Chinese men working as servants in colonial Singapore were a largely unregulated group of workers and, as a result, few traces of their lives have been preserved in the colonial archive. Rare cases in which Chinese domestic workers were accused of murder compelled the colonial state to directly intervene in their lives. This article explores the experiences of Chinese migrant men who worked as domestic servants in Singapore by analysing three murders that occurred between the 1910s and the 1930s. Details of the crimes and the arrests, along with the processes of conviction and sentencing, were reported in detail in the local newspapers. In addition, testimonies of the accused and of witnesses were preserved in Coroner's Court records. This rich criminal archive is used to shed light upon aspects of domestic servants’ lives that would otherwise remain obscure.

Using an analysis of time series data over an extended period, this article describes the waning strength of the left-wing vote in Italy's ‘red regions’. By analysing changes to the provincial share of the vote for successive principal left-wing parties over the period 1953–2018, the degree of continuity in relation to the left's traditional territorial entrenchment is assessed. It becomes clear that after an extended period of minimal change, in more recent years there has been an increasing disruption of previous patterns. A thorough analysis of voter transitions during the 2001–19 period in Umbria, the first red region in which the left lost control of the regional government, shows that in this case the gradual weakening of the traditional left-wing ‘vote of belonging’ has experienced a dramatic acceleration during the more recent period. This has been expressed in a growing rate of abstention, vote-switching according to the type of electoral contest, and a marked propensity to vote for populist movements and parties on both the left and right.

This article tells the story of the dog teams of the British Antarctic Expedition 1910–13. Its purpose is to establish an accurate record of sledge dog involvement in the expedition. It is not concerned with hypotheses about how a better outcome for the expedition might have been achieved, aiming simply to assemble and analyse verifiable evidence in chronological order. A substantial amount of research has been undertaken. Straightforward details about procurement of the dogs and their main Antarctic journeys have been summarised in tabular form as an accessible reference source for future work. A literature review has been undertaken, finding that none of the reviewed works accurately traces the evolving plans and instructions for the expedition’s dog teams. The story starts with Scott’s September 1909 public fundraising prospectus and goes on to the procurement and training of Huskies from Siberia. It traces the challenges, achievements, attitudes and management decisions that shaped the dogs’ main journeys. It finishes with Terra Nova leaving the Antarctic, with the last 13 dogs in January 1913. The dog teams and their handlers performed well in the Antarctic and successfully completed three of their four main journeys. They made a substantial contribution to the expedition.

This paper investigates the syntax–semantics interface within the domain of the realization of applied objects in Bantu languages, and I argue that the syntactic structure and semantic contribution of a given argument-licensing functional head (here, the applicative) do not covary. Specifically, I show that in principle, both high and low applicatives can (and should) be available with any type of applicative and not tied to a specific semantics (such as transfer of possession) or thematic role, as proposed in earlier work. Furthermore, I reject the centrality of thematic roles as a component of grammar that determines the grammatical function of applied objects, and I propose instead a typology of Bantu applied objects based on their semantic and morphological properties. This approach makes several predictions about applied objects: (i) syntactic and semantic diagnostics for high and low applicatives need not pattern together, (ii) syntactic asymmetry (such as c-command) can arise for applied objects which pattern symmetrically with other diagnostics (such as passivization), and (iii) the type of an applied object does not universally capture symmetry properties cross-linguistically. The view put forward in this paper provides a framework that can better capture this type of variation with object symmetry in Bantu languages as well as language-internal facts about applied objects; more generally, this paper sheds light on the nature of the syntax–semantic interface by showing that the meaning of a functional head is not necessarily determined by its syntactic position.

Popular publications produced in Russia on the events in the Balkans in 1877–78 offer a valuable opportunity to examine how the historical and political background of the Russo-Turkish War was conveyed to common readers, some of whom were potentially involved in the military action, or persuaded to support the cause by other means. The conceptions produced and distributed in these booklets were firmly based on pan-Slavistic ideas of Russians’ duty to help their “Slavic brothers.” The publications presented the reader with propagandistic images of Turkish enemies, which were compared to Islamic enemies of the Russian national narrative. The result was persuasive and simplified imagery leaning on dualistic representations of ethnic groups and graphic depictions of violence, effectively justifying Russia’s involvement in the events and taking a stand in the internal issues concerning Muslim minorities, too.

This squib presents two challenges for the analysis of promise-type verbs within the Movement Theory of Control. We show that the objects of these verbs in Russian are not prepositional and are incorrectly predicted to be legitimate controllers. We also argue against analysing oblique control as movement.

While the Victorian ideal of the public park is well understood, we know less of how local governors sought to realize this ideal in practice. This article is concerned with park-making as a process – contingent, unstable, open – rather than with parks as outcomes – determined, settled, closed. It details how local governors bounded, designed and regulated park spaces to differentiate them as ‘spaces apart’ within the city, and how this programme of spatial governance was obstructed, frustrated and diverted by political, environmental and social forces. The article also uses this historical analysis to provide a new perspective on the future prospects of urban parks today.

