Between 1880 and 1920 the medical quest to unearth the causes of disease saw two pathbreaking discoveries. One was the bacteriological revolution – the identification of specific germs as causal agents of specific diseases (anthrax, tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera and so on), and the simultaneous effort to develop disinfection techniques and immunisation measures to combat these diseases. The other was the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of heredity and the resulting emergence of medical genetics, where an entire set of medical maladies (deafness, blindness, bodily deformities, haemophilia, Huntington’s chorea, feeble-mindedness and many mental diseases) were identified – rightly or wrongly – as genetically determined. The ‘germ theory of disease’ and the ‘gene theory of disease’ shared striking, all-too-often overlooked similarities. Both theories built on shared epistemological assumptions that influenced their explanatory mechanisms and their overall conceptual frameworks; both mobilised similar visual and linguistic vocabulary; both appropriated – and enforced – prevailing cultural and gender norms; and both enshrined broadly parallel hygienic practices. Reflecting similar social concerns, medical bacteriology and medical genetics acquired kindred scientific and societal configurations, which this paper highlights and scrutinises.

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated a rapid escalation in the use of telepsychiatry. Herein we revisit some of the ethical issues regarding its use, including patient benefice, distributive justice, privacy, and autonomy. Based on these considerations we would hold that telepsychiatry is a vital aspect of providing psychiatric care, and ethically should be offered as a format for treatment, likely beyond the pandemic period. Investigative and advocacy efforts will need to continue to determine its exact role within psychiatric care, and expand its availability for those most in need.

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.