There is a parable about an entrepreneur who invents an amazing machine. Wheat, soybeans, lumber, and oil are fed into one end of the contraption. As if by magic, smartphones, coffee, and tea, and all manner of clothing and apparel come out the other end. The inventor is praised as a genius – until further investigation reveals that the wheat and the other inputs were being secretly shipped to other countries in exchange for the electronics and apparel that later emerged. When this news is made public, the inventor is denounced as an unpatriotic fraud who is destroying jobs.

Hopkins made large claims about the originality of his efforts in the composition of music. This chapter expresses caution about the interest and significance of these efforts. It notes large gaps in Hopkins’s understanding of music and finds his surviving comments on the music he heard unenlightening. Even his poem on the composer Henry Purcell reveals little in this respect. Hopkins’s correspondence with the Irish musician Sir Robert Stewart required the musician to attempt to correct basic errors in Hopkins’s musical practice. Music can therefore be considered a meaningful context for Hopkins only in the limited sense that his interests here connect with his view of poetry as sound and as requiring performance.

This chapter surveys the condition of Roman Catholicism and Roman Catholics in Victorian England. Special emphasis is placed on significant historical, political, aesthetic, and devotional elements of Roman Catholicism in Britain, and how these elements influenced Gerard Manley Hopkins’s life and writing. In particular, the chapter considers how Hopkins’s sacramental vision, cultivated during and following his conversion to Roman Catholicism, profoundly shaped his poetry at the levels of form, feeling, and vision. This chapter therefore examines Roman Catholicism as a transformative vision of everyday life and living, the arts, and vocation for not only Hopkins but also his contemporaries who endured, and subtly resisted if not helped to redress, the social prejudices against and legal exclusions of Roman Catholics throughout the Victorian period.

This chapter explores the anthropology of early human property. Making use of the ethological distinction between territoriality and social dominance, it argues that norms of social dominance largely governed early human property orders as nthropologists reconstruct them. Rights in land, rather than taking the Blackstonian form familiar from modern legal orders, were “use rights,” granted out in line with the social hierarchical of society. An important form of “ownership” also attached to rights in prey taken in the hunt. The chapter closes by challenging the economistic accounts found in the well-known “tragedy of the commons” literature, as well as economistic theories intended to explain that some societies display the ownership of humans rather than the ownership of land.

This chapter explores Hopkins and rhyme: both his views on the subject and his practice as a poet. It considers Hopkins as an artist caught between two conceptions of rhyme that stood in tension with one another. In the first view, rhyme is a metaphor for thinking about questions of cosmic design and coherence, and hence carries philosophical weight, and a religious and ethical charge. In the second, rhyme is aligned with pleasure and beauty, and needs to be disciplined and harnessed if it is not to be decadent or self-indulgent. The chapter considers Hopkins’s observations and pronouncements on the subject of rhyme in his letters and lectures and compares and contrasts them with the evidence of his poems, in which he often breaks his own rules. The chapter argues that Hopkins needed to be in more than one mind about rhyme in order to write the way he did.

While the legal ownership of the Company’s knowledge resources could be transferred to the Crown with the passage of a new charter, just what it meant to be a “public” knowledge resource was up for debate. In this period, just as natural philosophy was resolving into separate disciplines with separate institutional structures, the cultural space of knowledge production was separating into new and separate spheres: public versus private, national versus imperial, professional versus amateur. The Company’s piecemeal absorption into the British state was not so much the erasure of a historical anomaly but part of the very process by which “states” and “publics” came to be more clearly defined against corporations and “private” interests. This chapter considers how the public–private status of the Company was also debated and constructed in relation to science, education and access to knowledge resources. At a time when a coherent British imperial identity was only just beginning to crystallize, the extremely convoluted property relations for the library-museum (held in trust by the Company for the Crown, which in turn held it in trust for the people of British India) raised awkward questions about the very coherence of the idea of an imperial public.

The concluding chapter of this book aims to remind the reader of the purpose of the book, which is to help BSL learners to improve their sign articulation accuracy, recognise the kinds of errors they are likely to make, and gain a better understanding of the visual nature of BSL. The importance of practice to enhance fluency is emphasised in Section 5.1, which also encourages the learner to make every effort to understand the cultural aspects of the social life and everyday lived experiences of Deaf people. Section 5.2 contains a good number of exercises that incorporate aspects of the previous three chapters so that you can continue working on the areas that you have identified for improvement. Each exercise contains a clear aim and provides activities with instructions that will help you to continue improving your sign articulation. This chapter emphasises the fact that the ability to recognise and correct your errors is an important part of the learning journey. It helps you to self-reflect and stay on track with the development of your BSL skills as you progress further on your journey to becoming a fluent BSL user.

