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In the concluding chapter, it is argued that this study challenges the central idea of the legal consciousness literature that—despite strong criticism—people still turn to law. Instead, the case studies and the survey evidence in this book suggest that—because of this criticism—people move away from law. Based on these findings, it is argued that we need to redirect future legal consciousness studies. Rather than limiting our focus to the ‘salience of law’ and ‘legal hegemony’, legal consciousness research should also look at the ‘absence of law’ and the effects of ‘legal alienation’. While previous studies focused on ‘law and society’ and ‘law in society’, the next generation of researchers should shift their attention to ‘law versus society’.

After what seemed like an eternity of watching David’s moods shifting to such radical extremes, it had become more difficult to recognize him than it was to recognize his mood state. He had levelled out for a while. He had been profoundly low, desperate, demented and crawling with the agony of an ever present anxiety for too many months to remember. He was now back on the up. Nobody knows why. He didn’t know why. From experience I gave him about 2 or 3 weeks before the mania really took hold. Before the abuse, the anger, the incoherence, the wild spending, the voices, the discussions about how to counter the people who were following him in order to train him into the secret services, the newly discovered superpowers, the false texts telling me our dad had died, and the repeated threats of suicide. Then the promises that all of these would stop. Then more abuse, anger, rogue secret service agents and dead dads. Our dad must have died more times than Freddy Krueger over the years. Sure enough it was about 2 or 3 weeks. I got a call to tell me that he had gone AWOL leaving a message that he was going to drown himself in the sea. After driving around for 2 hours looking for David I finally found him on the beach staring at the sea. He said he wanted to be left along so that he could throw himself in. I told him that as he wasn’t on a platform it would probably be easier to walk in. If he threw himself, he’d bang his face on the shingle. This raised a smile. The momentary thrill of levity are pretty much all you have in these circumstances. We talked for a while. He said that he couldn’t control the buzzing in his head. Everything was happening so fast inside his head that he couldn’t control it. I said that it might be useful if he talked to a doctor. He thought the same and we walked back from the beach. One day the sea might get its man but not this time.

One should take K-pop very seriously, at least as a globalized, standardized product. It operates very efficiently, often much more than the average high-brow mise en scene. Also the preparation of a piece, as “documented” in this clip, is very effective, at least if an incident, like the lack of toilet paper, does not threaten the whole enterprise. Parody, lightness, standardization of taste and desire are the main ingredients and the guarantee of success.

‘What is the return on customer experience?’ is like the question ‘What is the return on innovation?’ To which the answer is, it depends on what you do and how you do it! The important point is, nobody says, ‘Let’s see if there is an ROI on a prototypical word like innovation before we innovate!’ And the same should apply to customer experience: that is if you are serious about it.

The so-called ‘Angry Young Men’ who were prominent in drama and fiction in the 1950s and 1960s were an amorphous group, yoked together around protest at establishment orthodoxies and a loosely left-leaning politics.1 Members of the group have walk-on parts in the work of several women novelists. Margaret Drabble (1939–) makes passing reference to Kingsley Amis in A Summer Bird-Cage (1963) and an aspiring actor, Simon, is reported to have ‘a reasonably-sized working-class part in a working-class play at the Royal Court’, where John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger premiered in 1956.2 Lynne Reid Banks (1929–) mentions ‘a publishing house specializing in novels by Angry Young Men’ in The L-Shaped Room (1960), and the eponymous William in Sweet William (1975) by Beryl Bainbridge (1932–2010) talks about ‘that Look Back in Anger stuff’ on a TV programme.3 Amis plays a more significant role in the writing of A. S. Byatt (1936–). There is a scene in Still Life, published in 1985 but set in the 1950s, where Frederica, like Byatt a student at Cambridge University during that time, goes to the Literary Society to hear Amis talk about Lucky Jim (1954). Frederica feels ‘a very simple sexual distaste for Lucky Jim’ and its cruel misogyny and is suspicious about the claims for Amis’s ‘honest stand’ and his ‘decency’ and ‘scrupulousness’.4 In 2001, Byatt returned to this scene in an interview with Philip Hensher. She recalls how, when she started publishing in the 1960s, she was met with ‘all this sort of post-war nonsense, angry young men, nobody has ever reported the English provinces… and the journalists just fell for it. As they fell for it with Look Back In Anger — as though nobody had ever reported lower-middle-class anger before’.5 Byatt’s objections are, at once, ones of sensibility — the sneering, the lack of tolerance she sees in Amis — and political — the sexism and the sudden ‘discovery’ of the lower middle class. Banks expresses a similar distance; she knew many of the group but felt no affinity.6 The closest a woman author might get is in Drabble’s ‘Introduction’ to the Virago edition of Poor Cow (1967) where she humorously describes Nell Dunn (1936–) as ‘an affiliated member of the non-existent school of Angry Young Men’.7

