This chapter explores the actual reading event. It considers what kinds of pleasure readers seek from book reading and rereading (in different settings and at different times), and the ways in which an e-book does or does not deliver such satisfactions. Examining aspects such as tactile dimensions of embodied reading, the role of the material object, convenience and access, optimisation and customisation, and narrative immersion, it contextualises original findings with recent empirical research on screen reading and offers insights on how, where, and when intimacy, sense of achievement, and the feeling of being ‘lost in a book’ can be found in e-reading. Pleasures such as immersion and sense of achievement appear to be impeded by digital for some readers but facilitated for others. The chapter further examines how an e-book can be framed as an incomplete book (frequently as ‘content’ or ‘story’ and hence the ‘most important part’) without losing its power to satisfy.

In chapter 7, Releasing the BIS credit (May 29 - June 5), the BIS credit of 150 million schilling is released to the ANB as a moratorium is averted and a guarantee. Meantime, the issue of an Austrian government loan, re-emerges and it becomes clear that the French may not be able to or wanting to take the lead in organizing the loan. In Basel, the BIS is getting ready for the upcoming board and governors’ meeting, where the decision about another credit to the ANB will have to be discussed. Rodd prepares several notes and a plan for the meeting.

In chapter 3, preparing for crisis, the narrative begins. It is told mainly chronologically and this chapter deals with the period between May 11 and May 19, but only after a brief focus on January 1931 where Harry Siepmann on the basis of the socalled Bagehot model considers what to do in case of a major financial crisis in Europe. The Bagehot model for a lender of last resort and its inadequacy in the face of an international crisis, is a theme that goes through the book’s narrative. On May 11 the Credit Anstalt failure is made known and the central bankers get ready to make sense of the information they get from Austria and elsewhere. The BIS sends Francis Rodd to Vienna and the chapter follows him closely as he communicates his findings back to the BIS and Bank of England. In a world where debt is abundant and credit scarce, Rodd presents a plan to the upcoming BIS board meeting.

Chapter 10, A world political problem (June 11 - June 16). This chapter recounts the endgame of the Austrian crisis, while instability spreads to Germany. Norman comes to realize that in reality there is not much the central banks can do, since the real issue is "a world political problem" going all the way back to the Versaille Peace Agreement of 1919, the German war reparations and the allied’s war debts. The International Creditors Committee negotiate in Vienna with the Credit Anstalt and the Austrian government and at the very last minute they succeed in getting guarantee for their deposits, while promising to leave them for at least two years. At the same time, on June 16, negotiations with French bankers over the Austrian bond loans fails, and the Bank of England singlehandedly steps in with a bridge credit to the government. Together, the loan and the standstill agreement stops the Austrian crisis, at least for a while.

Chapter 18, The End (1931 - 2022). Since the narrative IS the analysis, there is no conclusion as such. Instead, The End provides a discussion of what a forward looking, thick description, humanistic approach to the financial crisis of 1931 have contributed to our knowledge in combination with the concepts embodied in the narrative. First, it is argued that the historical narrative provides new information exactly because writing the history forward brings out the uncertainty and need for sensemaking and narrative emplotment. This argument is discussed briefly in the context of the historiography of the 1931 crisis. Secondly, I ask what this narrative approach has contributed to our emprical and theoretical understanding of decision-making. By very briefly comparing with the Great financial crisis of 2008 I argue that uncertainty is a basic condition that requires sensemaking and narrative construction. I end by suggesting that rather than drawing lessons from history, history can be used as a way to reflect upon the past and the present.

Chapter 17, Exit (September 16 - October 23). In this chapter I follow the last few days before Britain leaves gold on September 21 after having exhausted the credits on the peg to the US dollar. The decision makes sterling decline by 20 per cent, which lead to massive losses not least for the Banque de France. J.P. Morgan is unhappy as well, seeing how the credits are gone with nothing to show for them. As Norman returns to Britain and the Bank, he is unhappy with the situation and Bank of England’s bad reputation following the devaluation. Rodd and Siepmann struggle to make sense of the situation, and Norman - some years later - expresses that it was all in vain. He was left ’a bitterly disappointed man.’ The narrative ends with this chapter.

