Through the window of the Shrikhande graph, we have introduced you to many important topics in discrete mathematics. We hope that you have been inspired to learn more about some of the topics, so we provide a list of books that go further than we have done. For a textbook on discrete mathematics, somewhat similar in spirit to this book, we recommend van Lint and Wilson [71].

For general graph theory, we suggest the books by Bollobás [18] and Diestel [42].

A series of books edited by Lowell Beineke and Robin Wilson [10, 11, 12] give a good overview of several aspects of graph theory: algebraic, topological, structural and chromatic [13].

The religiosity of British soldiers naturally reflected patterns in civilian society but had distinctive features. The Army had long been a target of missionary effort by civilian religious agencies, and this work continued to be felt, especially in the distribution of Scripture. While the religious profile of the Army mirrored the decline of the mainstream churches and the weakening Christendom culture of the Army, this was qualified by several significant factors. If only for instrumental reasons, officers were still expected to show a modicum of religious leadership. Recruitment also mattered. By the 2000s, the Army drew disproportionate numbers of recruits from Northern Ireland’s Protestant community and from culturally conservative regions of mainland Britain. The vitality of global Christianity was also injected by ‘Foreign and Commonwealth’ recruits. Active service also served as a spur to religiosity, with prolonged operations in Afghanistan revealing that there were still relatively few ‘atheists in foxholes’. Furthermore, religion still framed potent idioms of mourning and Remembrance, especially in the poignant repatriation and vigil services arising from the ‘War on Terror’.

The Conclusion chapter summarises the reasons why today it is well worth engaging with Beauvoir’s philosophy. It is suggested that different writings will appeal to people in different age ranges and with different interests. Chimisso argues that Beauvoir’s ideas can significantly contribute to the reflection on particular current issues, like the apparent renewed trust in strong individuals, the promotion of role models, a surge in xenophobia and racism in many parts of the world that leads to the dehumanisation of ‘the Other’, and the weakening of a sense of solidarity and mutual responsibility.

This chapter opens the doors and allows readers to enter French courtrooms. It examines the architecture and dynamics of French terror courtrooms, focusing on the spatial layout and the positioning of actors within the courtroom setting. By analyzing the physical structure, we reflect how space and reinforces the roles of participants, from judges and prosecutors to defendants and victims. In addition, the chapter outlines the methodology developed during our research, our immersive approach within the courthouse. This immersion includes participatory observation beyond the courtroom itself to include the cafeteria, the courts’ corridors, security lines and the courtyard. These seemingly mundane settings reveal significant insights into the routines, relationships, and informal exchanges that frame the broader judicial process. By bridging architectural analysis and ethnographic observation, this chapter provides a presentation of the French terror trial setting as both a physical space and a site of social interaction.

This chapter analyzes the colonial dimensions of, and contributions to, the two world wars. Those conflicts present clear parallels in terms of troop recruitment strategies, forms of discrimination, and the logics of so-called martial races, among others. However, they also present certain ruptures, for instance those regarding the nature of nationalist claims or the extent of combat in colonial theaters of war. Considering multiple empires in tandem, including non-European ones, this chapter reflects a trend towards globalizing the two world wars, be it by focusing on the liberation of metropoles by their colonies, on the trench experiences of non-European combatants, or on the claims these same African and Asian troops formulated in the wake of the two conflicts.

Weisong Gao identifies complex and ambivalent constructions of and reflections upon “home” as constituting a frame through which Los Angeles’s rich Asian American literary history can be understood. In Gao’s chapter, home is a sensory experience, felt in the body. Focusing on writers including Steph Cha, Hisaye Yamamoto, Lisa See, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Nina Revoyr, Gao interrogates complexities of cultural belonging and identity, and locates cross-racial tensions and solidarities, across a breadth of LA’s diverse Asian American literatures. Gao contends that while “Asian American” was a category initially created and defined in political terms, a sensory lens both enables a critical interrogation of that category and offers a means reaching deeper, more affectively, and more sophisticatedly into the complexities of Asian American history, experience, and relationality that LA literature manifests.

This chapter looks at Maria Edgeworth’s writings on Edmund Burke from 1805 to 1814, culminating in her novel Patronage published in that year. It looks at the reputation of Burke and the charges against his style by the Irish writer George Ensor as a way of thinking about how Burke’s mixed style of rhetoric may have influenced Edgeworth’s fictional practice. The relationship between rhetoric and realism is considered, as well as reasons for Edgeworth’s fall from literary favour in later years.

Despite the growing number of multilateral environmental treaties since the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, the inter-link between the legal regimes governing the protection of the marine environment (marine regimes) and those governing the protection of international watercourses (freshwater regimes) has attracted only limited attention. The absence of an inter-link between these legal regimes is problematic particularly in the context of the prevention of marine plastic pollution via international watercourses. While marine and freshwater regimes have been developed as distinct disciplines of international law, one can find some common principles/obligations, such as the no-harm principle, the obligation to protect the environment, the obligation to conduct an environmental impact assessment, and the obligation to cooperate. On the basis of these common principles/obligations, this chapter explores the inter-link between the marine and freshwater regimes in the prevention of land-based marine plastic pollution.

This chapter explores the cultural, social, and emotional significance of food in wartime. It does so through a transnational lens, exploring Australian nurses’ encounters with food as they served in diverse theatres of war and negotiated a dazzling array of cross-cultural encounters. The meanings of food proved varied and complex. Truly global in their reach, foodways linked battlefield to home front. Food could encode racial difference and confirm imperial hierarchies, but it also expressed unexpected intimacies and provided a bridge from one culture to another. It proved a medium of emotional exchange that at once expressed and transcended cultural difference.

This final chapter offers a reflective account of the ethnographic journey behind this study of the Brussels Bubble and its digital transformation. Beginning in 2018, the research combined immersive fieldwork – including over fifteen trips to Brussels – and remote engagement with EU communications, newsletters and local media. The authors employed interpretive, qualitative methods, conducting more than a hundred interviews with diplomats, officials, interpreters and journalists. Using techniques like ordinary language interviews and the ‘interview to the double’, they captured not just what participants said, but how they experienced their digital and diplomatic worlds.

Ethnographic observation was central, from casual café meetings to high-level Council sessions, with fieldnotes documenting settings, interactions and the omnipresence of digital devices. The unexpected onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 became a pivotal ‘tragic serendipity’, forcing both the Brussels Bubble and the researchers to adapt to a digital ‘new normal’. The resulting data – over 1,000 pages of fieldnotes and thousands of archived newsletters – were coded thematically, revealing patterns in how technology reshapes EU governance.

The chapter underscores the challenges of access, anonymisation and balancing immersion with critical distance. Ultimately, it presents the book as a snapshot of a moment in EU politics, inviting further ethnographic exploration of digitalisation’s impact on diplomacy and global governance.

The notion that human beings are products of history, conditioned by particular and changing political, social, economic, material, and technological circumstances, is itself historicizable as an outlook that came to prominence in the eighteenth century and the Romantic period. A historical and, indeed, historicizing self-consciousness informed new logics of division between old and new, premodern and modern, in the reorganization of knowledge as in the reconstitution of political life, in relation to secularizing shifts in the grounds of authority. Yet such historical self-consciousness was not uniform but multiform. From apocalyptic millenarianism to cyclical or stadial conceptions of historical change to linear models of progress to geologically informed notions of “deep time,” thinkers and writers of the Romantic period showed in sometimes competing and sometimes overlapping ways a common preoccupation with how human beings are situated in history and time.