The chapter focuses on the interpretation of a group of expressions which the authors Axel Barceló and Robert Stainton term ‘quasi-factives’, an area in which the recurring issue of the relative contributions of linguistically encoded meaning and pragmatic inference is especially striking. In line with Deirdre Wilson’s early work on presupposition (Wilson 1975), they argue that the factive conclusions which these expressions seem to support are not to be explained semantically. Rather, they are components of the speaker’s meaning and their derivation by the addressee depends on the kind of cost–benefit trade-off that is central to relevance theory.

However well-regarded Chaucer’s works were during his lifetime, it was his immediate successors who fashioned him into the ‘father of English poetry’ they then bequeathed to the subsequent English literary tradition. In particular, the poets Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate not only represented Chaucer in this manner in their own, widely disseminated works, they were also instrumental in the broad dissemination of Chaucer’s works. Importantly, these activities were motivated not just by admiration but also by a politico-literary context in which Hoccleve and Lydgate, unlike Chaucer, were asked to produce works that spoke both for a prince and to a prince. Their invention of Chaucer’s literary authority cannot then be separated from their intervention into politics, and this conflation they also bequeathed to the English literary tradition, where it remained plainly visible in the works of their own successors, and where it persists, more obscurely, to the present.

Historically, aiding and abetting, as such, was not included in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal or the Charter of the Tokyo Tribunal. Rather, Control Council Law No. 10 first provided for the criminal prosecution of persons who were ‘accessor[ies] to the commission of any … crime or ordered or abetted the same’. Oddly, aiding and abetting was also not explicitly included in the 1950 Nuremberg Principles or the 1954 ILC Draft Code of Crimes – in both documents ‘complicity’ is employed – but it reappeared in Article 3(2) of the 1991 ILC Draft Code of Crimes and in Article 2(3)(d) of the 1996 ILC Draft Code of Crimes. Nonetheless, it is now consistently found in the Statutes of all modern international criminal tribunals.

While it is impossible to summarize the findings of this book, a few observations, points of interest, can be made. First of all, a few words on the customary law status of the modes of liability and inchoate concepts of liability that we discuss.

Commission is a well-established form of liability in ICL. In the Tadić Appeal Judgment, the ICTY confirmed that commission is first and foremost ‘the physical perpetration … by the offender himself’. Additionally, multiple other forms of commission exist, some of which do not necessarily require that a perpetrator commit a physical offence directly.

Criminal responsibility for contributing to a group acting with a common purpose is a key – yet controversial – issue in ICL. On the one hand, it is well-known that international crimes are normally committed by groups of people acting pursuant to joint plans or agreements. This calls for liability theories that establish responsibility based on the accused’s participation in a collective criminal effort. On the other hand, the principles of individual criminal responsibility and personal guilt proscribe the attribution of crimes committed by others to the accused merely because of his/her membership in a group or organization.