It is not without a certain irony that Nikisch's predecessor at the Royal Opera in Budapest was none other than his former subordinate in Leipzig: Gustav Mahler. Mahler's move to Budapest was in no small measure prompted by rivalry issues with Nikisch over the conducting of Leipzig's Ring cycle. Whilst not without its difficulties, Mahler's two-year stint at the Hungarian Royal Opera was marked by some notable achievements, including going some way towards the establishment of a Hungarian national opera. Predictably, however, his tenure quickly foundered as the irresistible force of his tempestuous creativity came up against the immovable object of the theatre management in the person of Hungarian nationalist sympathiser Count Géza von Zichy (1849-1924). Zichy's appointment as Intendant came with increased powers that directly challenged Mahler's own. This Mahler could not tolerate, and he resigned from his post at the end of March 1891.

Mahler's departure was followed by a two-year hiatus during which Zichy tightened his grip on all aspects of the Opera's administration before, on 9 April 1893, the Hungarian press announced Nikisch's appointment as Music Director, some three weeks prior to his final appearance as Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.2 On 6 June the press reported that Nikisch had visited Count Zichy at his country estate in Tetélen to discuss future plans.3 Money, Nikisch was told, was tight, and even at this early stage his ambitions were likely to be tempered by severe financial constraints.

A grounding is when a ship strikes the seabed, while a stranding is when the ship then remains there for some length of time.

Running aground could be one of the most disastrous misadventures to befall a ship, the situation requiring prompt and strong action by the officers as the vessel could quickly break up. Furthermore, as the crisis evolved the crew could become disorderly. Sailing across the open seas of the Bay of Bengal presented few dangers of groundings. But weaving one's way through the Andaman Archipelago, the South China Sea and the straits of the Malay Archipelago was a different matter. It was a beautiful region of verdant tropical islands, sandy beaches and azure seas but presented numerous navigational challenges. Between 1805 and 1819, there were fourteen Protests lodged by British country traders at Malacca relating to groundings or strandings, ten of which occurred in the Malacca Strait or the Singapore Strait.

Surprisingly, in his India Directory, starting from the first edition of 1809–11, Horsburgh downplayed the dangers in the Malacca Strait: ‘To persons unacquainted, Malacca Strait appears an intricate navigation, but as the channels are mostly spacious, with good anchorage, it is certainly not dangerous, if common prudence is observed. Many ships keep under way day and night, in most parts of the strait, and often pass through, without anchoring above once or twice.’

Why then, at the turn of the nineteenth century were vessels still running aground in Malay waters? What were the navigation tools available?

It has been estimated that Winston Churchill ‘published 6.1 million words in thirty-seven books’ – more words than ‘Shakespeare and Dickens combined’. Aware that deeds, however glorious, were ephemeral, he insisted that ‘words are the only things which last forever’. Hence the zeal to compose those words himself. Indeed, David Cannadine has described his ‘extraordinary career’ as ‘one sustained, brightly lit and scarcely interrupted monologue’. That bon mot about leaving the past to history yet being its historian was reprised on several occasions. Lacking any faith in an afterlife, Churchill believed his only guarantee of immortality was personally to inscribe himself into history. And he did that, above all, in six volumes of memoirs on The World Crisis of 1914–23 and then in his more celebrated six-pack on The Second World War. This essay will outline his idiosyncratically collaborative working methods, his learning trajectory between the two works and his unrivalled achievement in transmuting his story into public history.

What we now know as The World Crisis emerged piecemeal between 1923 and 1931, when Churchill was an active politician, including service as Chancellor of the Exchequer for nearly five years. The volumes lack the coherence of the later set, most of which covered his war premiership, but they do reveal some enduring strategic principles and authorial methods.

Legal proceedings concerning Captain Francis Balston and his voyage of 1820 in the Lady Flora are of interest as an illustration of the restrictions under which private trade took place and the sort of legal argument that could be advanced. Although this matter does not involve a Protest at Malacca, Balston had in the past availed himself of the facility, once in 1816 as captain of the James Drummond and again in 1818 when he commanded the Lady Flora.