Launched at the 2011 KomMissia comics festival in Moscow, with support from a European Union grant,1 the Goethe-Institut Moscow, National Center of Contemporary Art Yekaterinburg, the Center of Contemporary Art Vinzavod, the British Council and others, the social activist project ‘Respect: Comics from Around the World’ addressed intolerance, racism and neo-fascism in Russia through a medium its practitioners considered tailor-made to reach today’s youth: comic books. The comic books produced for the project, small chapbooks with red covers, were distributed free to young people in physical form as well as online, and were designed to reach a population presumed unresponsive to traditional text-heavy formats. As explained by Khikhus: Why is ‘Respect,’ a project about respect, in the form of comics? We wanted to talk with young people and adolescents especially, because they are at risk. And, in my very considered opinion, today’s youth simply don’t want to take in text-based messages, since they’re used to flashy visual images.2 So a story in the form of comics, invested with some meaning, works considerably better and attracts a lot more attention than a simple and boring message about how, you know, we should respect each other — which nobody is going to read. But comics they will read. (EAN, 2011)

This chapter looks at Chinese students’ initial experience at German universities through the lens of Anderson’s ‛affective, cognitive, and behavioral’ model. The initial period of study abroad is usually the most difficult time for interviewees. Due to the rush of the pre-departure period, most participants do not prepare well and encounter many challenges shortly after arrival. In the cognitive dimension, the Chinese students are not familiar with the types of courses and assessment at German universities, and they have difficulty planning and organizing university study themselves. In the affective dimension, interviewees felt abandoned and complained, ‘Nobody takes care of me here’. Yet, in spite of all these challenges, in the behavioral dimension, most Chinese students made efforts to improve their German language skills.

Despite being on the political agenda for over 20 years, Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in Ireland remains a neglected, underfunded policy area. In this chapter, Noirin Hayes explores the impact of the continued distancing of the state from interfering in the private sphere of ‘childcare’. Citing inter-departmental turf wars, fragmented policy initiatives and continued conceptual and structural separation of care and education, she argues that nobody is served by the current situation. Locating ECEC firmly in the domain of education Hayes argues that there are benefits for all with realistic investment in early education. While focusing primarily on the child, she also presents evidence of the familial and societal gains to be accrued from a coordinated, public policy approach to supporting high-quality ECEC.

The heritage that inspires ‘heritage cinema’ is pre-existing. It may be contested as a version of history but nobody argues that King George VI, Solomon Northup or Abraham Lincoln never existed. Likewise, no one protests that Elizabeth Bennet, Charles Darnay and the second wife of Maxim de Winter are fictional, set as they are upon the pedestal of classic literature. Nevertheless, while the tourists who visit stately homes and regal residences are compelled to respect the factual evidence of historical figures while consuming evidence of their everyday existence, the tourism that seeks out the locations of films and television series tends to blur fact and fiction, searching for fictional characters in surroundings that exploit the confusion. The desire to visit the locations of events imagined for films and television series is a consequence of this tendency that has recently surged in popularity. Thus, in addition to visiting the house where Jane Austen lived in Chawton near Alton in Hampshire, fans of the films and television series derived from her novels seek out the stately homes that have formed the backdrops to various versions of Pride and Prejudice. Such day trips, like those to the settings of Downton Abbey (2010–) and the Harry Potter films, can significantly boost the takings of previously unremarkable or unheralded national and regional monuments, heritage sites and stately homes. There are several degrees or stages of film tourism, however, that range from simply sightseeing at filming locations to elaborate quests seeking to replicate the experience of the protagonists of the films. As I shall explore, this gradation can suggest and even evoke a quasi-religious element in such cinematic pilgrimages, which extends from the merely observational day trip to the most intense peregrination of the hardcore and die-hard fanatic. As I shall both literally and theoretically explore, tracking this gradation via comparison with the arcane but relevant four stages of prayer invoked by Saint Teresa of Avila, the Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint of the sixteenth century, reveals a process for expressing similar passion, wherein four successive stages of pilgrimage can culminate in the ecstasy of communion with the cinematic object of desire in a way that bears comparison with the rapture enjoyed by the most religiously devout.

Autobiographies are commonly accused on insincerity. People start with the assumption that nobody sits down to write his own life without some motive of vanity, or without the wish to present himself in the most favourable aspect. From this they argue that what a man puts on record about himself must be more or less a plausible lie, intended to cast dust in the eyes of readers, and to glorify the individual.

On the morning of 28 October 2008, the eastern Congolese rebel movement, the CNDP, occupied the both strategically and symbolically important district capital of Rutshuru in the eastern Congolese province of North Kivu. The rebels drove out the government troops, continued their advance on the city of Corna on the shores of Lake Kivu, and thus helped to swell the numbers of refugees — already several hundred thousands. At the same time, at a distance of about 20 km from Rutshuru as the crow flies, in the area controlled by the rebels and within hearing distance of the shooting, some 4,000 people from the surrounding villages were busy in the market of Bunagana on the Congolese-Ugandan border. Nobody seemed bothered by the noise of the fighting or let it stop them from carrying on their business. Feeling rather nervous, I asked why everyone was so relaxed, and a woman selling secondhand shoes shrugged her shoulders and said: There’s no problem, the war is far away. The FARDC (the Congolese army [Forces Armees de la Republique Democratique du Congo/Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo]) will run away, as usual, and leave their weapons for the CNDR The rebels are in control here, but we are safe. And that is the most important thing.1

Producing new works of fiction for film and television is notoriously categorized as risky business. As discussed by David Hesmondhalgh, all business is risky, but the cultural industries are particularly risky because they are centred on texts to be bought and sold to audiences that use these texts in highly volatile and unpredictable ways (Hesmondhalgh 2013, p. 27). Developing a new film or television product is a process marked by high sunk costs without any certainty as to whether there will be audience demand for this specific new variation. In the film industry, the term ‘nobody knows’ is thus accepted as a common truth. Professor of economics Richard Caves (2000) has even formulated the ‘nobody knows principle’ as a defining property of the film and media industries, since it is impossible to predict how the market will react to a certain product beforehand.

