Chapter 2 considers the desire to escape impressionism which shaped Yeats’s early writings. Yeats’s formative visual interests are usually discussed in terms of the tastes he inherited from his Pre-Raphaelite father, but in his early verse and criticism he would often also express hatred for, and a desire to escape, French art of the later nineteenth century. In his writings of the 1890s and 1900s, it is the paintings of Édouard Manet which most disturb Yeats, appearing repeatedly to threaten his early theories of symbolism. Time and again, Yeats strove to counter them with the art of Titian, which came to serve as a paradigm for his own evolving poetics. The present chapter considers the antagonism in Yeats’s thought between modern French painting and the art of the Renaissance, as well as the cognate binaries (of hard outline against glimmering colour, unity against disunity) this came to encompass, before exploring their formative influence on the symbolist poetics he was developing at the turn of the century.

Cuba’s current economic struggles are due to a number of factors. These include an economic structure resulting from colonialism and neocolonialism and Cuba’s geopolitical alliance with the Soviet Union, which had mixed results in terms of economic performance. In the twenty-first century, there have been attempts in Cuba at market-oriented structural reforms, without a great deal of success. Thus far, these reforms have not shown major significant macroeconomic effects. However, it cannot plausibly be denied that Cuba’s post-1959 development strategy has been severely impacted by the system of unilateral economic sanctions imposed by the US. The US’s system of unilateral coercive economic sanctions disrupts Cuba’s international economic relations by making it expensive and risky for other countries to do business with the island and causing Cuba’s investment in infrastructure to perform below expectations. Sanctions create obstacles to accessing new technologies and foreign direct investment for key sectors of the Cuban economy, such as biotechnology and tourism, both of which are important elements of Cuba’s development strategy. Consequently, the US system of unilateral coercive measures affects Cuba’s overall economic health, has inflicted considerable damage to the Cuban population, and has interfered in many ways with the realization of Cuba’s development goals, violating the island nation’s right to development.

The complexity of international economic sanctions, breach of which can carry severe penalties, is well known to cause banks and other financial institutions to “de-risk” in relation to sanctioned countries. The practice of denying financial services to entire classes of people prevents those who need to transfer funds to or from sanctioned countries from accessing traditional banking channels, often leading them to rely instead on Informal Value Transfer Systems (IVTS). Where IVTS service providers are not properly licensed, customers increasingly risk being targeted by law enforcement agencies under wide-ranging civil forfeiture laws. The chapter considers how this state of affairs has developed, with a focus on members of the Iranian diaspora who seek to transfer money between Iran and the UK and US. Two individual case studies are considered and the authors address the treatment of those caught in the crosshairs of sanctions and anti-money laundering measures and some of the remedies available to them.

The Afterword considers a passage from Clive Bell’s seminal book of modernist art criticism, Art (1914), in which he puzzles over whether to describe impressionism as an art-historical end-point, while also expressing a deeper uncertainty about the ends of impressionism itself. In particular, he returns to the question that had baffled critics at the inaugural impressionist exhibition in 1874, and which has been a source of vexation to scholarship ever since: the question of whether impressionism is imaginative and self-expressive, or imitative and bound to the external world. By following the twists and turns in Bell's thought, the Afterword reflects on the irregular significance of impressionism to the writers discussed in the present study, before gesturing to its continued importance for the writers who followed them.

Chapter 2 explains how in constructing quantum mechanics, old ideas had to be discarded and well-established principles had to be modified or even abandoned. First it was necessary to be convinced of the physical reality of the atomic structure of matter; then to show that Newtonian mechanics is not directly applicable to the study of the atom; later to show that Maxwell’s electrodynamics alone does not describe all the elementary processes of interaction between an atom and other quantum particles. The chapter takes us from Planck’s energy quantum to Einstein’s quantization as a universal phenomenon, from Bohr’s quantum atom model, and the early quantization rules, to de Broglie’s waves associated with corpuscles in motion. It ends with a corollary on the electrodynamic nature of quantum mechanics.

This chapter addresses some of the many ways that unilateral coercive measures run counter to international human rights law. Such measures may directly compromise the human rights to health, education, economic and social rights, and the right to development as well as sustainable development goals. The chapter addresses the expanding practice of the use of unilateral sanctions, provides an assessment of the possibility of imposing unilateral sanctions as countermeasures or retorsions, and provides an overview of the humanitarian impact of different types of sanctions on different categories of human rights. It looks at the recent developments in sanctioning practice. In particular, as targeted sanctions are usually presented as a good alternative to the comprehensive ones, minimizing humanitarian impact of unilateral measures, the chapter addresses the grounds for targeted unilateral sanctions, assesses their impact on the human rights of directly designated individuals, as well as other people and targeted populations in general. It concludes that listings of individuals regularly run counter to the right to due process. Additionally, most recently unilateral sanctions have compromised internet access, which in turn undermines access to many essential services.

Chapter 17 begins by approaching the general problem of a quantum system subject to a time-dependent perturbation. We then apply perturbation theory to the interaction of atomic matter with the radiation field and derive the most important radiative corrections. Atomic transitions – both induced and spontaneous – are discussed in detail, with some important applications. The formal introduction of field quantization allows us to make contact with quantum electrodynamics and quantum optics and discuss the Jaynes–Cummings model. Stochastic electrodynamics, in which the matter–field interaction is not a perturbation but is present ab initio, is used to explain atomic stability and its breakdown leading to radiative transitions. In the same spirit, the quantization of the field is physically justified by deriving the conventionally postulated field operators and their basic commutators. The chapter ends with a brief introduction to second quantization, an elegant and powerful formalism for describing and analyzing quantum many-body systems.