This chapter examines ZANU PF’s presidential succession politics, which gathered strong momentum from the late 1990s onward. Mujuru joined active politics as a ZANU PF Member of Parliament after his retirement from the military in 1992 and he led a faction in the internal fight to succeed Mugabe. The chapter examines the elite politics of this succession struggle, in which Mujuru never sought the presidency for himself. It contends that the primary reasons for Mujuru and Mugabe’s political falling out centred on issues such as Mujuru’s opposition to Mugabe’s one-party-state project, Zimbabwe’s 1998 military intervention in the DRC and the deleterious effects of Mugabe’s policies on Mujuru’s commercial interests. The chapter also lays bare the causes of Mujuru’s important rivalry with Emmerson Mnangagwa, a presidential succession contender. Lastly the chapter surveys Mujuru’s business activities and considers his private life as husband and father.

Although Piero was criticised for his love of sports and footballing in the streets, sportsmanship – like cultural patronage – contributed to the soft power increasingly enjoyed by Renaissance rulers. Visits to the antiquities in the Medici palace and to the model farm at Poggio a Caiano formed part of diplomats’ tours of Florence, while the sports of horse racing and falconry provided invaluable items for gift exchanges with other rulers. So too did Piero’s famous Spanish runner Garzerano, who was regarded as a trophy (‘like some prince’, in the eyes of the royal court) when borrowed by Alfonso of Naples for his son.1 So if Piero’s sporting activities were unappreciated at home, they gave him more standing outside Florence than his critics may have realised.

Piero’s behaviour in the months before the denouement of the cousins’ conspiracy in late April showed the two contrasting sides of his nature: lazy and hyperactively scheming. Both were pinpointed by Becchi’s idiosyncratic turn of phrase when he criticised him – on one hand – for letting ser Piero Dovizi govern Italy as his boss while he rested on his oars, ‘allowing some wind to blow the boat where the oars can’t arrive, it wears you out to use your arms’, and on the other for restlessly moving in a rocking gondola: ‘keep still, for God’s sake, for you can’t see everything and you shouldn’t help the side opposite to yours’.1 Outwardly, at least, Piero seemed unworried either by his cousins or by the French expedition. He stood high in the pope’s esteem as the broker of a possible marriage for little Laura (the pope’s daughter) and, indeed, as Florence’s St. Peter, ‘the rock on which our city is now rising up’.2 He was also as ‘ambiguous’ as the pope, ‘temporising in order to see whom to please’. After receiving despatches from France, Milan, Rome and Naples in November 1493, with news of ‘Ferrante’s trepidation, the pope’s instability and the general state of affairs in Milan’, Piero told Dovizi he had little to reply except that he was waiting to hear more before writing to Becchi in France, so that, ‘well informed, [Becchi] can … temporise or do as he thinks fit’.3 In the meantime, he was busy organising the joust that he and his friends had long been practising for – probably on the large tract of public land along the walls he had enclosed in November as a jousting yard. In Piazza S. Croce the stockades had been built and the seating was being constructed.4 Then, at the end of January, everything came to an abrupt halt, not because of the cousins or news from France, but because of the death of Ferrante of Naples on 25 January 1494.

Friends play functional roles in our lives, such as enhancing our ability to think and act. Sometimes the functionality remains at the level of business: trading partners often start liking each other. However, a deeper study reveals that Utility plays a critical role in “altruistic” activity. Aristotle says benefactors seek beneficiaries “useful for noble deeds” (sc. of generosity). Doing good for others creates love—not in the recipient but in the benefactor, according to Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Kant, who agree despite diverse metaphysical commitments. Benefactors are like artisans who love their own creations. By investing part of themselves in others, benefactors create a stake in others which they feel they own. Part of their identity is now wrapped up in the other person. Doing good thus extends our being to include another self or selves. The insight that utility is an ingredient in love has public policy implications for social security, health care, and civil society-building.

In this chapter, we discuss romantic relationship maintenance in the context of self-expansion. Overall, we review the self-expansion model and its accompanying empirical literature over the past 30 years, and consider some implications and future directions. Specifically, we begin by conceptualizing relationship maintenance, describing the self-expansion model (including both of its key principles: motivation to expand one's abilities to accomplish goals and including close others in the self), and covering some of the foundational work conducted with couples (e.g., self–other overlap and relational benefits of shared exciting activities). We then review research showing that relationship maintenance and self-expansion are positively related, and discuss potential mechanisms and theoretical underpinnings. We next explore more recent research on individual self-expansion and its implications for the maintenance of close relationships. Throughout the chapter, we provide illustrative examples of how self-expansion is associated with relationship characteristics, behaviors, maintenance, and outcomes. These examples will hopefully allow readers to better understand the concepts, theories, and empirical findings, and also allow utilization of this knowledge in real-life applications. Finally, we end with a summary and discussion of future directions for self-expansion and relationship researchers.

Situating the research regarding cyclical relationships within the larger sphere of relationships research, several practical applications are offered. Recommendations depend on goals partners have for their relationships. For those wanting to maintain the relationship but stop the cycling, partners might need to explicitly negotiate the rules or expectations of their relationships to ensure that the issues that led to the previous breakups are resolved. Given the increased incidence of conflict and aggression, finding more effective conflict management tactics might also aid in gaining a steadier path. For those wanting to redefine their relationship into a friendship, there are few scripts and many challenges. Frequently, at least one partner also desires reconciliation, and these partners might become overly intrusive. Although possible, post-dissolution relationships might require explicit boundary negotiation. Those wanting permanent dissolution should avoid surveilling or contact with the ex-partner, which can lead to rumination and thus exacerbate breakup distress. Additionally, reframing thoughts about the breakup to see potential positives as well as re-establishing one’s identity outside of the relationship can help ex-partners move forward.