The chapter begins with the observation that global history has an ambivalent attitude towards explanation. In many cases, the mere presentation of sources and voices from many different parts of the world seems sufficient to justify a global approach. The need for explanation is ignored or even denied. In other cases, global explanation is eagerly pursued, but often at the expense of more complex explanatory models that incorporate factors at different scales. In this perspective, global explanations are claimed to be inherently superior and a privileged way of explaining historical phenomena. After a cursory survey of current positions on causality and explanation in general methodology and ‘formal’ historical theory, the chapter proposes a brief typology of explanatory strategies. It goes on to discuss the peculiarities of explanation within a framework of connections across great distances and cultural boundaries. The much-exclaimed concept of narrative explanation is found to be of limited value, as it underestimates the difficulties of producing coherent narratives on a global scale. Concepts offered in the social science literature, such as the analysis of mechanisms and temporal sequences, could be helpful in refining purely narrative approaches to explanation.

Coroners have a wide discretion in the calling of witnesses, including expert witnesses. This chapter looks briefly at the role of experts in the coroner’s court, admissibility of expert evidence and some factors that experts consider when writing a report.

This chapter offers an assessment of the challenges that interactive forms of digital literature pose to print-based assumptions about narrative. The assertions of critics such as Espen Aarseth, Janet Murray, and Bolter and Landow – that the interactivity of digital texts invalidates such core assumptions as the distinction between fabula and syuzhet as well as author, reader, and character – have tended to lose their force as the genres they regarded as transformative – hypertext fiction and text-based interactive fiction (IF) – have receded from public view. Yet, as Emily Short argues here, these genres are far from “dead.” Speaking from her perspective as one of contemporary literature’s most highly regarded authors of interactive and choice-based literature, Short shows that interactive fiction has not disappeared, but rather become so thoroughly ingrained in contemporary artistic practice as to become nearly invisible – not only in hypertextual forms like the popular videogames authored in the Twine platform, but also in contemporary print-based literary fiction. In thus penetrating the mainstream of literary production, both digital and analog, interactive forms have subtly but powerfully revised our core assumptions about literary narrative.

The chapter looks at a substantial number of texts outside the boundaries usually placed in Byzantine Studies through conventional taxonomic categories such as genre or antithetic pairs like learned versus vernacular language. Four larger themes are used to explore this varied textual production and offer a proposal for understanding its basic socio-cultural and aesthetic functions for its immediate recipients and later readers. The four themes discussed are education and literature, patronage and literary production, rhetoric and genre in prose and poetry, narrative art from the enormous to the small. Despite the strong presence of ‘Hellenic’ subjects, Komnenian literature owes more to its own dynamism (deriving from a reformed teacherly practice in the schools) than to the imitation of ancient models. At the same time, the role of the patrons in promoting literary production shapes much of both learned and vernacular literary experimentation, while religious literature generously defined is strongly involved in an ongoing experimentation with form and content. Finally, the chapter asks whether any form of change can be traced within the literary production of the Komnenian era.

Schubert’s twenty-eight ballads provide an unusual perspective on his approach to writing for the piano for several reasons. First, the role of improvisation within balladeering was much more pronounced, traces of which remain within Schubert’s published works. Second, the piano was used to provide more explicit scene-setting, through the use of scenic effects, than is generally the case in Schubert’s other Lieder. Third, the ballads allow for the re-examination of narrative processes within nineteenth-century Lieder – in other words, how songs told stories.This chapter focuses on three ballads that show Schubert adopting different approaches to rendering poetic imagery in musical terms. It begins with his 1815 settings of Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Der Taucher’, D77, and Ludwig Heinrich Christoph Hölty’s ‘Die Nonne’, D212, considering their use of elaborate ‘Schauder’ or ‘shudder’ effects, which now tend to be dismissed as hackneyed but might instead be considered to offer access to often-overlooked aspects of early nineteenth-century performance culture. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, and of Schubert’s career, comes his simple strophic setting of Gottfried Herder’s ‘Edward’, D923 (1827). Concepts and practices of the ballad shifted over the course of Schubert’s career and would continue to do so for subsequent generations.