Abstract This chapter examines the evolution of PN Review, a leading Manchester-based poetry magazine, in relation to second-wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. Largely funded by the Arts Council of Great Britain, the magazine was initially not a welcoming place for female poets and contributors. Women’s poetry was often disparaged, and few women contributed to the magazine. From the early 1980s, however, PN Review started to include more women voices—a transition led by the founding editor Michael Schmidt, who was eager to include forgotten and neglected female poets on his list. This chapter argues that changes in public funding, and increased market opportunities for women authors and feminist ideas, forced the magazine to evolve and adapt quickly. Women were taking a more visible role in the publishing world, as the success of the feminist press Virago (created in 1973) shows. Women poets were becoming more vocal, and openly denounced their marginalisation in the poetry scene. The funding cuts decided by Margaret Thatcher’s government led to profound changes as Arts Council “clients” competed fiercely to survive in a tough landscape. Changing priorities at the Arts Council—including the need for more diversity in publishing—also had an impact on grant holders. PN Review therefore offers a good example of a literary institution that was directly pushed towards gender diversity through external pressures from the Arts Council of Great Britain and the market.
The history of Japanese-Dutch relations began in 1600, when a ship called De Liefde reached the shores of Japan. In 1609, after an audience with the founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, the Dutch managed to obtain an official document according to which the ships of the Dutch East India Company could henceforth sail to Japan. In the Edo era, during the period of self-isolation, Holland remained the only Western country with which Japan maintained trade relations. Dutch merchants lived on the tiny artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Bay. At first, trade was going well, but, as early as in 1743, the trade mission in Dejima suffered its first loss.The power of Great Britain and the United States grew, while Holland, on the contrary, lost its influence. However, the gradual deterioration in the field of trade coincided strikingly with the increase in the influence that Holland had on Japanese culture, life, and language. In the Edo period, Holland became a kind of a “window to Europe” for Japan. There is an opinion that, if Holland’s influence on Japan had been weaker during this period, the modernization process in Japan at the beginning of the Meiji era would have been much more difficult.The great Japanese educator of the Meiji period Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835– 1901) managed to visit Holland as part of the Takenouchi mission (1862). It is likely that, when writing the chapters about Holland in his geographical works “All the Countries of the World” (1869) and “The State of Affairs in the West” (1866–1869), he relied, among other things, on his own experience of getting to know this country. Fukuzawa classified Holland as a developed and enlightened country. However, in his opinion, Japan should keep up with the times and focus on more advanced countries, such as the United States and Great Britain.
This article explores the evolution of Euroscepticism within British public opinion before and after Brexit. First, it contextualizes recent trends in the longue durée of UK-EU relations, reconstructing a comparable time series of polling evidence on the strength of opposition to EU membership from 1955 to 2024. Second, it zooms in on the period between the 2019 and 2024 general elections, identifying the continuities and changes affecting mass attitudes toward Europe. The analysis shows that Eurosceptic voters emerged from Brexit victorious, weakened, but resilient. The underlying, latent divide over Europe continues to structure voting behaviour and undermine the stability of the political system in the United Kingdom.
