This essay considers Gregory of Nazianzus’ allusion to ‘divine deceit’, a motif related to the so-called ‘Christus Victor’ theory of atonement. This allusion is curious when we recall that for Gregory, the devil, not God, is the master of deception. When we treat On the Lights (Or. 39) as a literary unit – which commentators have yet to do – we see that Gregory makes several doctrinal affirmations before alluding to what is known as ‘divine deceit’. In this doctrinal discussion, Gregory draws upon the Platonic distinction between the orders of being and becoming as described in the Timaeus. He then alludes to ‘divine deceit’ with respect to the order of ‘becoming’, which bears the possibility of being misapprehended because it is ‘grasped by opinion’. The devil's ‘opinion’ of himself and of Christ, therefore, is suspect. Death – or rather, Christ's vanquishment of it – is the moment of reckoning. Since God alone can defeat death, Christ's putting death to death is the only certain way for the devil to recognise that the ‘Son of Man’ is, after all, the ‘Son of God’. The ‘devil's delusion’, then – not ‘divine deceit’ – best summarises Gregory's understanding of this moment in the history of salvation.

This study examines gender differences in inflation expectations, attitudes and responses using the UK Inflation Attitudes Survey. It finds minimal gender disparity in inflation perceptions and expectations but highlights greater uncertainty and inflation aversion among women. During inflationary periods, women are more likely to increase savings, whereas men typically push for higher wages. Gender gaps in financial knowledge and trust in the Bank of England (BoE) suggest tailored communication strategies may enhance engagement. While BoE policies effectively anchor expectations, improved outreach and diverse messaging could address women’s lower satisfaction and financial understanding. The findings underscore the role of inclusivity in effective monetary communication.

Historians have long known that leaders of the American Revolution looked to the law of nations for insight into the rights and obligations of independent states. In so doing, Americans relied largely on the writings of European legal theorists, such as Hugo Grotius and Emerich de Vattel, whose treatises on the law of nations are regarded today as having laid the foundations of international law. As this article demonstrates, however, early modern statesmen did not base their conduct on such treatises, but on a customary law of nations that they derived from precedent and the text of earlier treaties. This article elucidates the distinction between the customary and theoretical branches of the law of nations. It then goes on to examine the law of nations’ impact on revolutionary-era diplomacy, drawing particular attention to a series of wartime negotiations over rights to the Mississippi River. As the article shows, most American emissaries lacked experience with the customary laws of diplomacy and struggled to use that law effectively in their negotiations. The most serious consequences were averted due in part to French legal advice, and because one American, John Jay, acquired enough competence in customary law to guide his colleagues toward an effective negotiation of peace.

Central banks have increased their official communications. Previous literature measures complexity, clarity, tone and sentiment. Less explored is the use of fact versus emotion in central bank communication. We test a new method for classifying factual versus emotional language, applying a pretrained transfer learning model, fine-tuned with manually coded, task-specific and domain-specific data sets. We find that the large language models outperform traditional models on some occasions; however, the results depend on a number of choices. We therefore caution researchers from depending solely on such models even for tasks that appear similar. Our findings suggest that central bank communications are not only technically but also subjectively difficult to understand.

Clinical guidelines recommend avoiding the use of medications to manage personality disorder. In clinical practice, however, substantial amounts of medication are used. In this article, we summarise the recommendations of guidelines published in various countries in the past 15 years. We review the evidence from randomised controlled trials and recent reviews, discuss the discordance between guidance and clinical practice and give recommendations on what a clinician should consider if they choose to prescribe in cases of severe disturbances in mood or behaviour despite the lack of evidence.

Together Cæsar and Cotton left an immense trove of English state papers on all matters of subjects. While Cæsar spent much of his lifetime as an officer of state, e.g., Master of the Rolls, they both devised innumerable works of great value. For instance, both he and Cotton expounded upon the issue of the post-nati and other arguments made in the conferences on the union with Scotland in Parliament. With their cessation in 1607, Cæsar undertook his most significant follow-up work: “That neither any General Statute nor Nativity only make a Man (whose Parents were Strangers) to be a Natural Subject in any Country.” Later duplicated by Cotton in Titus, F. IV., the intricacies of its two pages remained long-guarded in the private possession of such great men as Lords, Secretaries of State, and Prime Ministers. Only two centuries after Cæsar commenced its work did it come full circle to the British Museum—itself, ironically, formed from the seized library of Cotton. As for legal precedent, it is unique in that its broad historical scope predated the complexities of England's permanent royal colonies in America. During this period, every regnant—except for Charles I and James II—would assent unto major naturalization or alien statutes during their reign, all of which remained common law throughout England, the Empire, and America until, at the least, 1863.

The period of struggle over hydrocarbon sovereignty in the Arab world –the 1950s-1970s– saw a spate of periodicals in Arabic about oil. These included periodicals produced by the public relations departments of Euro-American oil companies, as well as monthlies, weeklies and quarterlies produced by Arab journalists, experts, and former oil revolutionaries in Cairo, Baghdad, Beirut and Kuwait. This essay argues that the trajectory of these latter publications –both their context and content– traces the massive political transformations that saw a shift of power in the region, alongside a radical transformation in the representation of oil from a public good into a private property.

This article contributes to broader discussions of early Latin American nation-making by focusing on the interplay among territory, sovereignty and human movement in nineteenth-century Central America. How did early Central American nations create sovereign spaces? And how did human movement in turn impact the meanings of bordered spaces? Drawing from constitutions, legal codes and archival documents related to the implementation of migration laws, the central argument of this article is that Central American governments typically treated free migration not as a threat to sovereignty but as an opportunity to reinforce sovereignty over the fixed spaces through which people moved.

We report 27 planktonic and 21 benthic radiocarbon ages from the subtropical marine sediment core ODP Site 1063 (Bermuda Rise) for the time range between 30 and 14 ka before present. Despite low abundances of benthic specimens, it was possible to measure radiocarbon ages down to ∼10 µg carbon using a MICADAS and the gas ion source developed at ETH Zurich. Based on a tentative radiocarbon–independent age-model we found that the radiocarbon reservoir of the bottom water varied moderately relative to the analytical and age-model related uncertainties throughout the examined time-period, but larger differences in the radiocarbon reservoir appear to have affected the upper ocean layer. In particular, radiocarbon levels around Heinrich Stadial 2 reveal surface radiocarbon content similar to that of the atmosphere, while during Heinrich Stadial 1 surface waters were significantly depleted in 14C.

The October 2016 train accident on Cameroon’s main railway line remains shrouded in mystery. The announcement of the derailment before it happened, followed by a denial by the Minister of Transport a few hours later, at the very moment of the accident, has given rise to much speculation. According to testimonies collected in Eséka through fieldwork and the media, this tragic event was interpreted as the result of a witchcraft conspiracy. The inhabitants of the Bassa region, who consider the railway crossing their territory as a cultural heritage, had expressed their discontent with attempts to rationalize the line for some time. These accounts reveal that the disaster was triggered by collective action which unfolded through three distinct phases: labelling, whereby words acquire particular power; harbingers of misfortune; and finally, the bewitchment of the train to ‘zombify’ it, leading to its derailment. In response to these witchcraft imaginaries, the president himself addressed the Bassa’s grievances and requested an adjustment of the train stops, thus demonstrating the performativity of witchcraft and its capacity to put grievances on the agenda and to shape public policies. This article puts forward the idea that witchcraft represents a repertoire from which a community draws to express dissent. Bewitching and zombifying the train to make it derail are, for some actors, a way of signalling to the modern African state that it is not always ‘master in its own house’, that it does not have total control over reality and that it must constantly negotiate its authority.