The status of folkloric beliefs in Hardy’s Wessex is frequently as uncertain for his characters as it is for the reader. His texts resist fixed or stable ways of viewing that would allow the kind of ‘pleasant reading’ of folklore that many contemporary readers expected. Instead, he creates a shifting world of varying beliefs, which reflects that of nineteenth-century Dorset. In The Return of the Native, for instance, when Mrs. Yeobright has just been bitten by the adder, the assembled heath-dwellers cautiously observe the snake as it watches them. But only Christian Cantle questions aloud whether it might have the power of the ‘evil eye’, or in his words the power to ‘overlook’. On the surface, Christian’s musing may be read as a throwaway comment, made by the village idiot and signifying nothing, but taken in a wider context his question reflects a network of beliefs and half-beliefs which only come to fruition later in the novel, or in other of Hardy’s stories. Such ideas and customs as overlooking, the burning of waxen images and hag-riding all appear and reappear in his fiction, presenting themselves in slightly different forms each time. What may seem harmless, distant or figurative in one work, often becomes harmful, manifest and literal in another. When the characters casually allude to these folkloric beliefs, they rarely need explaining to their neighbours: their meaning is tacitly understood by those within the community. Even John South’s elm tree fixation, which at first sight appears anomalous, unique to one individual, is recognised as having a local precedent; as his daughter admits, ‘Others have been like it afore in Hintock’ (Woodlanders 93). But even so, nobody is quite sure how to handle South’s obsession; while Hardy’s characters have an awareness of this or similar beliefs as part of their inherited ‘folk’ culture, the degree of their belief is often left open. It is with this in mind, that one can approach thinking about belief in Hardy’s texts.

In the opening of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith pauses briefly to consider exchange itself. We cannot credit any wisdom for this capacity, he observes; instead, it is part of human nature to ‘truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’.1 Animals can cooperate, but ‘nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog’.2 Smith doesn’t see the need for further evidence or speculate as to why people exchange: ‘it belongs not to our present subject to inquire’.3 By contrast, in his earlier Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith not only explores the equally fundamental operation of sympathy, but devotes considerable attention to demonstrating its existence and character. For Smith, that people sympathise is less obvious than that they exchange; the process thus demands considerable explanation. Smith opens with a similar statement about human nature: ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it’.4 Unlike exchange, however, the evidence for this process demands continual attention throughout the text.

So ends 18-year-old Hal Incandenza’s response to the selection committee at the University of Arizona where he is being interviewed by three Deans, of Admissions, Academic Affairs, and Athletic, the university’s Director of Composition, its varsity tennis coach, and its Academy prorector. He is a shy athlete of “substantial promise” being considered for the “University’s varsity tennis program.” Unfortunately Hal has some “subnormal” test scores and he is too nervous to explain them to the Admissions Committee. He greets their “expectant silence” with his “silent response” (2014, 125). His Uncle Charles does all the talking. Finally, infuriated by both Hal’s silence and his uncle’s unwillingness to stop talking, one of the Deans comes clean: “Look here, Mr. Incandenza, Hal, please just explain to me why we couldn’t be accused of using you, son. Why nobody could come and say to us, why, look here, University of Arizona, here you are using a boy for just his body, a boy so shy and withdrawn he won’t speak up for himself” (130). Hal finally explodes into a stream of verbiage that ends with the above monologue. Appalled by what they have heard, the Deans pinion his arms and legs and wrestle him to the floor. He is dragged through the Administration offices to an “old-fashioned men’s room” and “rolled over supine on the geometric tile” (133).

