Vaughan Williams’s lifelong association with the English Folk Revival presents an unexpected paradox. Despite his substantial experience as a folk-song collector, holding leading positions in major Revival institutions, composing and arranging music for its performances and producing groundbreaking writings on theory, his contribution – if it is acknowledged at all – is reduced to the view that he was an establishment figure who simply continued the ideas of Cecil Sharp. This caricature of the man and his work – a cypher with nothing original to say and a toff unable to relate to working-class singers – is not only wrong but ignores all available evidence. Benefitting from recent republications of his own writings and new scholarship following the fiftieth anniversary of his death, this chapter positions Vaughan Williams as a tempering influence on the more dubious aspects of the Folk Revival. From his first day as a collector, his methods and approaches were advanced for their time. And while supporting the value of Sharp’s aim of revival, Vaughan Williams’s letters and actions show he directly challenged Sharp’s authoritarian and unsound assumptions. An undogmatic, respectful, and humane observer of the traditional music he encountered, Vaughan Williams still has much to offer to contemporary folk-song researchers.

Shaken baby syndrome (SBS) is well accepted by child abuse paediatricians as an explanation for the triad when parents/caregivers can provide no explanation. There is mounting evidence on many fronts that SBS is not a valid or well-defined diagnosis, and that many cases of SBS have medical causes or are from accidental short falls. An incorrect SBS diagnosis has far-reaching implications for the alleged perpetrator, the family, the child, and society. The three most compelling reasons to doubt the existence of SBS are: multiple biomechanical studies show that shaking cannot produce nearly the forces needed to cause the triad; sutopsy studies of most infants with alleged SBS do not show microscopic findings of trauma, but rather of hypoxia; retinal hemorrhages - once thought pathognomonic of shaking through vitreous retraction - are seen wherever there is an abrupt and significant rise in intracranial pressure and are highly unlikely to be caused by shaking. This review also provides observations that question the existence of SBS and the underlying psychological reasons why SBS proponents do not accept the compelling evidence that puts the diagnosis of SBS into question.

This is a brief presentation of the evidence from a systematic literature review of the diagnostic accuracy in suspected traumatic shaking. The national and international reaction to this systematic literature review is also addressed, along with rebuttal of the criticism and an interpretation of the hostile reception of the review. We argue that despite the fact that a scientific controversy often includes competing theories about mechanisms, the shaken baby controversy also includes a controversy about correlation knowledge, because its function is to corroborate (or falsify) the applied theories about mechanisms. Moreover, we argue that long personal experience and groupthink within child protection teams have influenced the development of biased gold standards, resulting in turn in circular reasoning: hence most of the shaken baby literature is flawed.

Shaken baby syndrome (SBS) is a determination, typically made by physicians, that a child or infant has been violently shaken whenever three findings are present (subdural and retinal haemorrhage, and brain swelling or dysfunction) and there is no history of major trauma or a fall from multiple stories. These beliefs serve a forensic purpose: they permit physicians and law enforcement to identify abuse in a non-verbal child where the parents or caretakers deny abuse. Globally, thousands of parents and carers have been convicted or had children taken away based on an SBS determination. Shaken baby syndrome, however, has become controversial and many of its foundational tenets have been challenged and proven unreliable. For nearly two decades, paediatric physicians and child abuse prosecutors have defended the SBS determination, while challengers continue to question its reliability in the courts, where judges and juries must sort out its reliability on a case-by-case basis. This chapter chronicles SBS’ history, as that history is helpful to understand the concerns and controversies about the hypothesis.

A widely shared expectation of science is that it speaks authoritatively about how the physical world works and therefore about what the consequences of different human actions and policy interventions are likely to be in that world. Science, and therefore the scientist, is believed to offer public life something different – something more truthful and hence more authoritative – than offered by politicians, journalists, lawyers, priests, or celebrities. Scientists ‘reaching a consensus’ and ‘speaking with one voice’ are integral to science’s projection of epistemic authority. This is especially the case with the IPCC, where its authority is perceived to rest on its communication of a scientific consensus. This chapter first summarises the nature of consensus-making in science in general, before examining the IPCC’s consensus-seeking practices. It then evaluates some of the arguments for and against the pursuit of consensus by the IPCC and concludes by highlighting some future challenges for the IPCC with respect to its pursuit of consensus.

This chapter traces the crtical reception of Roth's Portnoy’s Complaint, released to significant controversy. While many deemed the novel to be brilliant and hilarious, others found it offensive. Many readers were taken aback by its unabashed engagement with sex: protagonist Alex Portnoy speaks frankly about many aspects of his sexual life, particularly his propensity for masturbation. As is the case with many of Roth’s works, readers interpreted the protagonist to be almost wholly autobiographical. Moreover, many Jewish critics and rabbis, specifically, felt that the book’s material further revealed Roth to be a “self-hating Jew."Yet for many of the same reasons that it was criticized, Portnoy’s Complaint has also been hailed as one of Roth’s signature works, which exemplifies a coming into his unique voice and trademark sense of humor.

This chapter frames the complex and contested concept of Christian Platonism explicated throughout this volume. Here, it is introduced as an object of theological and philosophical contention, the subject of historical and conceptual communication, and a theme of compulsory knowledge for the student of intellectual history.

From the early years of the eighteenth century onwards, Dublin theatre managements attempted to formulate an idea of a ‘National Theatre’ for Ireland. The most famous of these managers was Thomas Sheridan the Younger (1719–1788), whose assertions that Dublin could support only one venue for serious theatre and that only he was competent to manage it were met with considerable scepticism. Controversies raged as to what an Irish national theatre ought to present, how it should cherish Irish creative talent, and to what authority should such a theatre be accountable, and these debates dominate much of the rest of the century. At the heart of the issue is whether such a patriotic cultural initiative should function independently of the vice-regal patronage of Dublin Castle. Should such a theatre cater for popular taste or should it function ‘in advance’ of prevalent opinion? Such issues are difficult enough in the context of a twenty-first-century independent state, but in a colonised nation that retains some of the trappings of autonomy without actual self-government, such issues were inflammatory.

The conclusion examines the legacy of physical-psychical scientists.By the 1940s even the most sympathetic physical-psychical scientists were ambivalent at best about the ‘psychical’ achievements of Crookes, Lodge and other veteran physical-psychical scientists.From the 1940s until the 1960s very few of the connections between physics and psychics involved the modern physics of relativity and quantum theories; the 1970s, however, saw a rejuvenation of interest in these possibilities, which became a major focus of the new field of ‘paraphysics’ whose theories and practices continue to cause controversy.I argue that the protagonists of this book would have recognised many of the problems faced by practitioners of paraphysics but repudiated these practitioners’ perceptions that Victorian physics was materialistic, rigid and closed to psychical significance.

Chapter One explores ancestors of the idea that the physical sciences were relevant and significant to the study of obscure powers associated with the human body and mind.In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, practitioners of animal magnetism and mesmerism linked the study of a supposed new imponderable ‘magnetic’ fluid affecting health to better-known physical imponderables.In the mid-nineteenth century the German chemist Karl von Reichenbach and his followers stimulated much debate for their alleged discovery of new imponderable ‘od’ that they believed extended the domain of physics into the realm of physiology.From the 1840s onwards ’Modern Spiritualism’ prompted many natural philosophers to intervene on controversies over its startling physical effects.The final section of the chapter contextualises these attempts to link physical and psychical realms in terms of the fluid state of the physical sciences in the early and mid-nineteenth century.