In an article with the challenging title ‘Against Realism’, Alan O'Leary and Catherine O'Rawe (2011) argued that Italian cinema studies needed to move forward. In their view, the abuse of ‘realism’ as a prescriptive as well as descriptive term had stunted research into Italian cinema of the postwar period, channelling it exclusively towards neorealist trends and thus devaluing study of the other forms, movements, auteurs and productions that emerged during the same period. This historiographical tendency, which Christopher Wagstaff aptly called the ‘institution of neorealism’ (2007, 37), encouraged the development of reverential study and by the 1960s had assumed the form of a canon. While the position taken by O'Leary and O'Rawe was certainly provocative, it has served to stimulate thinking about the areas of postwar Italian cinema that had remained in the shadows and unexplored. Starting to focus on an ‘other’ cinema has not had to mean ‘forgetting’ neorealism, but has brought changes to the way that it is studied. Almost ten years later, the challenge seems to be to rethink neorealism as a transnational phenomenon that straddles different periods, genres and contexts; while it has its roots in postwar European culture, it continues to be influential on a global level.

This article examines Paolo Sorrentino's portrayal of moral degradation and pursuit of power in his twin biopics about Silvio Berlusconi: Loro 1 and Loro 2 (2018). It does so by performing a psychological reading of Sorrentino's representation of Berlusconi, as someone suffering from a personality disorder characterised by excessive power striving. It argues that this obsession with power also affects most of the films’ characters, who become obsessed with entering Berlusconi's inner circle – the pinnacle of wealth and power in a neoliberal society. In particular, it argues that their power striving circulates ‘virally’ in the film's narrative; the characters are willing to do anything to befriend their idol and attain absolute power. The ensuing analysis shows that Sorrentino's portrayal of Berlusconi – as the embodiment of a highly dysfunctional and obsessive, viral quest for power – comes to represent the deep pervasiveness of corruption, hedonism and commodification that marked the Second Republic.

I suggest that Sidgwick, in his controversial “distinction passage,” has Schopenhauer in mind as someone who denies egoism on the ground that there are no separate individuals. I then reconstruct Sidgwick's argument in the passage. I take him to be defending a presupposition of the case for choosing egoism over utilitarianism. He is claiming that there are separate individuals. I close by rejecting alternative interpretations, on which Sidgwick is arguing directly for egoism.

In the late eighteenth century, Montevideo evolved from a small colonial town dependent on Buenos Aires into the main Atlantic port in the region. Networks connecting Montevideo to Luso-Brazilian merchants turned Montevideo into a hub for trans-imperial trade. Between 1778 and 1810, thousands of Spanish and foreign ships entered the port of Montevideo. As a result, although economically dependent on Buenos Aires’ commercial community, Montevideo merchants and authorities managed to use their privileged port, newly created institutions and trans-imperial networks to advance the city's commercial and political role within the estuary. The emergence of Montevideo as an Atlantic port city with global connections was not an isolated event, but a part of a broader process of growing global trade and political transformation.

When on 8 March 2020 lockdown was declared in Lombardy, I had a national flag in a drawer waiting for 17 March – the birthday of unified Italy – to be hung down from my balcony just for one single day. Suddenly it seemed to me very natural to begin the ritual early, fixing it carefully and looking at it while it was moving softly in the mild evening breeze, amidst the surreal silence of the neighbourhood riven only by so many, too many ambulance sirens: a suspended time, a time of fear and resistance that I was sharing physically with my fellow citizens, and virtually, with my relatives, friends and colleagues living far away.

Despite the recent flurry of revisionism in Schumann biography, the last months of his career are still misunderstood. Biographers describe a gradual psychological decline, which led to Schumann's removal from his position. But there is no evidence that Schumann was suffering from mental illness before 10 February 1854. According to Clara's diary and correspondence, Schumann was healthy and contented in the fall of 1853, and his psychotic break came as a shock. Two recently published sources – a report to the Düsseldorf city council and correspondence between Schumann and a Berlin colleague – suggest that Schumann decided to resign and seek his fortune elsewhere. The fall of 1853 was one of the most prolific periods in his career and he may have felt that he could support his family on his earnings as a composer. Schumann's resignation was not the irrational response of a desperate man, but a reasonable course of action.

We introduce the China Government Employee Database—Qing (CGED-Q), a new resource for the quantitative study of Qing officialdom. The CGED-Q details the backgrounds, characteristics and careers of Qing officials who served between 1760 and 1912, with nearly complete coverage of officials serving after 1830. We draw information on careers from the Roster of Government Personnel (jinshenlu), which in each quarterly edition listed approximately 12,500 regular civil offices and their holders in the central government and the provinces. Information about backgrounds and characteristics comes from such linked sources as lists of exam degree holders. In some years, information on military officials is also available. As of February 2020, the CGED-Q comprises 3,817,219 records, of which 3,354,897 are civil offices and the remainder are military. In this article we review the progress and prospects of the project, introduce the sources, transcription procedures, and constructed variables, and provide examples of results to showcase its potential.