In the proposed final chapter of the unfinished Pictures and Conversations, Elizabeth Bowen intended to answer the question of whether there ‘is anything uncanny involved in the process of writing?’ For the many writers who appear in her fiction, writing certainly is an uncanny process, capable of mirroring the self and manipulating others. Markie, in To the North, writes on scraps of paper to enact his predatory aims; in The Death of Heart, St Quentin accuses Portia of using her diary to ‘precipitate things’. As Bowen puts the matter, for ‘the writer, writing is eventful; one might say it is in itself eventfulness’. While such uncanny eventfulness would seem to grant the writer an immense power, writing in Bowen’s novels – be it letters, diaries, or novels – often takes on a troubling life of its own. Markie and Portia eventually find themselves thwarted by the after-effects of their writing. Given the tendency of writing to dangerously stray, it is little wonder that so many of Bowen’s writers, such as Iseult Arble in Eva Trout, never complete their masterpieces.

This chapter focuses on those parts of animals that are deformed, useless, harmful, or ‘weird,’ and that thereby challenge Aristotle’s teleological view that the sublunary world and the animals in it are beautiful on the grounds that they are functional, and that they are therefore worthy of our study as well. My account will present three different types of teleological failure that Aristotle identifies in the production processes of animals with such ‘bad’ parts, one of which attributes ‘genuine’ mistakes or oversights to the formal natures crafting these animals. The chapter argues that especially this third type of mistake signals a methodological weakness in the explanatory project of the Parts of Animals as a whole, namely that it overextends Aristotle’s theory of natural teleology to features that could have been explained more satisfactorily by reference to chance or necessity alone.

Analyzes the outcomes of my cases and argues that the use of armed force is very unlikely to result in military or political success.

Reviews the empirical and conceptual findings, makes forecasts about the future likelihood of the use of force in each category of conflict, the role of learning and non-learning in the decline of war, why the great powers are still more committed to the use of force than other states, and the prospects for weaning them from violence.

In creative work, as all of life, failure is inevitable. In this chapter, artists talk about how they feel about failure, how they incorporate it into their future work, and how it affects their attitudes toward creativity. They discuss how it can open new areas of creativity that they might otherwise not have considered. The artists also share their definitions of failure, which vary widely. Some artists dwell on failure regularly while others try their best to avoid such thoughts. They also talk about how they cope with failure.

Neuromuscular disorders cause respiratory failure when they significantly impair the respiratory muscle pump. This is a complex system involving the diaphragm, intercostal, neck, shoulder girdle, abdominal wall and possibly paraspinal muscles. The dilator muscles of the palate, pharynx and larynx maintain a patent airway and air conduit. The diaphragm is the main muscle of inspiration, but is aided by the parasternal intercostals, and additionally by the accessory respiratory muscles in forceful inspiration, diaphragmatic weakness or compromised diaphragmatic function as is the case in lung emphysema. Exhalation is passive, but forceful expiration and cough require the abdominal wall and a portion of the intercostals. This chapter focuses on the physiology of the muscles involved in respiration, and the recognition of developing neuromuscular respiratory failure, its clinical evaluation and assessment, and basic principles of management.

This chapter looks at the history of climate change, the failure to act, systemic thinking and truth.

The introduction sets out how Mike came to write the book, why it is so important for us to face up to the challenges ahead for humanity, how dismally we have so far failed to do so, how the book is structured and what kind of future we can hope for.

This chapter aims to understand the entrepreneurial perspective on legal innovation. How do those who create legal innovation make the services and products that improve the way law is used? The conversation centres on topics such as passion for innovation, identifying needs for new products and services, dealing with failure, keys to success in the market, innovation networks, regulatory approaches to innovation and innovation in the financial services industry. The chapter also considers aspects of innovation that are particular to legal services. Among them are the creation and availability of legal datasets for the application of artificial intelligence and the transferability of legal innovation to other jurisdictions with different laws.