Fun is often touted as an important component of modern childhood. It is represented as an inalienable right for children to have fun. The degree of fun we are supposed to have in childhood distinguishes this phase of life from all others. The range of ways in which fun is understood in childhood is wide and frequently contradictory. At one extreme we find the widely held belief that fun is an important pedagogic tool—through having fun and playing children tend to consolidate learning more effectively—at the other extreme fun is represented as something disruptive and in need of control. It is often the case that fun is regulated by spaces—some are appropriate to have fun in, others not, by time—there is a right time and a wrong time to have fun, or it is regulated by other people. Children have to learn the rules of fun if they are to have it without interference from adults. This process of training is never more apparent than in schooling. Since the 1960s the teaching of very young children has been underpinned by fun and discovery as core pedagogic principles. When the brain is at its most gymnastic and able—in early childhood—we acknowledge that fun is an extremely effective way of fixing learning and encouraging ‘learning by doing’. Associated with this is play, and, as will be explored later, play and fun are often synonymous in the minds of children in ways that are distinct from that in adults. However, as we progress through school the fun becomes marginalised and compartmentalised, as does the play. The fun has to make way for the serious stuff—but the serious stuff is actually not the content of learning but the style of learning. There are many ways to learn the same thing. As they progress through school years, children are coerced into understanding fun as something that does not occupy much of the day and that sober concentration is much more important. Whilst some may consider this an overly pessimistic picture of schooling, nobody that I have spoken to during the course of my thinking about fun has argued that their experiences were radically different. This is not to suggest that we are necessarily unhappy as a result of this sequestering of fun—just that it is interesting that it happens. Famously Ivan Illich (1971) suggested that this is another example of society imposing the values of traditional productive labour, control and deference upon generation after generation of youngsters, all being trained to behave themselves so as not to disrupt the power and privilege that dominates society. This process is not, of course, designed and maintained by identifiable and conscious individuals; rather, it becomes the way in which we do things—in much the way described by Norbert Elias in ‘The Civilizing Process’ (1939). As we get older the places and spaces in which we are allowed to have fun become fewer. We get hung up on the age appropriateness of fun and regulate our behaviour accordingly. A young woman I spoke to told me a story about how, when she was 13, she went on a trampoline and was having great fun until she noticed that some other children of about the same age were laughing at her. It transpired that they were giggling because bouncing on trampolines was something that younger children did. She never went on a trampoline again.

On 21 November 2011, an apology for abuse in out-of-home care was issued at a ceremony at Stockholm City Hall. Today, we ask for forgiveness for society’s betrayal. You were placed with foster parents or in an orphanage. You should have been given warmth and security; you should have been given a safe upbringing. But the dream died when the social welfare authorities placed you in care. Instead, you were met with coldness and indifference. You were subjected to violence and abuse; you were ignored and denied enough food and clothing. Today, we ask for forgiveness. Society was responsible for ensuring that you were given a good upbringing. But no one in charge visited you, no one saw you, nobody asked you how you felt. You were abandoned. (Sveriges Riksdag, 2011)1

When Dylan Moran appears on the Vicar Street stage in Dublin as part of the Monster II tour, he gestures in various directions around the crowd, throwing out a couple of ‘hello’s’, along the way. While trying to get the microphone off the stand he proceeds to get himself caught up in the wire, swears and tells everyone he’s leaving. Behind him and upstage centre is a very large and decorative picture frame. Within the frame, Moran’s own series of sketches ebb and flow in slide show format. His entrance onto the stage may or may not be timed with the image of a torso in a pin-striped jacket, speckled shirt and patterned tie. There is a revolver where the head should be; it’s pointing at the audience, and underneath that is a caption that reads “How may I help you?”3 Images such as this help to set a certain tone to the evening. Apart from the cartoon gallery, which silently shifts and segues its way through the performance like an art instillation, the stage space, in the main, is typical of a stand-up comedy performance piece. A microphone, a stand, a square table just left of centre stage and a bar stool without a back. On the table there is a jug of water and a glass, a glass of white wine and no ashtray. (In recent years Moran has given up smoking, at least while performing.) However, in this instance the comic who should not be smoking stubs out his cigarettes on the stage floor. Nobody seems to mind.

What are the rights of au pairs in Norway? In 2010, nobody really knew the answer to this, even though sociologist Cecilie 0ien had stated in a government-funded evaluation of the scheme that au pairs had limited access to their rights (0ien, 2009, p. 29). The Norwegian government recognised that there were challenges, but in practice, 0ien’s recom- mendations have been turned into political action only to a very lim- ited degree, even with the Labour party in power for the entire period.

Hobbes asserts that in a state of nature there is neither justice nor injustice, and then a few pages later explains in some detail the applicability of justice in a state of nature. To explain away the appearance of contradiction, I adapt Martinich’s distinction between the primary and secondary states of nature: rather than his view, according to which the primary state of nature abstracts from all law and even from God’s existence, I contend that only atheists occupy the primary state of nature. The primary/secondary distinction turns on submission: those in the primary state of nature submit to nobody, whereas those in the secondary state of nature submit to God but no civil sovereign. This account explains how we might conceive of a situation where the concept of justice lacks application without running afoul of Hobbes’s theism and the normative scope of the laws of nature.

On Christmas Eve 1931, Indian Police battalions, accompanied by units of the Indian Army and the Royal Air Force, entered Peshawar and all other urban centers of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) in order to arrest the leadership of the regional nationalist movement. By Christmas morning the leader of the Khudai Khidmatgars, or the “Red Shirts” as the British referred to them, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, his brother, Dr. Khan Sahib, and a number of other nationalist leaders had been detained and deported from the province on a special train. Meanwhile, military columns spread throughout the NWFP, marching at night, and rounding up entire villages in dawn raids.1 These raids, carried out on a day which, as the then Deputy Commissioner for Peshawar, Olaf Caroe, put it, “nobody, however suspicious, would expect a British authority to proceed to stringent action,” constituted the first salvo in a two-year campaign of attrition against the nationalist movement in the province.2

