Several writers, beginning with Gustav Nottebohm, have made mention of a movement entitled ‘la gaiete’ that was at one stage intended for Beethoven's String Quartet in E-flat, Op. 127, but none of them have previously given a full account of this movement. It appears in several sketch sources, notably Artaria 206 (currently in Kraków), and although it was not incorporated into the final version of the quartet, it played an important role in shaping the slow movement of the work. It also had an indirect influence on the coda of the finale. Its precise function in the creation of the quartet becomes much clearer through a detailed study of Beethoven's sketches, which are scattered in many different sources and appear in four formats that run concurrently, making assessment of them difficult. Examining the sketches for the movement also throws light on the chronological relationship between the various sketch sources. Contrary to some accounts, the movement appears never to have been part of a planned six-movement scheme for the work – a scheme that was extremely fleeting and only one of many possibilities for the work's structure.

While many theories of well-being are able to capture some of our central intuitions about well-being, e.g. avoiding alienation worries, they typically do so at the cost of not being able to capture others, e.g. explaining deprivation. However, both of these intuitions are important and any comprehensive theory of well-being ought to attempt to strike the best balance in responding to both concerns. In light of this, I develop and defend a theory of well-being which holds that our well-being depends, in part, on the nature of our well-being qua person, a class whose members are defined by their possessing certain cognitive and volitional capacities including those capacities constitutive of autonomy. I argue that this ‘person-centred’ theory of well-being is able to address concerns about alienation and deprivation, along with capturing the importance of autonomy to well-being, better than many popular subjective and objective theories of well-being.

Since at least 2001 Ken McGoogan has been claiming that in discovering Rae Strait in 1854 John Rae also discovered the final link in the northwest passage. This claim is false, in that a substantial section of the passage further north, some 240 km in length (between Bellot Strait and where James Clark Ross had found the north magnetic pole) was still undiscovered in 1854. On the basis of McGoogan's false claim Mr. Alistair Carmichael, MP for Orkney and Shetland, has been pursuing a campaign to have a corrective plaque installed near the Franklin cenotaph in Westminster Abbey to the effect that Rae, and not Franklin, discovered the northwest passage. The Dean of Westminster and the Abbey authorities have decided that a simple tablet with the words ‘John Rae; arctic explorer’ but with no further elaboration, will be installed in the Abbey near the Franklin cenotaph.

If pleasure is more open than pain to a double definition, first as a real sensation, second as a more indirect impression, it is clear that the calculus – the advantages of which Bentham praised so fulsomely − cannot be identical for pleasure and pain alike. Sensations may be combined in the infinitesimal calculus in a substantive way, but this is impossible for the more indirect reflective impressions, which require other sorts of mathematics. For Bentham, it is not a question of eschewing calculation, but of facilitating it, perhaps through a probability calculus in a Bayesian or subjective style. The theory of fictions permits the combination or substitution of the two aspects of pleasure, so that what seems to be an ambiguity in Bentham's approach to pleasure is really an attempt to render the concept useful, that is, capable of utilization in calculations bearing on important areas of practical policy.

In this article I use the case of mountains to explore the ways in which the Fascist regime articulated its vision of nature/human relationships. I will show how mountains were considered as creative environments which could produce a special type of people: the montanari (mountaineers), meaning with this word mountain villagers rather than mountain climbers. The Fascist regime praised people from the mountains – especially from the Alps - as the true and better stock of Italians; that environment made them strong, healthy, pure, and disciplined, as the rhetoric of the Great War had supported. The Fascist regime celebrated the virtues of montanari by birth, those who were born and raised in the mountains, but it also aimed at employing the creative power of nature in its plan to shape the new Italian. In the article I show how the regime employed mountains in its discourses and practices of ‘bonifica umana’ (human reclamation) which involved both body and soul. In the Fascist narratives, mountains were the open air gymnasium for building a stronger man, a living archive of ruralism for reproducing the true Italian, and the secular church of the collective memory for the making of national subjects. The blend of nature, culture, and politics in the Fascist discourse on mountains and people is at the core of this article.

This contribution to the special issue focuses on newsreels and documentaries that were produced concerning the Second Italo–Ethiopian War (1935–1936), commonly known as the Abyssinian War. It aims to contextualise LUCE's filmic production on the war, so as to create a framework in which the institute can be understood not only as being part of a wider politics of propaganda in Fascist Italy, but as an example of a modern socio-technical organisation that enabled the discursive construction of East African nature as ‘Other’ and therefore helped to justify colonial war as a process of sanitised creative destruction aimed at replacing a previous, negative ‘first nature’ with a positive, Fascist and Italian ‘second nature’. The article draws on archival documents from Mussolini's government cabinet, and on LUCE documentaries and newsreels; these sources are used to create a background against which LUCE's concern with the Second Italo–Ethiopian War can be understood.