants thought about them. As Britain did not see battles on home soil, war was both omnipresent and far away. Moreover, the reputation of the British armed forces was notorious, with common soldiers famously called “the scum of the earth” by Wellington. In conveying the battlefield experience to a sheltered audience, military memoirs, especially those written during or shortly after the wars, aimed at bridging the emotional divide between military and civil life, between the callous soldier and the compassionate citizen. Soldiers, too, these texts argued, were men of feeling, able to preserve a moral sense of respectability despite all the killing, blood, and trauma. Many memoirs communicated viscerally and in graphic detail about the horrors of war, both to make the traumatizing experience understandable and to show the heights of their emotional self-discipline. Bringing together the history of biography, reading, and emotions, this article argues that, by writing frankly about their horrific experiences, British soldiers fighting during the Napoleonic Wars contributed to changing civil society’s feeling rules about the army, reproaching the civilians’ contempt, and soliciting their compassion.

We define a knot to be half ribbon if it is the cross-section of a ribbon 2-knot, and observe that ribbon implies half ribbon implies slice. We introduce the half ribbon genus of a knot K, the minimum genus of a ribbon knotted surface of which K is a cross-section. We compute this genus for all prime knots up to 12 crossings, and many 13-crossing knots. The same approach yields new computations of the double slice genus. We also introduce the half fusion number of a knot K, that measures the complexity of ribbon 2-knots of which K is a cross-section. We show that it is bounded below by the Levine–Tristram signatures, and differs from the standard fusion number by an arbitrarily large amount.

Social media content creation is hugely popular with second-generation Arab immigrants to the UAE who lack a path to naturalized citizenship, particularly as a space to perform their belonging in the nation. This essay analyzes the work of two Arabophone content creators on Instagram and YouTube who use comedy to perform as quintessential “Dubai kids.” While they align with the state mission of presenting the UAE positively on social media, these creators produce ironic content that makes visible practices of belonging by second-generation youth who distance themselves from inherited politics of national and gender identity. The affective communities that form around these satirical content creators offer a model of belonging in which binaries of citizen and noncitizen can be elided, staging performances of immigrant identity uniquely local to the UAE.

Despite the density of scholarly engagement with Mozart’s operas, Donna Elvira’s aria ‘Mi tradì quell’alma ingrata’, composed for the 1788 Viennese production of Don Giovanni, has received little sustained, critical attention. Yet this oversight is unjustified, particularly considering the aria’s many stylistic elements that expand beyond the musical language of the original Prague Don Giovanni, and which therefore show Mozart not only deepening Elvira’s characterization but probing new compositional horizons. This article undertakes a thorough, analytic examination of ‘Mi tradì’, focusing especially on its evocation of Elvira’s subjectivity and self-consciousness, and paying particular attention to formal rhetoric and topical reference, both of which, by suggesting affinities with genres such as variation and the free fantasia, move the aria significantly beyond the expressive world often associated with Mozart’s vocal writing. The article closes with brief speculations on the relationship between ‘Mi tradì’ and the composer’s career aspirations in the late 1780s.

Let $r_5(N)$ be the largest cardinality of a set in $\{1,\ldots,N\}$ which does not contain 5 elements in arithmetic progression. Then there exists a constant $c\in (0,1)$ such that

\[r_5(N)\ll \frac{N}{\exp\!((\!\log\log N)^{c})}.\]

$U^4$

We have recently completed the draft of a book on the changing representation of East African wildlife from the 1940s to the 1980s. We have used many published texts as well as visual representations such as photographs, films, and television. The output of material in these years was huge. We suggest that these media representations were a significant, and neglected, element in the emergence of a global animal-centric conservationist ethos. This article discusses some of the people involved and the papers, many of them in private hands, that we used. We believe that this is valuable material and should, where possible, be acquired by archives. The material is scattered, especially in Kenya, the UK, and USA. In the UK, the University of Bristol library now houses the Wildscreen film archives and also some private papers that could form the foundation for a larger collection.

Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It has been in continuous operation since 1586, making it the second oldest university press after Cambridge University Press (1534). From its imposing complex in Jericho, the stylish suburb of Oxford, and its many satellite offices around the world, including Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Karachi, Hong Kong, Cape Town, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Melbourne, Toronto and New York — the overlap with former territories of the British Empire is conspicuous — it produces an unparalleled number of academic publications every year and occupies a dominant position in the authentication of knowledge and its dissemination across the globe. In 2022–23, for example, the press published no fewer than 1,777 new academic titles, available in 193 countries and translated into 45 languages (including Somali and Quechua, as the press's 2022–23 Annual Report breathlessly announces). And revenues are substantial: £825,000,000 in sales last year alone. A bastion of prestige, global in reach but with a clear centre, and sitting comfortably within the inner citadel of a hierarchical, worldwide ecosystem of knowledge-making, Oxford University Press can be seen as a quasi-imperial operation in its own right.

The Haefliger–Thurston conjecture predicts that Haefliger's classifying space for $C^r$-foliations of codimension $n$ whose normal bundles are trivial is $2n$-connected. In this paper, we confirm this conjecture for piecewise linear (PL) foliations of codimension $2$. Using this, we use a version of the Mather–Thurston theorem for PL homeomorphisms due to the author to derive new homological properties for PL surface homeomorphisms. In particular, we answer the question of Epstein in dimension $2$ and prove the simplicity of the identity component of PL surface homeomorphisms.

This article analyzes three contemporary plays by trans and gender-non-conforming artists from the United States that engage with forest fires and queer ecology. These three plays – MJ Kaufman’s Sagittarius Ponderosa, Agnes Borinsky’s The Trees, and Kari Barclay’s How to Live in a House on Fire – tie wildfire to colonial histories of fire suppression and imagine a just climate transition as linked to queer and trans self-reinvention. The article describes this dramaturgical tactic as ‘burning hope’ – letting go of straight, settler desire and gesturing toward reciprocal obligation with the non-human world. Building on Kim TallBear’s call to attend to organic matter and Stephen Pyne’s study of fire history in the ‘Pyrocene’, the article imagines theatre as a prescribed burn that can re-orient audience relations to futurity. Burning hope does not abandon hope; it recognizes grief as mobilization for environmentalist solidarities.