When, on 26 April 2002, the first school massacre with an enormous bloodcount of 17 people killed (including the offender) hit Germany, the shock and astonishment were enormous. Nobody thought that such a deed could possibly happen within German society, broadly peaceful since World War II and owing to the structures of the modern welfare state. Symptomatically, Germany’s leading newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), stated the following day: “Previously we have only seen images like this in reports from America.”1 In what is today, in cultural terms, a massively Americanised German society one thing still seems to be the trademark of America: the obvious problem of public violence. Thus the phenomenon of rampage and/or school shootings in Germany could generate questions that address both the lasting presence of violence within the social realm and the seemingly ubiquitous representation of violence through cultural artefacts. In this chapter I will focus on these two problems by examining German media coverage following the two most disturbing school shootings in Germany within the last decade: the Erfurt massacre of 2002 and the Winnenden massacre of 2009. This work is part of my research about rampages in Germany and the United States, which is still in its early stages. Therefore I will focus on two newspapers only — FAZ and Germany’s leading weekly news magazine, Der Spiegel. The data involved in the final project will be much broader in scale.

It had taken no more than three minutes for what had started off as a discussion about global warming to degenerate into something more akin to a group of eight-year-olds squabbling over the existence of Santa Claus. For some it was a FACT. End of. For others it was made-up mumbo jumbo. For a more thoughtful few it probably was real but they worried that maybe it wasn’t. Others believed it probably wasn’t true but did not want to look foolish in case they were later shown to be wrong. Everyone had a view on what should, or should not, be done about it and nobody was willing to change their position. The entire climate debate in abrasive microcosm: scientific claim and counter-claim, aggressive name calling, and words like ‘evidence’ and ‘truth’ wielded like weapons by speakers unqualified to define either.

In February of 1892 Wilde asked a number of his friends, including one of the actors, to wear a green carnation to the opening night of Lady Windermere’s Fan. When one of the chosen coterie, Graham Robertson, asked about the meaning of the gesture, Wilde replied that it meant ‘nothing whatever, but that is just what nobody will guess’.2 The green carnation would become a recurring symbol in both Wilde’s writing and his dress: he would wear one again at the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest two years later3 and would have Salome promise to reward the Young Syrian for allowing her to speak to Jokanaan by dropping ‘une petite fleur verte’ (CWOW5, p. 519).

Ashley lives with her mother and older sister (20 years old) in a traditional terraced house in the centre of Millthorne. It is a July morning in 2006 when Ashley and I meet for her first interview and we take shade in the cool sitting room at the front of the house. Nobody else is at home; both her mother and sister are out at work. Ashley’s parents separated when she was very young and although she mentions her father I get the sense that he is a peripheral character in her life. As she reflects on the rhythms of everyday life at home she portrays an image of three women living together but very separately: ‘We’re like ships in the night most of the time’ (Interview 1).

Deep participation dynamics are complex and interactive with numerous factors of life and power. It is tempting to try to simplify their explanation; however, if we do so, we are left with an elegant definition that may sound good but is still insufficient. So, in this chapter we will allow the overlapping messiness and complexity to show itself, but at the same time define a map and path for our exploration of deep participation and social integrative power that acknowledges the complexity while still defining a succinct and useful way forward.

In his paper “Punishment, Forgiveness, and Divine Justice,” Thomas Talbott makes a compelling case against the Strong View of Hell (SVoH). Talbott provides many arguments, but in this chapter we will focus primarily on his argument that retributive justice is inconsistent with Hell as a place of infinite punishment. Following Talbott, we will discuss Hell in the Christian context. Talbott argues that infinite punishment can only be a just punishment for a crime that caused infinite harm. He bases this on the idea that proportionality of punishment to crime is at the heart of the principle of retributive justice and that retribution without any concern for proportionality is not justice. He then argues that it would, therefore, be unjust for God to punish anyone with infinite harm since nobody actually causes infinite harm when they sin. Oliver Crisp has defended the SVoH against Talbott by invoking the Status Principle (SP), which implies that sin against God merits infinite punishment because God has infinite status.

Although our sense of smell is important to us, as primates, our sense of the world is dominated by our visual system and we therefore lack an appreciation of how important smell can be to other animals. A rather dramatic demonstration of this was reported in early 2014. Much work on behaviour is carried out by experiments on rats and mice and experimenters can be men or women. Canadian researchers reported that exposure to men, but not to women, produced a robust stress response in these animals.1 The effect occurred because rodents sensed male odours and even T-shirts that had been worn by men induced a similar response. An interesting question was raised by commentators: if the rodents were stressed by men but not by women what impact would that have had on decades of research in which nobody worried about the gender of the experimenters?

