Describes further work on postwar planning and discussions of the postwar world with the US administration.

Describes life and work at the League of Nations.

Parts of Animals (PA) I.5 sends a strong message that the parts of the animal body are to be studied for the sake of the substance, the whole animal. If, as Aristotle suggests, it is the lowest or ‘indivisible’ species which are the substances, then we should study the parts of animals at this level. Yet many of the parts of animals are common to several species, so explaining them for each species would be repetitive and tiresome. We find thus in the PA two opposed explanatory tendencies: one ‘upwards’ toward the more common and greater simplicity and another ‘downwards’ toward the ultimate species and greater complexity. Aristotle’s proposed solution is to account for the various bodily parts at a general level and to descend to the species only when the parts differ significantly. In this chapter I discuss some difficulties for Aristotle’s solution.

This chapter studies the significance of King Arthur’s status as a military fighter and as a leader of warriors in both medieval and modern literary contexts. First exploring the militarist and imperialist version of King Arthur that was appropriated and expanded by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the essay shows how aggressive Arthurian militarism was consistently haunted by anti-imperialist critique, particularly within late medieval romances of the Old French tradition (such as Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval) and late medieval English work (particularly, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). After analysing the ambivalence of Arthurian militarism within Malory, the essay shows the modern deployment of Arthurian militarism by figures such as Spenser and Tennyson. The essay closes with comparison of ghostly, late medieval warnings about the ill fruits of militarism in the Awntyrs off Arthure with Kazuo Ishiguro’s contemporary portrait of the endemic nature of violence in the Britain shaped by Arthurian militarist culture.

Continues the account of Meade’s life and work as Professor of Political Economy in Cambridge.

In Tongoane v National Minister for Agriculture and Land Affairs, the Constitutional Court of South Africa ruled that the government’s attempt to regulate property in traditional communities through the Communal Land Rights Act (CLARA) was unconstitutional. It emphasised that traditional land was already governed by indigenous ‘living law’ and CLARA sought to replace this vernacular law, a system evolved over time, with legislation. This highlighted the presence of indigenous law predating colonialism, challenging colonial notions like ‘lex nullius’ (no law) and ‘terra nullius’ (empty land), which denied indigenous Africans their rights. This chapter argues that South Africa’s post-apartheid constitutional vision fails to fully recognise and integrate this vernacular law, undermining true transformation, and instead advocates for ‘Alter-Native Constitutionalism’, which would amalgamate ‘customary’, ‘common’ and vernacular law to reflect the realities and normative convictions of most South Africans. This approach aims to rectify historical injustices and create a more just legal system, rooted in indigenous values and addressing social and economic inequities. Explicating the indigenously feminist decolonising concept of Alter-Native Constitutionalism, the chapter calls for reconstitution of South Africa’s legal framework and content to give full voice to indigenous world-sense and law-sense, advocating a shift away from Eurocentric logics and norms.

This chapter examines the rise of regular mass, public giving, through initiatives such as Save the Children’s Penny-a-Week scheme in thousand of factories, Christian Aid Week and the hundreds of branches of Oxfam, War on Want and Save the Children that initiated a huge variety of fundraising activities. Britain was a nation of givers, but the perennial problem of humanitarian fundraising was always apparent: that people gave in response to immediate suffering when the charities were committed to long-term aid. This chapter reviews the publicity materials and surveys of public opinion to examine the persistent nature of the problem, demonstrating the extent to which an incredibly self-aware sector has nevertheless been locked into the pursuit of fundraising tactics which it knows are far from appropriate. One consequence was the discrepancies in attitudes to poverty overseas and immigration in the UK. The Commonwealth, as both a post-imperial entity and as a facilitator of aid interventions, remained crucial to the imagination of what charity meant overseas. But when that Commonwealth came home – via immigration – the silences of the humanitarian charity spoke volumes too.

This chapter systematizes the comparison of the Nigerian and Saudi cases to offer four primary insights about the past and future trajectories of economic liberalization in resource-wealthy, autocratic and hybrid regimes. First, at the level of political actors, the Nigerian organized private sector appears dynamic and competitive in its pursuit of procedural rents when compared to the ossified Saudi Chambers of Commerce. Second, at an historical level, the Saudi and Nigerian histories of corporate law reform share a common experience of initial foreign importation, before a process of local tailoring and, eventually, their liberalization becoming rent-conditional. Third, at a theoretical level, the diverse causal processes evidenced within the two cases illustrates the potential for greater causal processes within the flexible rent-conditional reform (RCR) framework. Fourth, considering the potential global transition to a lower-carbon economy, the application of the RCR theory suggests diverging future potentials of liberalization in high- and low-cost oil producers, and potential newfound relevance for non-fuel mineral producers.

This chapter offers a brief overview of patterns in approach, tone, theme and characterisation in North American engagements with the Arthurian legend since 1900. It considers retellings of the medieval romance and historiographic traditions alongside adaptations in multiple modes and media that are not especially interested in the earliest iterations of Arthur’s story. Paying particular attention to the perspectives from which these texts are told, the chapter considers how the diverse nature of these reimaginings challenges audiences to consider what exactly makes a text Arthurian while also acknowledging that the legend’s flexibility is central to its enduring popularity.

The introduction briefly presents the text of the Parts of Animals and its history. It also provides an overview of the contents and philosophical questions that emerge from the text.

The chapter introduces the origins of the plebiscite as a tool of international politics, and examines Sarah Wambaugh’s early career in the American women’s peace and suffrage movements. Wambaugh began researching the plebiscite following American entry into the First World War in 1917, and her early contributions reflected her youthful idealism and embrace of the principle of the self-determination of nations pronounced by Woodrow Wilson. Her early works may have influenced the peacemakers during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919; however, the plebiscites that resulted were more frequently the result of instrumental bargaining among the victorious powers. If the plebiscite was not used as consistently as advocates such as Wambaugh would have liked, a major achievement was the inclusion of women’s suffrage in nearly all plebiscites written into the post-war settlement. In this the first plebiscite decided upon for the Danish–German border region of Schleswig set an important precedent.

The seventeen French Arthurian romances in octosyllabic rhymed couplets considered in this chapter were written between the end of the twelfth century, or beginning of the thirteenth century, to the end of the fourteenth century, and with few exceptions are limited to northeastern France, Flanders and England. This chapter does not propose to study each of the seventeen romances, but to offer an overview, with the aim of situating them in a broad literary and cultural landscape. Textual culture will be the focus, seen as the meeting point between the text (romance) and manuscript, and between text typologies and typologies of text transmission.

This chapter opens with the pivotal scene in Goethe’s bestselling novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, when Werther reads Ossian to Charlotte. In describing this moment, Goethe reproduces Ossian’s patterns of rhythm and syntax in his own prose. The effect suggests that Werther and Charlotte share an embodied responsiveness to their reading. Goethe here seems to be drawing upon contemporary theories of universal rhythm and debates about prosody. The idea that poetic rhythm is a sensuous experience that can be shared between readers is then pushed to the extreme in the Roman Elegies, in which he playfully compares prosody to sex. The final section of this chapter focuses on Elective Affinities and shows how the novel’s comparison between chemical bonds and bonds of human affection extends also to a comparison between human relationships and the relational structures of language and metaphor.