Summarizing the results of Bergson’s inquiry into the realities generally referred to under the heading “religion,” the chapter identifies what Bergson calls the “specifically religious element” as love (the mystics’ word for the élan vital) in action. To account for its possibility, the chapter turns to Bergson’s use of the term “conversion,” which he consistently employs to describe qualitative change, and articulates the mystic experience as a conversion that aims at a creative transformation of humanity. The very terms in which Bergson couches this conversion call up and shed new light on major themes of Bergson’s philosophy, including liberty, the élan vital, and philosophical intuition. The conclusion of the essay addresses Bergson’s problematic “conversion” to Catholicism as an instance of love in action.

This chapter explores the role of religious experience in evidence for God, with special attention to the role of God in moral conviction toward perfect love for others.

Thomas Hobbes claims that he set political philosophy on its proper footing for the first time in On the Citizen. We examine the opening argument (1.1-1.2), in which Hobbes seeks to remove and replace the longstanding Aristotelian foundation, that human beings are political animals. Hobbes associates this idea with the view that human society is made possible by “mutual love” and a desire for association for its own sake. We argue that Hobbes is particularly targeting the Nicomachean Ethics on philia (friendship or love) and its role in the polis. One might nonetheless doubt that Hobbes’s arguments were at all successful. Although Hobbes certainly takes pleasure in portraying Aristotle’s views in a maximally absurd light, we show that Hobbes’s argument is more sophisticated than it first appears, and that it brings out genuine difficulties for Aristotle’s view. Finally, we consider Hobbes’s revisitation of the idea of “political animals” in a later section of On the Citizen. What emerges from this discussion is that Hobbes’s disagreement with Aristotle does not only – perhaps, not primarily – concern the nature of human motivation, but rather the essence of politics. The idea of a naturally political animal turns out to be an oxymoron.

Chapter 2 focuses on Ann Stephens’s goal of praising “noble women” and denouncing “bad men” to achieve what she calls “human love.”

Hobbes clearly and consistently maintains that we have a duty to love and fear God. However, he also problematizes love of God and, by implication, other passions putatively directed “to Godward.” We lack any conception of God, and therefore cannot love God in any literal sense. Moreover, even if love of God were psychologically possible, it is not clear that it would be appropriate, since love is apt only when someone is good to us. Love also requires wishing for the wellbeing of the beloved, which is absurd in the case of God. Similar arguments apply to fear of God. I examine the way in which Hobbes deals with this tension in On the Citizen. Without being explicit about what he is doing, Hobbes effectively redefines "love" and "fear" in the case of God, so that they are exhaustively constituted by obedience to the laws of nature, and not by any sort of feeling or affective attitude.

This chapter provides the readers with a reassessment of the Stuart masque. In order to have a broader perception of the Stuart masque texts themselves, Barroll contrasts them with the livrets of a number of ballets presented at the contemporary courts of France. Then, turning to Jonson, Barroll observes that if one considers the literary values in the printed texts of Ben Jonson’s masques, they emerge as uneven records of his oeuvre. The poet’s various attempts to influence the transmission of his masques have affected our assumptions about them. Barroll pays specific attention to the transmission history of Oberon and Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly, first printed, with four others, in Jonson’s 1616 Folio. Beyond our sense of Jonson’s inclination to present all his F1 masques not as multi-dimensional spectacles but as literary endeavors, another factor may well have contributed to this great difference in detail between the Oberon and Love Freed texts, Barroll suggests. This was the changed atmosphere of the 1615 as opposed to the 1610 Stuart court.

This chapter concentrates on how the concerns of Catullus’ texts inform the erotic and cultural dynamics of Wyatt’s love poetry. Focusing on gendered images of speech – the impotent or unreliable tongue, verbal duplicity, broken oaths and overt lies – it examines how issues of speaking are turned into ethical markers which can be mapped onto the spectrum of gender. Contextualising the poetry from the two periods against, respectively, one of Cicero’s forensic speeches, and Henry VIII’s love letters, it investigates how modes of speaking are used to contest and uphold the idea of masculinity as a moral state, not just a gender position: what it might mean to ’speak like a man’ in Republican Rome and Henrician England.

The conclusion focuses on Sonnet 18 and compares its significance in Shakespeare in Love (the film) and Shakespeare in Love (the play). It argues that this Sonnet has transcended the sequence, and has come to signify the Sonnets as a whole. Whilst this can be a reactionary decision, which ignores the overt homoeroticism of the sequence, it can also be a means of making the Sonnets more accessible by offering multiple different appropriations, emphasising the polyvocality of the individual Sonnet.

This chapter, on beauty, explores the desirability and splendor of creatures as a participation in divine beauty and goodness. It is, at heart, an exploration of what to love, and how to love it. In the words of an ancient prayer, the message is one of loving God 'above all things, and in all things'. As a contrasting position, we consider the vision of the Swedish Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren. Unlike his appeal for us to sever love for God from love for creatures, the vision in this chapter is integrative. The tendency is considered, all the same, for human waywardness in how we love, and the order of our loving. While the reality of sin and the need for restraint are recognised, the characteristics of a 'participatory spirituality' are seen not to be founded on denial or rejection: what Martin Buber calls one of 'subtraction ... or reduction'. The focus for the chapter is for the most part what could be called the beauty of goodness. It concludes with a discussion of the participatory character of aesthetic beauty.