This introductory chapter presents the aims of the book and its rationale in Section 1.1, including some insight into the author’s experience of teaching sign language for many years. Next, Section 1.2 provides some suggestions for how you can best use the book to advance your learning and provides explanation for some of the terminology and conventions used in the book. This section also provides some awareness of the systemic barriers faced by many sign language teachers and the limited amount of research on BSL teaching and learning. The following section, Section 1.3, then gives some details about the research and evidence basis of the book in order to provide the reader with some awareness of current research and understanding of this visual nature of the language. Lastly, Section 1.4 addresses a few questions that students commonly ask and expels some common myths around learning BSL.

The rule of law, an abstract concept heavily debated among legal scholars and social scientists, has in the past few decades acquired a nearly universal appeal, as democracies, autocracies, and oligarchies all claim to uphold it. Repeatedly, Xi and the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have pledged to build a “rule-of-law country.” But when the ruling elites of a one-party authoritarian state allege commitment to the rule of law, what do they really mean? How is it different from the Western concepts of the rule of law, especially the “thick” version of it that has been closely tied to liberal democratic values? What are the key features of the “rule of law with Chinese characteristics”? And how will it impact the international legal order? Applying a transnational legal ordering framework, this chapter attempts some answers. It traces the development of the Chinese legal system and the evolving rule-of-law debates in China and then explores how China might impact the international legal order.

This chapter continues the task of considering what, beyond law as it is often imagined, accounts for judicial decision-making. It explores work investigating the influence of motivated reasoning on judges’ behavior, including that which emphasizes the influence of judges’ desire to satisfy the expectations of groups such as their professional peers. It examines the celebrity culture that has arisen around many Supreme Court justices as providing an avenue for the influence of motivated cognition. It also explores other research into the influence of psychological phenomena, such as heuristics and biases, on judges’ decision-making and finally considers the significance of our tendency to notice bias more readily in others than in ourselves.

As I sit down to write this introduction it is difficult to appreciate that writing the original text of The Romanization of Britain (henceforth RoB) was completed (in my attic in Durham) a professional lifetime ago – the manuscript being completed in July 1988. In this introduction, I want to reflect on the context within which that book was written, then discuss some of the responses to it, before offering a few thoughts on the current state of studies of Roman Britain (and the provinces more broadly). I will not, however, enter into a prolonged discussion of current thinking about cultural change under Roman hegemony. Before embarking on this, I would like to digress with two observations. First, over the ensuing thirty-five years, I have occasionally been asked why I have not written a new edition of RoB in order to bring the text up to date. My answer has always been that the original book was very much a product of its time and was conceived of, as its subtitle proclaims, as ’an essay’. As such, although aspects of the evidence presented should indeed be updated, the essence of the book was conceived of as a connected narrative, so any updating or revision would carry the danger of blunting its argument. Further, it was a product of my thinking at a particular point in time, so it should remain as such and be read in that context.

ADHD is a highly prevalent, genetic, brain-based disorder associated with important impairments in academics, socio-emotional, family, and physical aspects of a person´s life. It has been described many years ago, generally starts in childhood, and in 50% of cases persists into adulthood. It has a well-documented safe and effective treatment that includes a multimodal combination on psychoeducation, parent training in behavioral management, academic support, and medication (stimulants or nonstimulants). Early and sustained treatment reduces symptoms, impairment, and negative consequences of complicated ADHD, such as poor academic outcomes, depression and other psychiatric complications, and accidents/injuries.

In a 2008 interview on ‘Meet the Press’ on US television, then President-elect Barack Obama, while discussing his intention to implement a stimulus plan to get the economy moving, qualified that ‘things are going to get worse before they get better.’ Things did indeed get worse. By the last quarter of 2008, the US economy was shrinking at an annual rate of 8%, as it sank into its deepest and longest recession since the Great Depression. In Figure 4.1, the blue line shows the drastic decline in the growth rate. Household consumption was trending downward at a rate of nearly 5% per year, business investment in factories and equipment was falling at a rate of 21% per year, and new-home construction was plummeting by a disastrous annual rate of 33%. Clearly, if something could be done, it should be, and swiftly.