When Raphael Cilento drafted his unpublished autobiography, he called it ‘The World, My Oyster’. Some of the other titles he considered—such as ‘Confessions of an International Character’, ‘20th Century Spotlight’, ‘Mankind in the Raw’ and ‘Tapestry of Humanity’—similarly evoked his international career. Other alternatives—such as ‘Topical Confessions of a Tropical D…
The space age dawned in 1957 with the successful orbiting of Sputnik by the Soviet Union, and it surged forward with the Apollo moon land-ings, ushering in the era of satellites and deep space probes. This situation in which space business relied on space science probes, space shuttle flights, and satellite launches largely persisted until the…
International humanitarian law (IHL), now synonymous for many withjus inbello, is the branch of international law that governs the conduct of war. Eventhough the main instruments of IHL have been universally ratified, however,and IHL is perhaps the most effective means so far developed to limit theeffects of war, it is notoriously difficult to implement and enforce (Sassòli2007, 46–47; Bartl…
In August 2015, while we were writing this book, a group of sustainability activists were gathering in the grounds of a borrowed château on the outskirts of Paris. They were intent upon ‘eco-hacking’ the future. What this meant was turning the château into a temporary innovation camp, equipped with the tools for develop-ing a variety of technologies of practical and symbolic…
The Temple of Dendur stands grandly in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 1). Reflecting pools and cool tan-marble floors stylishly evoke the Nile and its surroundings; an enormous semi-translucent ceiling remains a relic of 1970s mod-ernism; a vast wall of glass looks out to Central Park and E. Eighty-Fourth Street. All frame the Egyptian temple’s relocation to the former Sackler …
In many countries, policies regarding reduction of unwanted catch anddiscards are crafted in response to concerns regarding accountability, conservation,and waste as well as scientific needs to fully account for all sources offishingmortality. It is important to note, however, that unwanted catch is minimal andmost, or all, of the catch has value in somefisheries. Utilisation rates are very hig…
Drylands encompass land areas characterized by a mean annual precipitation to mean annual potential evapotranspiration ratio (known as the aridity index) below 0.65. The aridity index defines four distinct dryland subtypes: hyper-arid (aridity index < 0.05), arid (0.05 ?aridity index < 0.20), semi-arid (0.20 ?aridity index < 0.50) and dry sub-humid …
In her treatise on aesthetics, Feeling and Form, the twentieth-century philosopher Susanne K. Langer wrote that Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ conveys above all the joyous experience of having such a great idea as that which informs the poem—the ‘excitement of it’ (Langer 1963, p. 219). Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ …
What is going on when a graphic novel has a twelfth-century samurai pick up a telephone to make a call, or a play has an ancient aristocrat teaching in a present-day schoolroom? Rather than regarding such anachronisms as errors, Samurai with Telephones develops a theory of how texts can use different types of anachronisms to challenge or rewrite history, play with history, or open history up to…
The creation of—or even the existence of—a “Pacific World” is a question that has preoccupied scholars to a much greater degree than existential doubts have bothered historians of other oceanic basins. Economic historian Eric Jones and colleagues have written that “there can be no meaningful history ofthe whole Rim or Basin [ofthe Pacific] since there…