My final chapter looks to a post-Independence text and reads India’s first Partition memorial that was designed by modernist architect and iconoclast Le Corbusier at Nehru’s invitation. I provide the background to Le Corbusier’s surprising contribution to Indian modernism and read the monument’s passive resistance as it presents its visitor with two modes of interpretation. The outside offers representational language promoting a nationalist reading of the monument, while the inside offers only empty space. The exterior elevation with its symbolic iconography operates in stark contrast to the shadowy interior that resists the realm of knowing and the division on which identity is based. Through the absence at its center, the "Martyr’s Memorial" monumentalizes doing nothing, demanding nothing, even forgetting the events it is meant to commemorate. The monument stands as a marker of lost ground, the ground lost to violent divisions founded upon identity, and contemplates the costs through its modernist lines.

Let us add another item to the long list of lessons still to be learned from Being and Time: We need an ontology of philosophical failure. What is failure in philosophy? I am not asking about failing at philosophy either by failing to do it or by doing it badly. I mean the more deeply puzzling phenomenon of doing philosophy as well as it has ever been done and yet failing in that philosophy, nonetheless. What does it mean to say, rightly, that Being and Time fails, or that it is (in Kisiel’s words) “a failed project”? In what way can and should the most influential philosophical work of the twentieth century be considered a failure, judged by the most sympathetic standards of an “internal” or immanent reading (that is, by its own lights or on its own terms) rather than by some measure “external” to the text itself? What did Being and Time set out to accomplish, and why did it fail to achieve that goal? Is this a failure Heidegger could have avoided or rectified if he had had time to complete the book in the way he originally planned? Or is this a necessary failure, one that follows from some inexhaustibility inherent in the subject matter of Being and Time itself, and so from the impossibly ambitious nature of its attempt to answer “the question of being”? In what way must philosophy fail itself (to employ a polysemic locution), necessarily falling short of its own deepest, perennial ambitions? What is the lesson of such necessary philosophical failure?

This chapter captures the extent to which journalism fields marginalize African journalists in the coverage of international events unfolding on the continent. This marginalization leads to a continuation of bifurcation in the field that was also present during colonization. It shows that the effect of this bifurcation is that African audiences primarily learn about events happening across the continent from the Global North as opposed to African journalists. Chapter 4 shows how African journalists are marginalized in their fields and how they understand and explain this marginalization.

Superficially, the period of Conservative rule since 2010 has been one of electoral stability. The Conservatives emerged as the largest party in four general elections in a row. As a result, the party has retained the reins of power for fourteen years. This represents the second longest period of government tenure for any one party in post-war British politics. Yet, in truth, it has been a period of unprecedented electoral instability and political change. Two of the four elections produced a hung parliament, an outcome that had only occurred once before in the post-war period, while a third only produced a small overall majority. After the first of these hung parliaments, in 2010, Britain was governed by a coalition for the first time since 1945, while in the second such parliament, between 2017 and 2019, a minority government entered into a ‘confidence and supply’ agreement with the Northern Irish Democratic Unionists. The right of prime ministers to call an election at a time of their own choosing was taken away, only to result in parliamentary tussles that, in the event, failed to stop two prime ministers from eventually holding an election well before the parliamentary term was due to come to an end.

In this final chapter, we consider how history might judge these years of Conservative governments. Our focus, as laid out in the Introduction, is: what were the achievements of these years? Were there mitigating factors? What is the overall verdict?

This chapter explores the consequences of the extensive influence campaign mounted by Russia and its proxies during the Russian–Ukrainian war. It focuses on the extent to which the media discourse that emanated from the Donbas ‘Republics’ and Russia about the Euromaidan revolution, the Donbas War, the ‘Kyiv regime’, and the 2022 invasion resulted in shifts in terms of how people in Donbas and Ukraine felt about themselves. Years of sustained effort to portray Ukraine as a pro-fascist country with a US-installed puppet government were at least somewhat successful at fostering stronger anti-Ukrainian sentiments within Russia, and to an extent among Ukrainians in the Donbas ‘Republics’. This success has expressed itself as continued and sustained support among Russians for the invasion of Ukraine. However, in Ukraine itself (and especially among Russian-speaking Ukrainians), this propaganda campaign backfired, and instead contributed to a consolidation of Ukrainian identity, which became stronger than ever before.