Literature, which marks the major landmarks in history, focuses on events at the micro and individual level, and can thereby uncover significant social processes either overlooked or difficult to document from the historical record. This article illustrates, using Anthony Trollope’s novel Doctor Thorne, the social evolution of England in the 19th century. Trollope depicts social evolution at the level of decisions, events and acts involving individuals, which aggregate to acquire wider social significance. These movements provide insight into the evolution of society. Society has evolved over the centuries, but the evolution has been mostly unconscious. Knowledge of the process of social development revealed by the study of literature may be applied consciously to facilitate and accelerate social progress. Conscious development abridges time. Trollope’s works, like all great works of literature, can be an invaluable aid in our effort to comprehend the evolution of society and devise ways to accelerate it. Revolutions come in many forms. There are the traditional ones, with mass uprisings, violence and dethroning. In what was perhaps one of the earliest revolutions nearly three thousand years ago, the Babylonians overthrew the Assyrian empire in a long, bitter war and declared their independence. There are others, well planned and executed, that silently repaint the landscape. The Russian October Revolution was launched by Lenin, signaled by a blank shot. Hardly another shot needed to be fired as the Bolsheviks took over all critical power centers in Petrograd. They entered and almost got lost in the vast Winter Palace, stumbling upon members of the government who still remained inside. Illiterate revolutionaries compelled the arrested men to write their own arrest warrants. Thus was born the Soviet Union. Some revolutions seem doomed to failure. The Irish Rebellion failed to overthrow British rule in Ireland. The Tiananmen Square protests may be discussed the world over, but not in the land where it took place. There are yet other attempts, apparent failures, that in retrospect can be seen to mark the beginning of truly radical change. Spartacus and his 70,000 slaves who attempted to escape during the Roman slave rebellion were annihilated by the powerful Roman army, but their unconquerable spirit left an impact on the Romans, who reduced the number of their slaves, looked elsewhere for laborers, and began to treat the remaining slaves less harshly. Some are led by one man, others by countless men and women all over the land. Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution that led to the Arab Spring of 2010 began with a poor vegetable seller who did not live to see the global impact of his suicidal act. Some are carried out in ways so unconventional. Mahatma Gandhi ousted the British colonialists from India by defying
For years, visitors to the Musée Guimet were bound to notice the two wooden statues enthroned in the institution's entrance hall. However, the information label explained their journey from Afghanistan to Paris in a rather elliptical manner. This article reopens the case of the gift of several sacred statues looted by the army of the Emir of Afghanistan ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Khān in the mid-1890s during the conquest of "Kāfiristān" (the "land of the heathens"). The so-called “Kafirs” were non-Muslim peoples whose supposed Aryan origins fed Rudyard Kipling’s inspiration as well as the imagination of the many of the explorers of this remote area of the Hindu Kush. These populations were forced to convert to Islam and were partially deported by the Emir. The region was renamed Nuristān ("the land of light") to mark the disappearance of religious practices considered contrary to Islam. A few pieces of local religious statuary were taken away by the troops and displayed in the Emir's residence in Kabul, while other pieces were destroyed on the spot. Some of these statues were then donated by Ḥabībullāh, then Emir of Afghanistan to France in the 1920s, much to the irritation of British authorities. After decades of well-maintained and consolidated diplomatic connections between British India and Afghanistan, the donation of the statues could be interpreted as one of the many symptoms of a degraded relationship. This article analyses the trajectory of heritage objects from Nuristān to their subsequent transformation into early Afghan heritage and their donation to France through the prism of the complex trans-imperial relations that shaped the area at the turn of the 20th century.
Especially prior to the twentieth century, invalid and convalescent cookery constituted an integral part of health care provided at home, as in many cases recovery of health was to be achieved by consuming appropriate food rather than through an application of medicine. Interestingly, in Irish culinary discourse convalescent cookery was still commonplace until the 1970s. This research, based on a qualitative content analysis of selected Irish culinary texts published from 1910 to 1970, aims to provide an overview of invalid and convalescent cookery in Ireland in the twentieth century. Exploring the prevalence of recipes and tips for home treatment of invalids in twentieth-century Ireland, this article attempts not only to add to the growing body of scholarship centred on feeding the sick at home but also in a broader context to contribute to the work on Irish culinary history and Irish women’s history.
Significant progress in health care in recent years offers the potential for transforming health care provision in the form of Technology-Enabled Care (TEC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for diagnosis. In Britain, the National Health Service (NHS) has used technology for many years with the first scans provided by the public health service in the 1970s. Given recent advances in health technology, the Department of Health set the target of achieving a fully-digitalised NHS by 2024. Yet until the Covid-19 crisis the disruption of this sector was less marked than in other industries. The pandemic has brought the necessary impetus to increase the use of technology in this sector. Digital technologies have played a crucial role in monitoring and protecting populations against the disease. Online medical consultations have been vital in providing safe and convenient access to routine care, especially for vulnerable populations and to avoid risks to exposure to the disease. But recent advances in health care delivery have also underlined some significant challenges. The public health care system in Britain has encountered limits to the provision of a fully digitalised service: inadequate funding and outdated infrastructure. Moreover, there is often reluctance on the part of the patient and health care provider to accept digital health services. While digital health care should enable a more inclusive health service, it can also exclude vulnerable and socially disadvantaged populations. There is also an increased privacy risk when health data is digitalised. There are thus significant governance and infrastructure issues in the delivery of health care via digital devices, which this paper will explore. It will specifically focus on digital exclusion more than specific analysis of AI in health care in England and offer a literature review, which is timely given the extent of digital disruption in the wake of the health crisis.