In 1820 Balston took the Lady Flora, owned by John Palmer, in ballast from Calcutta to Canton under special licence from the EIC to take on a cargo of tea there and bring it back to Calcutta or ‘any intermediate port’. Instead, the ship took on not tea but other goods at Canton, then proceeded to Batavia to take on more cargo and then to the Cape of Good Hope, arriving on 20 January 1821. Here the Comptroller of Customs, Mr Bird, after taking advice and in conjunction with Mr Luson, the EIC Resident, arrested the ship and refused permission to land the cargo, alleging an infringement of the terms of the ship's licence. However, the suit brought by the Fiscal General in the Court of Justice for condemnation of the ship and cargo was lost; the ship was returned to Balston and the cargo unloaded on 27 February.

Not content with this outcome, later described as ‘an indulgence to which … [he] was not entitled’, Balston brought actions against both Bird and Luson for damages resulting from the delay in unloading the cargo.

Performance and theatricality have been prominent throughlines in David Cannadine's studies of institutions and individuals, whether the context has been royal pageantry, class society, imperial spectacle, civic ritual, academic ceremony, oratorical heroics, architectural splendour or family drama. In a similar spirit, this essay considers the consequential theatrics and theatrical consequences of Benjamin Disraeli in nineteenth-century political culture and beyond. Viewing Disraeli as a performer above all else is hardly a new insight. Oscar Wilde, (in)famously performative in his own right, thought Disraeli ‘played a brilliant comedy to a “pit full of Kings”, and was immensely pleased at his own performance’. The ‘ceremonial impresario’ Lord Curzon hailed him as ‘an actor in the guise of a politician’. Historians and biographers have shown great consistency on this point: Robert Blake called Disraeli ‘a superb actor’ and ‘an impresario and an actor manager’; forty years later, William Kuhn showed him using ‘the drama of his personality to woo and win the House’. Indeed, it is difficult to find any account of Disraeli that does not in some way assert that he was an actor.

Perhaps, then, it is no accident that Disraeli's ascent to the top of the proverbial greasy pole happened in the years after 1867, when one commentator observed that the theatre ‘occupied a larger place in the national consciousness’ than early in Victoria's reign. The Victorian era saw the theatre's historic disrepute recede, thanks in part to figures like William Charles Macready, the leading tragedian of the 1830s and 40s, who worked hard to promote an image of professional seriousness and respectability.

Sea routes connecting Africa and its diaspora and the syndicalist and socialist world left deep marks on Cape Town, a port city at the intersection of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans that provided fertile soil for an emergent New Left. Sprawled around the flat-topped Table Mountain and adjoining Devil's Peak and Lion's Head Mountains, the city hosted diverse discussion clubs, facilitating the development of autodidact intellectuals who followed world events and produced a vibrant socialist culture with communist, Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist currents. This anti-Stalinism reflected opposition to both the oppressive and exploitative Soviet bureaucracy as well as the local Communist Party's practice and growing influence in the ANC. The speeches and writings of Unity Movement intellectuals in the 1940s–1950s and the Forum Club's 1950s journal Discussion provide a few examples of their significant socialist and left-radical theorizing.

The vehemently anti-Stalinist Unity Movement played a crucial role in this ‘global thinking’ that reflected the interrelationship of international and local dynamics. It was led by the charismatic Isaac Tabata, a Lovedale andFort Hare College-educated intellectual and isiXhosa-English orator born in 1909 at Bailey, near Queenstown. In 1943 Tabata and other Marxists in the tiny Workers Party of South Africa launched the Unity Movement. A federal organization, the Unity Movement sought to link African, Coloured and Indian organizations through a democratic platform in the hope of undermining the state-imposed sectional divisions. Its two main affiliates were the eastern Cape-based All-African Convention (AAC) and the western Cape-based movement against the Coloured Affairs Department (CAD) – the Anti-CAD movement.

Thinking as poeisis

By the mid-eleventh century the cathedral city of Liège was the intellectual capital of the Rhineland, greater than Chartres or any other center of learning in northern Europe. Scholar-monks from elsewhere, including Sedulius Scottus from Ireland, often fleeing marauding raids on their monasteries in vulnerable coastal areas, had come to Lotharingian Liège in the mid-ninth century. By the early eleventh century, despite a rocky century involving various wars and insurrections, fierce ongoing quarrels with the papacy over rights of clerical investiture, and issues of legitimacy among the Rhenish warlords who constituted the Ottonian kingdoms, Liège entered its most illustrious period, especially under a particularly energetic, effective scholar-bishop, Notger (d. 1008), a contemporary of Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II, d. 1003).

