As with the Left, the Conservative Party also began to look to charity for the delivery of social services. Following the enormous appeal of Band Aid and Live Aid, the Government turned to the voluntary sector to make up for the cuts to the social services budgets. However, it also hoped to embrace a compliant sector. Conservative MPs regularly complained to the Charity Commissioners about the political advocacy of the humanitarians and other poverty lobbyists. From the mid-1980s, this became a concerted campaign through neoconservative organisations such as Western Goals. The most successful was the International Freedom Foundation, an anti-communist libertarian group which triggered an investigation into Oxfam’s advocacy on apartheid. The Charity Commissioners concluded that Oxfam had overstepped its remit and publicly rebuked it in 1991, even though the end of apartheid was in sight. It later emerged that the IFF was a front organisation for the South African military. The racist politics of the region, which shaped so much humanitarian intervention, had returned to the UK to impact the regulation of all charities’ campaigning work.

In Central and Eastern Europe Arthurian literature was associated with chivalric values. Already present in the byliny tradition of the Kievan Rus’, Arthurian elements cannot be traced to a specific origin/text. The fourteenth-century Old Czech Tristan, also known as Tristan a Izalda, derived from specific German Arthurian texts. This was also the case with the Old Czech Tandariuš (Tandariàš a Floribella). The Tristan tradition appears in Bulgarian (or Bulgarian-Macedonian-Serbian) songs. The sixteenth-century Belarusian Tristan had Italian sources. Polish literature includes only short references to the Arthurian tradition. The so-called Artus Courts (curiae regis Artus) became highly popular in the Hanza towns of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and they showed that Arthurianism still stood for high moral values at the time.

Despite sustained efforts to privatize state-owned enterprises (SOEs) across various sectors in China, they continue to play a significant role in certain industries. Existing scholarship has yet to provide a fully satisfactory explanation for the historical development and sectoral distribution of SOEs. Economists frequently argue that SOEs serve as tools for addressing market failures, while others interpret them as outcomes of political decisions shaped by ideology and interest group dynamics.

This book advances a legal theory of SOEs, asserting that prevailing accounts are incomplete. Market failures, after all, can also be addressed through regulatory measures. The more pertinent comparison, therefore, is between the use of SOEs and the use of regulation. When regulatory costs are high, SOEs are more likely to arise, endure, and resist privatization.

The literary tradition where Arthur first appeared belongs to Welsh language, the immediate descendent of the Brittonic Celtic language spoken across most of the island of Britain before the subsequent arrivals of the Romans, then the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, and the Normans. At the turn of the sixth century, which marks the moment associated with the Arthur of history, the landscape and cultural outlook of Wales and northern Britain offered an anchor to what were probably oral stories in circulation. The earliest surviving Welsh Arthurian poems and narratives furnished the essence and the pathways for the later transmission and adaptation of the legends into other languages and territories throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. The Cambridge History of Arthurian Literature and Culture (henceforth CHALC) acknowledges the longue durée of Arthuriana, from the origins of the Arthurian story to an exploration of its impressive reach across medieval Europe, then into the global world.

This chapter explores the earliest insular texts featuring the prophet Merlin, and his Welsh original, Myrddin. From the uses of the name ‘Myrddin’ as a prophetic authority in early Welsh prophecy, to the appearance of ‘Merlin’ in Latin histories and hagiographies in the twelfth century, this chapter details the early literary life of the foremost prophet of the Arthurian tradition. It acknowledges the development of the Arthurian Merlin as the product of multiple, and potentially multidirectional, lines of influence between insular languages, centring on two related figures first conflated by Geoffrey of Monmouth: a northern wild man prophesying in the Caledonian Forest a generation after the age of Arthur, and the child prophet from Carmarthen who interprets the mystery of the red and white dragons in the age before. This is read in relation to wider insular traditions concerning prophecies of national deliverance, and early Welsh references to the prophet ‘Myrdidn’, whose own early legendary biography remains obscure.

This chapter examines a range of Arthurian poems in alliterative verse, including Awntyrs off Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Alliterative Morte Arthure. It argues that while the works are diverse in tone and content, there is a consistent thematic preoccupation with the relationship between Arthur and his nephew Gawain. Through a close reading of the presentation of the characters, it suggests that the alliterative poems – despite their differing treatments – display a certain anxiety about King Arthur. By implicit comparison with Gawain, elements of Arthur’s character are often found wanting.

According to Dazai Shundai, techniques of political economy must be based on the models of the ancient Chinese sage kings. In order to apply these models to present-day Japan, it is important to draw proper analogies between ancient Chinese and later Japanese phenomena and to use appropriate terminology in describing Japanese phenomena.

This chapter presents case studies of Indigenous peace agreements in the Andes region. It begins with an introduction that highlights the significance of understanding legal geography and its relevance to Indigenous peoples. It then explores the legal frameworks that protect Indigenous rights, focusing on international instruments such as declarations and conventions. It then examines specific agreements in the Andes that enact these legal frameworks, with a spotlight on the National Agreement for Development and Peace in La Araucanía, 2018, in Chile, and the Agreement Between the Bolivian Government and the Confederation of Indigenous peoples from the East, Chaco, and Amazonia in 2010. These case studies showcase the intersection of legal, social, and political dynamics in promoting Indigenous rights and fostering peace. By analysing the legal geographies of these agreements, the chapter contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex challenges and opportunities Indigenous communities face in achieving sustainable development and peace in the Andes region.

This paper aims to assess the cogency of Hume’s famous argument against testimony for miracles. Hume starts by arguing in favour of a “general Maxim” which involves balancing the strength of the testimony “considered apart and in itself” against the inductive unlikelihood of the reported event. But although this reasoning shows real insight – anticipating what is now known as the “base rate fallacy” – it turns out that such a separation cannot work, and an adequate maxim must inevitably take into account the specific nature of the reported event when evaluating the epistemic strength of the testimony. There is also a deeper problem with Hume’s argument, which arises from his treating a miracle as an extreme example of an inductively unlikely event. For the believer can agree that miracles are inductively unlikely – or even physically impossible – whenever the world is proceeding normally. Where she will differ from Hume is in claiming that divine activity can interfere with the natural order, and can sometimes be identified through its purposive nature. Naturalist philosophers – like Hume – are likely to reject this, but their best argument for doing so comes not from theoretical probabilistic maxims, but from the hopelessly unconvincing track record of miracle reports, combined with the lack of evidence for divine purpose in the world (as revealed so artfully by Hume’s Dialogues).

Chapter 6 reconstructs the technology-specific legal contours of freedom of expression in the Internet age, presenting empirical evidence of the growing importance of technology for legal practice and regulation. Since data-processing technology is a prerequisite for free speech, the starting point is privacy law. An important distinction is made between data integrity and network integrity and the discussion on net neutrality and the open Internet is revisited. The case law of the ECtHR on Article 10 ECHR is also examined to see if there is a tendency to recognise an independent ‘right to transmit’. Moreover, the activities of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) can be seen to produce technology-related standards relevant to the freedom of expression. ICANN, which is responsible for routing data packets to their destination, controls the ‘master key’ to the entire global Internet and can thus influence the conditions under which freedom of communication is possible. Finally, the chapter addresses the technical standards for the Internet developed by the independent Internet Architecture Board and the Internet Engineering Task Force, which are also crucial for the freedom of expression.