“Close your eyes, everybody close your eyes. Now put your hands up in the air, like that. OK. I count to three, and then I want everybody to put your hands on your biggest sexual organ. OK? OK, everybody close your eyes, nobody’s looking at me.” It is early Friday morning, time for a “life orientation” course for the students, aged between 16 and 18, of the Bella Vista High School in Cape Town’s Bo Kaap district. Most of them are still talking when Mimi, an instructor from Think Twice, starts the class. Think Twice is a relatively small Cape Town-based FBO, has seven employees, close ideological ties to the globally active Pentecostal church Jubilee and is committed to youth education.1 Some of them are couples, sharing a bench and more or less ostentatiously kissing and caressing one another. “OK,” Mimi continues, “One, two, three. Put your hand on your biggest sexual organs!” Now the students are laughing, partly because of the apparently bizarre instruction, partly out of embarrassment. Not all of them obey but instead peek to discover where their classmates are putting their hands. “Don’t be shy,” Mimi encourages them, Don’t be scared to do it. OK guys. Now sit down. I saw that some of you put your hands all over the place. And some put your hands on your head. Why did you put your hands on your head? Why do you think my brain is my biggest sexual organ?

In this chapter I interrogate performance identity through the lens of masquerade, with specific reference to the solo performance On the Verge by musician and actor Jez Colborne of Mind the Gap. Colborne’s work offers a unique opportunity for analysis since it is, to my knowledge, the only one-person show ever to feature a learning disabled performer. As Michael Peterson argues, the ‘performance art monologue’ tends to privilege ‘reality’ over ‘fictionality’, and gains its affects by acknowledging that the ‘author is present on stage in the body of the performer’ (Peterson 1997: 12). This imbues solo performance with a kind of authenticity, making the individual, implicitly or explicitly, representative of the social group to which they belong and thus creates the sense of unmediated presence: the ‘monologic apparatus’, therefore, has a two-fold effect of speaking for the individual but also their social category. An element of heroism also attaches itself to the solo performer, because they inhabit a largely bare stage and may call on few, if any, resources. Colborne’s performance is important both because it adheres to the conventions of the solo autobiography — direct audience address, self-reflective anecdote, adoption of multi-character personas, juxtaposition, or collage as well as straight narrative and lack of visible human support — and because it dissembles these conventions in surprising ways.

In 1582, Richard Stanihurst, a Dublin recusant living in exile in the Spanish Netherlands, published The First Four Books of Virgil’s Aeneis translated into English Heroical Verse in Leiden. Nobody, and certainly not Virgil, had sung of ‘arms and the man’ quite like this before: Now manhood and garbroyls I chaunt, and martial horror. I blaze thee captayne first from Troy cittye repairing, Lyke wandring pilgrim too famosed Italie trudging, And coast of Lauyn: soust wyth tempestuus hurlwynd On land and sailing, bi Gods predestinat order.1

The peasants’ spontaneous cooperation by no means persisted after the founding of the PRC. Hinton (1967: 625–630), during his discussion of mutual-aid teams (MATs), wrote that when the Party Branch and the Peasants’ Association in Changgong Village (his area of study in Shanxi Province) brought the problem of MATs to the table for the first time, nearly all the peasants thought they were a good but impractical idea. The situation was similar in Xiaogang. The MATs were difficult to manage. This was particularly true in the allocation of farm work, as nobody would cooperate with a lazy worker. Also, it took a lot of time to arrange meetings and it was not easy to organise production; as a result, the MATs were quickly mobilised into more coercive bodies. This chapter will explore the bio-politicisation of the villagers through cooperativisation and collectivisation. The village and the nation coincided; mobilisation of the villagers was regarded as the representation of the nation. In such a context, Foucauldian bio-politics coincided with the increasing politicisation of villagers’ bodies and lives. In this chapter, I will also show the embeddedness of resistance in this process. Villagers’ survival-oriented opposition and strategies partially subverted the all-encompassing sovereign power, which laid the foundation for the era of decollectivisation.

The current population of the United States has grown up with what seemed to be a steady and reliable increase in value of homes. Owning one’s own home is one of the signs of a prosperous and successful culture. In the 1930s, many people lost title to their homes during one of the greatest failures of human economic systems known. In response, banks and mortgage lending were regulated, bank deposits insured up to a level covering what most people had, and stock-trading practices ostensibly controlled. True, very old people could remember a time when the price of housing dropped, but with the inevitable passage of life with time, this group grew smaller and smaller, and older and older, and less relevant. There also were anomalies in local areas where, for whatever reason, home prices might negatively fluctuate. Reinhart and Rogoff have described five such anomalies, all associated with banking crises (Spain in 1977, Norway in 1987, Finland and Sweden in 1991, and Japan in 1992).1 But house price decline occurred very rarely, and nobody really noticed.

The moral luck issue arises as a result of a tension between the putative ordinary belief that we cannot blame or praise two or more people differently for things beyond their control, and what seems to be our ordinary practice of judging people differently regarding what actually happens. This is a famous example (adapted from Nagel 1979). Two people, after having some after-work beers in a pub, decide to drive back home. On the way Driver A loses control of his car, comes off the road and hits and kills a pedestrian; whereas Driver B, although also loses control of her car and comes off the road, doesn’t hit any pedestrian, and consequently doesn’t kill anybody, because there simply was nobody in her way. Both agents seem to be responsible for different things: one of them will be responsible for a death and thus will putatively be more blameworthy; whereas the other, even though he is equally at fault or makes the same mistake, will be normally judged with more leniency and won’t be responsible for killing anybody. Certainly, they are equally negligent or reckless, but the question here is whether actual consequences can add something to their culpability and then make a moral difference in the overall moral judgment that they deserve. If you think that they are to be morally judged differently, then you accept that luck can make a moral difference — for you moral luck is a real phenomenon.1