This paper draws on recent conceptual work in the field of border studies in order to analyse the island economy - of which London and Paris are a part - as a dynamic functional process of bordering. The particular focus is on the commercial real estate markets of the two cities, and the discourse of firms of international property consultants. It is shown that these non-state actors play a key role in standardising information so that investors perceive the office markets of global cities as transparent. A brief account is given of the evolution of these cross-border consultancy relations since Big Bang in 1986 and in the context of the financialisation of real estate. The paper then goes on to examine research reports and commentaries published since the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum by the three leading firms of property consultants covering the London and Paris office markets. This was a period marked by much speculation about the transfer of jobs (Brexodus) in financial services from London to Paris. For international investors in real estate, Brexit added a new variable to their calculations of risk, and one that seemingly muddied the waters of the relatively transparent property markets of London and Paris. The analysis of market commentaries concludes that the international network of glocal property consultants plays a role in the on-going process of bordering and filtering flows of finance that reflect the normative power of international real estate investors.
This article discusses the problems of higher education in Great Britain and Russia between the second half of the 19th and the early 20th century as viewed by the historian and lawyer F.W. Maitland (1850–1906) and the Russian-English legal historian P.G. Vinogradoff (1854–1925), both struggled to reform higher education in these countries. The relevance of the study is due to insufficient data on the activities of British and Russian historians to transform the traditional system for training lawyers and historians at Cambridge and Moscow universities. Comparative analysis of the weak spots identified by F.W. Maitland and P.G. Vinogradoff in the English and Russian systems of university education was carried out by studying their articles and epistolary writings with the help of historical-comparative, historical, and biographical methods of research. The conclusions obtained help to understand the life paths of F.W. Maitland and P.G. Vinogradoff and are of potential interest for lecture courses on the historiography of the world and Russian history. The active role played by the scholars in bringing change to the education systems at Cambridge and Moscow universities influenced them considerably: for F.W. Maitland, who had acquired no higher rank but professorship since 1888, it hampered career growth; for P.G. Vinogradoff, it had fatal consequences in Russia (two resignations (1901, 1911) and emigration), but he acquired British citizenship and finally became an outstanding historian and jurist in England, which turned out to be an irretrievable loss for Russia.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities
Galen’s great treatise on drugs, Simple Medicines, begins with 5 theoretical books which explain the mechanisms of drug actions in the following catalogues. The key agent of change is the mixture of the qualities hot, cold, wet and dry. But drugs also have substance, the leaf, root or fruit of plants, the material of animals and minerals. How does substance act on the human body? This is one of the key questions for the theory of drugs, since mixtures had already been explored by Galen in Mixtures. Galen’s exploration of substance brings him to the composition of a drug – in thick or fine particles – and to the notion of substances in the plural and the notion of whole substance in the cases of foods and poisons, all of which Galen places in the class of drugs. Whole substance is the core of the paper. Galen’s understanding of substance as of qualities depends heavily, as often, on Aristotle. The paper presents an argument based on the key passages in Simples I–V, which I have recently translated for the Cambridge Galen series, as too on related passages in Mixtures and On the Capacities of Foods.
Slavic languages. Baltic languages. Albanian languages
The article is devoted to study history of formation mechanisms of foreign policy of the European Communities in the period before creation of the European Union (40s – 80s of the XXth century). The dynamics formation of the foreign and security component of European integration from the first postwar projects of political association of the leading states of Western Europe (France and Great Britain) to creation in the early 1970s of a mechanism of European political cooperation (EPC) and its further activity are traced. The article analyzes political and legal status, evolution of the organizational structure, main activities, international achievements and miscalculations in the work of the EPC. Positions of Member States of the European Communities on development of their foreign policy and security components have been taken into account.
The conclusions stated that the processes of European integration in the post-war period began precisely from the political sphere. However, due to differences in the strategic views of the states of Western Europe, their unwillingness to surrender state sovereignty in favor of European political institutions, as well as the position of the United States, it very quickly moved into the formation of a purely economic regional association. At the same time, the scale of economic integration and international policy tendencies have led to the formation of the system of political cooperation, which has become commonplace in the work of the Community institutions and the interaction of the Member States. On the whole, the EPC remained a weak and declarative practice of regular inter-state meetings at various levels, because it was outside the system of institutions and the regulatory framework of the European Communities. National ambitions of the Member States, each of which often favored the established priorities of its own foreign policy over the common interests of the union. Achieved level of political unification positions and actions of the Member States of the European Communities did not significantly increase the influence of integration in the international space until the formation of the European Union.