The later eleventh to mid-thirteenth centuries were a most productive period not only for scholarship in the textual and logico-literary arts of the trivium but also in the mathematical arts of the quadrivium, including music and geometry. This occurred in monastic, contemplative circles, especially among Carthusians, Cistercians, Victorines, and, as lay religious culture increased into the late thirteen- and fourteenth centuries, among the religious solitaries such as anchorites, lay mystics, and among various orders of friars, especially Augustinians and Franciscans, and very often women, in religious orders and not. In this final chapter I will examine a few of the many inventive formae tractandae using a great variety of geometricala, not just the familiar biblical ones, taught and used mainly in monastic and cathedral circles for productive meditation. My choices are certainly not comprehensive, but I hope they may be fruitful for other scholars in their own studies.

Cultural studies, leaning upon discussions in the social sciences, teaches us that there are binaries in the societies in which we live and define the spaces in which we circulate, the opportunities we have, and the representation we receive in public and private narratives. This can sometimes be read as the difference between teachers and students, the young and the old, the wealthy and the poor, the hegemonic and the marginal. We also learn that within these categories there are other binaries that divide them even further (students at the top of the class and those at the bottom, those that are marginalized for one reason and those that are for two or more reasons). These categorizations can continue ad infinitum. The key point to draw from this is that certain groups (normally those most hegemonic) receive more representation in society in terms of voice, power, place in history, and so forth. Those that fall into the category of the Other tend to receive less representation.

The definition of the Other that this study will use to focus its arguments is that their identity is forged from difference. This difference in power leaves the Other in the position of marginality or dispossession. It is possible to understand the Other to be the subordinate of any binary (Barker 155). Photography has a strong capacity to represent the Other, to give it another place in history. It can reveal lesser seen aspects of the lives of the Other and can broaden the understanding of the entire society in which the reader lives, works, or studies. For this reason, this chapter will consider how photography relates narratives of the Other that offer important insights and opportunities for seeing this sector of Latin America with greater confidence and increased detail, enabling renewed reflection and facilitating deeper study.

It was not only in the cities of the German Empire that national consciousness and self-regard found expression in the form of grandiose architectural statements. In London the process had begun when Prince Albert (1819-61), Queen Victoria's German-born consort, proposed the establishment in South Kensington of ‘a group of permanent facilities for public benefit'. The focal point was to be the circular Royal Albert Hall, completed in 1870 and opened on 29 March 1871 by Queen Victoria in person.

Amongst the first visitors from abroad to perform in the new arena was the unlikely figure of Anton Bruckner, who on 2 August 1871 gave a recital on the recently completed ‘Father’ Henry Willis organ of music by Bach and Handel and, intriguingly, an ‘Improvisation on English Folk Melodies'. Six years later in the summer of 1877 the Albert Hall was the venue for a series of concerts given by none other than Richard Wagner, assisted by Hans Richter, in an ultimately fruitless attempt to raise funds to pay off the debts incurred by the first Bayreuth Festival of the previous year. Over all this presided the gilded figure of Prince Albert, who since 1876 had gazed sphinx-like from beneath Gilbert Scott's elaborate baldachin over the area of London which came to be known by the affectionate soubriquet of ‘Albertopolis'. The stage was set for an upsurge in interest in opera and symphonic music which in the closing years of the century was to bring conductors steeped in the Austro-German tradition to increasing prominence in the heart of the British capital.

The connection of spinning, weaving, and binding with both generative and destructive agency in peaceweaving, healing, and deathweaving is paralleled in particular in the Old English corpus by both generative and destructive weaving of a more cosmic sort: the weaving of creation and the forces of nature and the spinning, weaving, and binding of fate. I will discuss each in its turn with an eye to the textual, linguistic, material, and analogical environment in which it is situated. The discussion, in particular, of wyrd and related terms is complicated by many years of scholarly attention and a large array of evidence, and I will take a fresh and relatively unique look at this evidence and the novel patterns that emerge in the abundant fatal textile imagery in Old English and Anglo-Latin literature, often mirroring patterns in associated classical and medieval cultures.

Weaving Forces of Nature: Creation and Water-Weaving

Among the many riddles of the Exeter Book are found references to metaphorical, cosmic weaving by forces of nature. The first appears in Riddle 40. The narrator, personified “creation,” describes its influence and mode of generative action: ic uttor eaþe eal ymbwinde, / wrætlice gewefen wundorcræfte “I easily wind around outside all things, wondrously woven with marvellous power” (84–5). “Creation” acts in concert with God, whose power alone it respects, as it winds and is woven throughout the world.