The months that followed Beckett’s return to Paris on 26 October 1937, which would see him settle in the city until his death sixty-two years later, could not have been more tumultuous. Before the year was out he reconnected with Joyce and his circle as well as his Dublin friend Brian Coffey, heard that his novel Murphy had finally been accepted for publication by Routledge, and started an affair with Peggy Guggenheim. In November he also went back to Dublin to testify at the Oliver St. Gogarty trial. And before the first week of January 1938 was over, he had met Hemingway through Sylvia Beach, received the collected works of Kant he had ordered while in Germany, and got himself stabbed by a pimp called Prudence during one of his nightly sojourns. The subsequent period of hospitalisation, from 7 to 22 January 1938, brings together some of the protagonists that will feature in the story that follows: Brian Coffey, Peggy Guggenheim, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, the proofs of Murphy, Verlaine (in absentia) and, here reduced to a very minor role, James Joyce. This rather intense phase of Beckett’s life, in emotional, geographic and creative terms, which continued across 1938 and 1939, resulted in a series of poems written in French, starting with the poem ‘they come’ penned (in English, however) immediately after his release from the Hôpital Broussais.1 The precise order in which these poems were written remains rather nebulous, though Seán Lawlor and John Pilling have gone as far as possible in unravelling the sequence in their critical edition of Beckett’s Collected Poems and elsewhere.2 Twelve of these poems were eventually published as ‘Poèmes 38–39’3 in the second issue of the journal Les Temps modernes in 1946, but in 1938 and 1939, as John Pilling points out, ‘Beckett’s French poems were either a private matter between him and [his friends], or at best a trial-and-error type experience to be disclosed to a circle or coterie of close friends’.4 Arguably the most personal and unusual poem of this period, however, was only discovered in 2013 by the poet Peter Manson while researching the Getty Research Institute Archives in Los Angeles.5 Entitled ‘Match Nul ou L’Amour Paisible’, the poem is part of an undated typescript that Beckett sent to E. L. T. Mesens, the Belgian surrealist who edited the short-lived London Bulletin (April 1938 – June 1940).6 It was obviously not accepted for publication by Mesens, and remains unpublished.

Pristine shale formations are limited subsurface microbial habitats owing to their limited physical space. However, the process of drilling and hydraulic fracturing to recover natural gas from these formations greatly enhances their habitability for microbial life. Drawing upon over a decade of research, this chapter introduces fractured shales as dynamic microbial ecosystems, with particular emphasis on microbial processes that negatively impact on shale gas extraction, including input fluid degradation, biogenic sulfide production and biofilm formation. Collectively, these processes have the potential to sour natural gas, corrode extraction infrastructure, restrict the flow of gas and generally increase costs of resource recovery. The use and efficacy of biocides to control these impacts is discussed. This review presents a biogeographical overview of the fractured shale formations studied to date, highlighting a paucity of information on fractured shales outside the United States, and concludes with a discussion on the remaining knowledge gap.

Quality assurance and enhancement exercises are important in higher education. Curriculum assurance and enhancement exercise, relied in the past primarily on raw assessment data and self-reported, which lacked follow-up mechanisms gauging its effectiveness. This paper reports on an impact study of a curriculum review exercise using both digitalised data and self-reported data. Both the original review and its impact study were conducted on an English Programme in a Hong Kong university taken by around 6,000 students each year. Both adopted a learning analytics approach with digitalised behavioural and assessment data. Results of the impact study, which is the focus of this paper, demonstrate the strength of using learning analytics, including its capability of inter-course and intra-course investigations. Learning analytics can also empirically confirm and/or refute concerns reported by teachers and students. The use of digitalised data for learning analytics offers opportunities to implement and follow-up on quality assurance measures.