When Philip V ascended to the Spanish throne in November 1700 the French government needed to move swiftly to ensure it could remit funds to support French forces that were, within a few months, deploying across the Spanish Monarchy’s lands. This was not going to be a matter of spasmodic, ad hoc transfers of money abroad, as it had been in the Nine Years’ War, although nobody at first was sure of the volume of remittances that would be needed. By spring 1702 it was, however, abundantly clear that huge sums were required and Louis XIV and his ministers would need to work very closely, year on year, with the strongest bankers, securing their services in a planned manner to ensure that his strategic goals — largely defensive ones — would be achieved. Part II of this book will therefore consider how the king and his ministers interacted with the leading bankers, what means the bankers used to support their operations, and how the pressures placed upon the banking system both by the king’s demands and by the manipulations of the bankers brought the French state’s entire remittance edifice crashing down in 1709.

With the exception of soothsayers, nobody is expected to provide as much news about the future as economists. This is even more surprising considering that hardly anyone is so often wrong not only about the present, but also about the past, which they sometimes fail to see clearly as well. If a fortune-teller misreads what’s written in the coffee grounds, she may lose a customer. Economists never do. Although they cannot agree about the causes of the Great Depression of 1929–33, they are still asked about the crisis of 2008–13. While it would seem that at the time of an extensive crisis the focus is on the present, they are constantly posed questions about the future. And if nobody asks them, they take a stance anyway. No matter how many errors they have committed in the hypotheses, conclusions and theories they put forward, they can aptly create a never-ending demand for their services. Since we can’t get rid of economists, we should use them for the sake of the cause.

Nobody likes to think about it, but it is undeniable that humanity is facing grave threats. Especially dangerous are the ‘two problems for our species’ survival — nuclear war, and environmental catastrophe’.1 It is neither obvious nor certain that the human species can survive.2

When investing in private equity funds, LPs typically aim to beat a target return, for example, set by a public equity index, or, importantly for funds-of-funds, outperform other LPs. The best 25 per cent of a vintage year’s fund population have been shown to outperform most other types of assets. On the other hand, various reviews of research studies suggest that the private equity funds’ average risk-adjusted returns have not been nearly as attractive as expected.1 For primary investments in funds a pricing mechanism that could adjust for the risks incurred does not exist.2 To compensate for this gap and the lack of risk-adjusted pricing, LPs must have strong selection skills.

When Faulkner’s novel appeared in 1942, the title page was completely misleading. Go Down, Moses and Other Stories — though it was reasonably well reviewed — had never been intended as a story collection. As Faulkner wrote later to his agent, “I remember the shock (mild) I got when I saw the printed title page … nobody but Random House seemed to labor under the impression that GO DOWN MOSES should be titled ‘and other stories’… Moses is indeed a novel” (Blotner 1102). For the author, however, continuously short of money, worried about the Second World War, and facing another return to scriptwriting in Hollywood, his latest book and its reception would neither keep him awake at night nor make him wealthy.

In the midst of one of the most famous passages in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith writes ‘nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog’ (WN I.ii.2).1

This final chapter builds upon chapter 8 to look to the future and considers the impact cloud computing is likely to have on society and the economy. In 2007, nobody imagined using a data center on the other side of the world to send a text message or book a calendar appointment. Yet, well before 2013, Apple Siri and Google Now were exploiting cloud computing to provide these services. Here we discuss the social and technological implications of cloud, looking at its potential impact on smart cities, communication, and business. Within this we also note the emergence of other technology trends such as super-low-cost computing (for example, the $10 computer-on-a-chip) and additive manufacturing and explore their potential in shaping the commercial landscape when linked with cloud computing. Essentially, the chapter addresses the question: If computing is in the cloud — what next?

Francois Hollande, in the position of First Secretary of the Socialist Party, was Lionel Jospin’s Jospin. From 1981 to 1988, Jospin had been Mitterrand’s placeman at the head of the party and thus owed his authority to his ability to speak on behalf of the president. In 1997 Jospin had placed the little-known but well-liked Hollande at the head of the party, and the First Secretary’s authority derived from his closeness to Jospin. Like Jospin in 1981, Hollande was no threat to the absent (real) leader and maintained a sedulous balance within the party, but built up no independent support of his own. Jospin’s disappearance might have touched off a round of infighting, but there were no obvious successors. Nobody was in a position to force the issue, and in the run-up to the 2002 general election after Jacques Chirac’s re-election, a facade of unity was required to save seats.

We live in an age of profound disruption. Global crises that are related to finance, food shortages, fuel supplies, water quality, resource scarcity, and poverty challenge almost every society. Yet this disruption also brings the possibility of profound personal, societal, and global renewal. For that renewal to take place, we first need to stop and ask: Why do we collectively create results nobody wants? What keeps us locked into the old ways of operating? And what can we do to transform the root causes that keep us trapped in the patterns of the past?