This report describes the goal, mission, composition of participants, main events and results of the applied research seminar in the format of a field trip under the aforementioned name, which was organized and held during the summer semester 2019 by Jun.-Prof. Dr. Steffen Eckеhard (Ph.D. in Political Science at Konstanz University, Germany) for the MA-students of the International Administration and Conflict Management Program, with assistance from professors and students of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv’s Faculty of History.
The seminar consisted of two parts. The first – preparatory-theoretical, was conducted at Konstanz University, Germany. The second – empirically-practical, was held for a week in Kyiv. Aside from Germans, as much as half of the research group consisted of exchange students from other countries: Great Britain, Netherlands, Canada, Lithuania, Italy, Turkey, Ukraine and Sweden. Overall, the students conducted 16 interview meetings with representatives of international, domestic, public and non-profit organizations in just five days.
Such interviews were conducted with, among others, the students who took part in the Revolution of Dignity and military conflict in Donbas on Ukraine’s side. Besides, Ukrainian politicians, “NV” radio station’s editor-in-chief, political scientists and employees of international organizations such as the EU, OSCE and UN also helped the participants of the seminar to formulate their own view of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Based on the collected and analyzed information, 6 reports were prepared. They can be accessed in English at the official web-page of the research group: https://www.polver.uni-konstanz.de/eckhard/teaching/applied-teaching/
In this interview, Irish-Argentine writer Juan José Delaney reflects upon his writing. His own cultural affiliation with both the Irish and the Argentinian culture come to the fore in his answers. Thus, when asked about his background he replies: “I have always been nourished by both the Argentinian and the Irish cultures”. Juan José Delaney was born in Buenos Aires in 1954. He is a fiction writer and essayist and he holds the chair in Twentieth Century Argentinean Literature at the Universidad del Salvador (Buenos Aires), where he also coordinates the Irish Studies Program. As a fiction writer, he has published the collections Papeles del Desierto (1974-2004), and Tréboles del Sur (1994), which has been recently reedited (2014). His novel, Moira Sullivan (1999), like many of his short stories, depicts the life of the Irish in Argentina, a topic that he returns to in his most recent nouvelle, Memoria de Theophilus Flynn (2012), which connects Waterford with Buenos Aires. He is also the author of a dramatic comedy entitled La viuda de O’Malley and the biography Marco Denevi y la sacra ceremonia de la escritura (2006). During the course of the interview he discusses cultural and linguistic assimilation issues that were conspicuous in the context of Irish emigration to Argentina.
Beginning in 1892, Feydeau established himself in France as the new master of vaudeville comedy. London theatres surrendered to his infectious laughter, producing a number of his plays between 1892 and 1897, though admittedly, carefully selected: The Sportsman, adapted from Monsieur chasse! , The Other Man from Champignol malgré lui, His Little Dodge (Le Système Ribadier), A Night Out (L’Hôtel du Libre-Échange) and A Night Session (Séance de nuit). By reviewing the manuscripts submitted to the Office of the Lord Chamberlain, our article proposes to examine the approaches that made it possible for London directors and producers to edit light comedies which, with the name Feydeau, boasted of their French origin and frivolous nature, even when this choice carried inevitable risks. How could they avoid offending a Lord Chamberlain, hostile to any signs of immorality, with these plays, which were often based on subversive and ribald comedy? In each case, the manuscripts submitted for his censorship, in the proposed texts, reveal a prior self-censorship, evident both in the choices of the plays presented, and in the contortions of the adapters and translators: transpositions of situations, cuts and line changes all aimed at smoothing over or toning down the comedic effects relating to sexuality, as well as to social divisions. Even the most faithful translations brought about a shift in the starting situation, profoundly changing Feydeau’s reflections on intimate relationships and social ties. But why edit these plays, and deliberately run into such obstacles? Perhaps the dramatic and rhythmic inventiveness of Feydeau’s plays was an irresistible attraction to both performers and the public, as the study of their reception reveals. Even when adapters were often compelled to reduce Feydeau’s text, they also easily found the means to introduce clownish acts that were likely to please British audiences.