How did the character John Bull come to be so widely recognized as a stand-in for the British government or people? John Arbuthnot created the character in 1712 in a series of five pamphlets criticizing the British role in the War of the Spanish Succession, and for fifty years the character was mentioned only in references to Arbuthnot. In the late eighteenth century, John Bull began to appear in newspaper articles relating to other political contexts, eventually appearing in satires on all manner of British policies and characteristics, from taxes and the economy to xenophobia and imperialism. This essay argues that the American colonists adapted the character to their own purposes. This analysis contributes to the understanding of the content, political engagement, and spread of the press in eighteenth-century Britain and America. It also reveals one way that writers about British national identity and its symbolism accounted for an increasingly diverse global empire that could not be represented adequately by a single figurehead.

The burial of war dead was a key element of displacement and community formation during wartime and postwar China and Taiwan, 1937–1955. Reckoning with the physical burial and spiritual pacification of civilian as well as military dead posed practical and epistemological problems for the tens of millions forced to migrate amid shifting political and military boundaries. Various populations of living and dead refugees became increasingly politicized on the national and international levels, affecting local rituals and family burials. The accumulation of unidentified or lost bodies raised the stakes for the incorporation of the known dead into local, translocal, or national communities. The moral imperative of families and lineages to reconstitute themselves in the aftermath of war was made concrete via the extensive networks of locally-identified charitable organizations who worked to transport coffins back “home” from China's interior. The Nationalist government, meanwhile, prioritized symbolic control over military heroes in ways that ignored or eschewed burial and family ritual. The KMT and those who fled with them to Taiwan in 1949 were then cut off from their national as well as family graves, and struggled to find ritual and practical methods of overcoming or temporarily ameliorating political boundaries, geographic distance, and the passage of time.

This note comments on Szendrői’s (2017) claim that some of the pragmatic constraints on syntactic operations proposed in Trotzke (2015a) are not supported by convincing empirical evidence. Szendrői objects to two empirical points made by Trotzke. I will deal with these points in turn: Section 1 focuses on the syntactic flexibility of idioms discussed by Szendrői, and Section 2 replies to her comments in the domain of island effects.

Historians have long aspired to see beyond the rise and fall of dynasties to the longue durée and the major changes over time in Chinese society. The five empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated books discussed in this essay all share this goal. While they make distinct contributions, they have in common close attention to the relationships between the state, the elite, and local institutions between the late Tang and Qing periods. Reading them together encourages rethinking the state-and-society issues that historians have been debating for a generation. In this essay, after a brief summary of each book's major contributions, I suggest ways they help us conceptualize the long-term processes of continuity and change from the late Tang to the Qing.

Published in 1903 and 1904 the Weekly Critical Review was a typical ‘little magazine’: it was produced on a shoestring with a small readership, with big editorial ambition. Its uniqueness lay in its claim to be a literary tribute to the entente cordiale (and it enjoyed the imprimatur of King Edward VII), but more importantly, it was a bilingual journal, which was rare at the time even for a little magazine. The Weekly Critical Review aimed to produce high-quality criticism and employed at least a dozen high-profile English and French writers and literary critics including Rémy de Gourmont (1858–1915), Arthur Symons (1865–1945) and H.G. Wells (1866–1946). It also published articles and musical news by four leading music critics: English critics Alfred Kalisch (1863–1933), Ernest Newman (1868–1959) and John F. Runciman (1866–1916) and the American James Huneker (1857–1921).

Why did these critics write for the Weekly Critical Review? What did the articles in the WCR reveal about Anglo-French relations, about the aspirations of the English and French music critics who wrote for it, and about the scholarly style of journalism it published – a style that was also characteristic of many other little magazines? And in what ways were those who wrote for it connected? As a case study, I examine the ways in which Ernest Newman’s literary and musical networks brought him into contact with the journal and examine the style of criticism he sought to promote.