This essay explores the unique insights into the lives and book ownership of the Paston family offered by its fifteenth-century correspondence. It looks at three Paston women ߝ Agnes Berry Paston, her daughter-in-law Margaret Mautby Paston, and Margaretߣs daughter Elizabeth Paston (Yelverton) ߝ and the books that were in their possession or that they may have read. Putting the evidence concerning book ownership provided by wills, for example, alongside that of letters provides intriguing insights into the spirituality and influence of women, and the value they placed on devotional and moral works. The Paston womenߣs reading also included secular romance, the interest of which may have been as much political as personal. The reading interests of such women, then, extended far beyond the narrowly domestic.

A summary of the information revealed by Collin’s letters with specific examples

This chapter deals with the formation of contracts under the civil code and shows that the process is effectively the same as in Western legal systems, requiring an offer and a corresponding acceptance, as well as common intention among the parties.

Only some of Daniel Defoe’s correspondence survives, much of that consisting of political exchange between Defoe and his spymaster Robert Harley. In particular, the correspondence relates to Defoe’s time agitating for the Union of Scotland and England in 1707.

Although a lot has been written (mainly in German) about field post in the German army during the Second World War and the many historiographical issues concerned with it, very little study has been devoted to the letter collections of the German generals. This chapter attempts first to consider this unique collection of sources and discuss where they have been used before and to what end. There is also a discussion about why they have not been used more generally in past operational histories. The problems with Kurrentschrift, and even the standardised Sütterlinschrift, are explained to make readers aware of the complexity inherent in tackling letters from a generation of men educated in the late nineteenth century. Another major focus of the chapter are issues concerned with veracity and verification of the correspondence. A statical analysis of each collection provides a remarkable insight into anomalies, which reveals that letters are missing (or were withheld) from the publicly available collection. This is an important qualification of the study and already points to an attempt by the generals to present a selective post-war image.

The question of what kind of recognition populism supplies to the people connects to the question of how populists understand and practice “democracy.” This chapter disputes the widespread assumption that populism is committed to a procedural conception of democracy, which rejects all substantive standards and constraints on popular decision-making. It argues that populism cannot be regarded as essentially democratic, while it is only against liberal constitutionalism. Indeed, from the perspective of democratic respect, the fault with populism is not that its understanding of democracy lacks substantive constraints on popular decision-making, but that it fails to appreciate the procedural value of democracy. The populist understanding of democracy fails to appreciate the importance of “procedural respect,” while it promotes “outcome respect” and “identification recognition.” However, outcome respect as a form of correspondence between public policy and people’s opinions is incompatible with the circumstance of disagreement, and populist leader-people identification has equally anti-pluralist implications. Finally, populism has a very limited understanding of democratic procedures, focusing on aggregative mechanisms such as referendums and elections, while it excludes a more expansive understanding of democracy, which includes free opinion-formation, activism, and deliberation in civil and political society.

Alevtina Kuzicheva surveys the intense family life that was the one constant of Chekhov’s existence by examining Chekhov’s correspondence with his parents, brothers, sister, and wife.

This chapter discusses the right to respect for ones private life as it is protected by the European Convention on Human Rights, other Council of Europe instruments, in EU law and in international instruments. A wide variety of different aspects of the right are discussed, including secret surveillance, personal identity, the right to respect for ones home and the freedom of correspondence. In the final section, a short comparison between the different instruments is made.

Guillaume Apollinaire is without doubt the most prolific French poet of the Great War. In addition to his major poetry collection, Calligrammes (1918), he wrote and published plays, stories, journalism, and criticism during the conflict. His writing is nothing if not wide ranging. He considered poetry a spiritual activity and an escape from the traditional classification of genre. He also believed there was no boundary between art and life – the two are inextricably linked – and, further, that art and life transform one another. This porous nature, not without its ambivalences and paradoxes, constitutes a major key to the interpretation of his work. The diversity and originality of his oeuvre, the trajectory of the author and the importance of his legacy help to explain how and why he became a poet of war in France, a country that ignored the tradition of 'war poets' that had developed in Great Britain.

Before developing my ideas further I must explain why I object to the common metaphysical picture behind standard scientific realism, which I call ‘correspondence realism’: the assumption that there is well-defined reality ‘out there’ with all its constituents existing mind-independently. This picture can be put under effective critical scrutiny if we disambiguate the notion of mind-independence. All entities that we can even think about are ‘mind-framed’ (characterized in terms of some concepts supplied by the mind), but real entities are not ‘mind-controlled (they do not do as we wish). The ‘fallacy of pre-figuration’ is to mistake the lack of mind-control as the lack of mind-framing. This fallacy is at the heart of the notion of correspondence between our theories and the mind-unframed ‘world’, and the purely extensional notion of reference according to which our words simply point to pre-figured realities. Such notions are produced through a metaphorical projection of the representation relation in real practices, in which correspondence holds among mind-framed entities. In standard realist discourse in the philosophy of science the fallacy of pre-figuration is reinforced by the faith that science does give us something resembling the ultimate true picture of reality, which must be free of mind-framing.

The introduction offers an original discussion of the emergence of Gaia, informed by the extant literature while centered on the letters exchanged in their working relationship, drawing new connections and insights from these previously unpublished materials. It highlights a range of themes that animate their conversations and the history of Gaia as a scientific and philosophical idea. The introduction treats the first encounter of Lovelock and Margulis; their individual careers and professional personae; material and social aspects of their collaboration; questions of authorship; the range of scientific disciplines necessary to Gaia's elaboration; matters of geography and institutions; the significance of the occasional disagreements between Lovelock and Margulis over how best to characterize Gaia; Gaia's reception within different disciplinary and social contexts, including evolutionary biology, Earth sciences, systems sciences, exo- and astrobiology, and a range of political and environmental cultures. The introduction concludes with a chronological outline of the correspondence.

The chapter explains the basic principles of linguistic change from a sociolinguistic variationist perspective. It begins with an explanation of the inextricable relationship between linguistic variation and change, and proceeds to demonstrate how language change can be observed, investigated, and explained. Sociolinguists can document and analyse language change using either the real-time method or the apparent-time construct; these methods and their advantages and pitfalls are explained and exemplified.

Britten and Pears regarded their relationship as a ‘marriage’ and described it as such as early as 1943. Although comfortable with using this term privately, they were aware of the legal prohibition and social stigma that prevented them from proclaiming their partnership openly. And yet throughout their nearly forty years together they made no immediate secret among their circle of friends and relatives about living their lives as a couple. As this essay suggests, theirs was a special case, in that they lived their relationship with relative openness among those who knew them. Works such as the Michelangelo Sonnets and Canticle I were a declaration of sorts about the nature of their relationship, although it was not until after the composer’s death that Pears commented overtly in an interview about their love for one another. A decade after the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in the UK, and with social discussion on homosexuality widening, Pears believed that his and Britten’s marriage need no longer be regarded as a secret.