For those who by the end of the twentieth century came to be termed “survivors” of child sexual abuse, different genres and forms have been available to narrate and evaluate that abuse. This article explores the reception and practical results of such disclosures: the unpredictable effects of telling, and the strategies of containment, silencing, or disbelief that greeted disclosures. I make note of the ethical challenges of writing the history of child sexual abuse and conclude that twenty-first-century observers have been too ready to perceive much of the previous century as a period of profound silence in relation to child sexual abuse. At the same time, historical and sociological accounts have also been too ready to claim the final third of the twentieth century as a period of compulsive disclosure and fluency in constructing sexual selves. The history of child sexual abuse reveals significant barriers to disclosure in the 1970s and 1980s, despite new visibility of child sexual abuse in the media and through feminist sexual politics. Attention to such obstacles suggests the need to rethink narratives of “permissive” sexual change to acknowledge more fully the ongoing inequities and hierarchies in sexual candor and voice.

From the twelfth and certainly from the thirteenth century onwards, a social group of artisans with their own political and economic aspirations can be clearly delineated in Netherlandish towns. Bound through common skilled work, they made up a distinctive group with a self-image and a developing political vision and economic programme. Their “guild ideology” is increasingly clearly expressed in the sources they produced from the fourteenth century onwards as a self-confident group in urban society. Labour, certainly when organized within guild structures, was the cornerstone of community life, cultural experiences, and practical ethics. Even though there were socioeconomic differences among guildsmen and many geographical and chronological variations in the degree of political power they wielded, the ideal of artisan ideology in the late medieval Low Countries was one of a community of brotherly love and charity centred on the value of skilled labour.

Propaganda from the BBC directed at Italy during the Second World War played a dual role. The ‘Radio Londra’ programmes, on the one hand a propaganda tool of the British government and on the other moral support to many Italians, are part of the cultural heritage of the war. This article explores what topics and types of programme were broadcast during the period of the Allied occupation of Italy (1943–1945) in order to engage the support of different social categories, including ordinary men and women, soldiers, factory workers, former Fascists, and intellectuals. The first part analyses some of the programmes in order to determine their propaganda strategies, while the second part focuses on the letters sent by listeners in Italy to the BBC broadcaster Colonel Stevens. It will be seen how both the use of cultural stereotypes and the attention to the detail of daily life for Italian civilians contributed to the success of the programmes.

In 2015, a Pakistani court in the case of Leghari v. Federation of Pakistan made history by accepting arguments that governmental failures to address climate change adequately violated petitioners’ rights. This case forms part of an emerging body of pending or decided climate change-related lawsuits that incorporate rights-based arguments in several countries, including the Netherlands, the Philippines, Austria, South Africa, and the United States (US). These decisions align with efforts to recognize the human rights dimensions of climate change, which received important endorsement in the Paris Agreement. The decisions also represent a significant milestone in climate change litigation. Although there have been hundreds of climate-based cases around the world over the past two decades – especially in the US – past and much of the ongoing litigation focuses primarily on statutory interpretation avenues. Previous efforts to bring human rights cases have also failed to achieve formal success. The new cases demonstrate an increasing trend for petitioners to employ rights claims in climate change lawsuits, as well as a growing receptivity of courts to this framing. This ‘rights turn’ could serve as a model or inspiration for rights-based litigation in other jurisdictions, especially those with similarly structured law and court access.

This article presents an analysis of the distribution and syntactic behavior of the English expression slash, as in John is a linguist slash musician. The interpretation of this ‘effable slash’ is largely equivalent to intersective and, but it differs from other connective devices like Latin cum, N–N compounding and the orthographic slash </>. A corpus study of American English finds that slash is productive in this use. Its syntactic properties confirm its status as coordinator, but it is distinguished from standard coordinators and and or, in that it imposes category restrictions on the conjuncts: it cannot coordinate full clauses or noun phrases with determiners. I propose that words like slash, period and quote form a class of ‘effable punctuation’ that entered the spoken language from writing. In sum, by incorporating slash into the grammar of English, I argue that slash is a rare example of innovation in a ‘very closed’ functional category.

For almost a month in 1877, the Russian public was engrossed in one of the largest nonpolitical trials in the history of Russian law. An alleged criminal organization dubbed the “Jacks of Hearts Club” (Klub chervonnykh valetov) involved 48 defendants in addition to several who had died or managed to escape, as well as more than 300 witnesses. The charges included dozens of episodes of fraud and forgery committed between 1866 and 1875, in addition to one murder and one count of sacrilege. Even more sensational was the fact that the group of defendants belonged to “respectable” society, among them wealthy merchants, landowning nobles, and even a member of the aristocratic Dolgorukov family. In the Russian popular lexicon, a “Jack of Hearts” became enduring shorthand for a personable young swindler of upper-class origins. Over the years, the story grew in the telling, with some of the legends travelling from author to author, such as the story of Pavel Speier, the alleged leader of the club who supposedly tricked a naïve English tourist into “buying” the official residence of the Moscow governor general on Tverskaia Street.

This article examines the impact of the Paris Agreement on the human rights of communities who are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of anthropogenic warming because of their geographical location, their spiritual and cultural connections with land and the wider environment, and their histories of colonialism, dispossession and other forms of exploitation. It focuses on two groups: forest dwellers, and inhabitants of small island developing states who are in danger of inundation as a result of rising sea levels. The Paris Agreement on climate change includes stand-alone articles on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), and loss and damage. The main argument in this article is that the inclusion of human rights in the Preamble to the Paris Agreement is a step forward, but is incommensurate with the scale and urgency of climate change.