If your organisation does not tell people as much as they want to know and if it fails to keep communication ahead of events, then in the absence of real information, people will fill the vacuum with rumour. When we find out what is going on through rumour and gossip, we start to lose confidence — we feel as if nobody is in control. Because rumour loves exaggeration and gossip loves alarm, the information we obtain from uninformed sources is always more scary than reality.

’suppose they gave a war...and nobody came’. So ran the ironic caption to a bold red and black poster produced by an anti-Vietnam War activist group styling itself the ‘Committee to Unsell the War’. Fear of throwing an unpopular war is the spectre that has haunted American political elites ever since US troops left Vietnam in 1973. The past four decades have seen a proliferation of efforts to capture what diagnosticians consider an enfeebling affliction of the American body politic. The condition is variously described as casualty aversion, avoidance, phobia, shyness or sensitivity, or patholo- gized as a syndrome — named inter alia after Vietnam, Somalia, body bags or Dover, the US Air Force base through which soldiers’ corpses pass en route to hometown burial.1

‘The malaise comes from Germany. It has discovered that the participation of its companies and industries in the EDF is only 10% of the total while its own contribution to the Fund is perceptibly superior (34%). There is a view that has gained currency in public opinion that this state of affairs is unbalanced — a situation that nobody contests — but also that it is unfair — which is more contestable. According to the same view, we should remedy it by all possible means. Among these means, some are legal and possible (the Commission has sought for some years now to work them out with tenacity and even success). Others are neither desirable nor workable (automatic division of markets, obligation on companies to amalgamate). One has to realize that the privileged (even monopolistic) situation of one of the Member States (France) is about to be reduced and brought into line, which is normal in a Community. One can also see that the participation of other Member States in their trade with the Associated States or in the adjudication of the Fund is increasing year by year. From this, one may conclude that the Commission is on the right track and must continue its efforts (…). The Community is not a piggy-bank, from which each Member State can draw the exact amount of money that it initially gave’ (Ferrandi, 1967, p. 31).

When it comes to framing places of terror and disappearance, Germany unfortunately has a wide range of cases to offer. In the intense discussion preceding and framing the building of the central German Holocaust memorial in Berlin, which was dedicated in 2005, an interesting comment came from Jewish historian Marianne Awerbuch. She wrote: ‘The whole country is a monument!’ (Assmann, 2011, p.222). The new monument for the murdered Europeans Jews was built in the centre of Berlin on neutral ground. With her statement Awerbuch wanted to prevent this new site somehow eclipsing, devaluing and displacing the authentic historical sites in the attention and memory of the Germans. A special paragraph concerning the obligation to preserve and care for the former concentration camps, that had been turned into historical sites of memory after the end of the war, had been inscribed into the treaty of unification of the two German states after 1990. This state of affairs, however, in no way demonstrated that ‘the whole country is a monument’. Hundreds and hundreds of less conspicuous sites had been made invisible after 1945, transforming them into nondescript places by deleting the traces of their history. If nobody intervenes, nature has a great capacity for de-historicizing places. ‘I am the grass, let me work’ is the tag line of a poem ‘Grass’ by Carl Sandburg (Sandburg, 2013) about the great battlefields of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

We’re teetering on the abyss of mass unemployment, right? Not really. It depends who you are, what you can do and where you live. Consider this: according to the European Union, member states require something in the region of 700,000 computer literate workers by 2015. These people — to quote a report from the Brussels-based lobby group Think Young,1 — “appear to be missing.” The word “missing” is a euphemism for “shortage.” Nobody worked out ahead of time that these people might be needed in this digital world of ours and consequently they never got trained. It’s interesting to talk with IT professionals who’ll tell you ruefully that even today — when the computer, the tablet and the iPhone are ubiquitous bits of kit — there is very little computer programming taught in schools. All the majority of school and college leavers seem capable of doing is downloading apps and using already programmed software.

The critical orthodoxy takes it as axiomatic that Movement writers sought to address life direct rather than as filtered through prior art. In the introduction to Poets of the 1950s (1955), the first anthology of the Movement generation, D.J. Enright wrote: ‘we do need poetry that is about something, poetry that is about people — preferably other people’.1 In his prose contribution to the volume, Larkin put it the other way round — we do not want poetry that is about poetry: As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly-created universe, and therefore have no belief in ‘tradition’ or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people. A poet’s only guide is his own judgement. (RW, 79) Kingsley Amis’s position was just as intransigent but was more explicit that the embargo on art about art extended to the visual as much as, if not more than, the literary inheritance: ‘nobody wants any more poems about philosophers or paintings or novelists or art galleries or mythology or foreign cities or other poems. At least I hope nobody wants them.’2 Laurence Lerner summarizes ‘the typical Movement poet’ who ‘emerges from these statements’ in the phrase ‘the poet as ordinary man’.3 Alvarez agrees: ‘he is just like the man next door — in fact, he probably is the man next door’.4

The hurdle for small businesses in getting a start anywhere in the world often comes down to the same issue: credit. If you can’t get a loan, you can’t get your enterprise up and running. If you’re in the stone-carving business, for example — like the artisans in the Carrara region of Tuscany, Italy, sources of marble for Michelangelo’s David and La Pieta — how do you get a new business going when you don’t have a financial track record, don’t have collateral, and nobody knows you at the bank?