This article argues that the image of the ‘bad German’ and the animus that accompanied it was tempered by that of the defeated German and the pity Italians in liberal and Catholic circles expressed for German misery. Such sympathetic expressions were not confined to the ruling elite but circulated broadly in media representations and in accounts given by Italians who travelled north in the early postwar years. To view Germans as objects of pity was an empowering act and a humanising one. As an emotion and a practice, pity provided a blueprint for how to think and feel about the former enemy – and oneself – that, in Italy, reinforced Catholic and liberal frameworks for political and social reconstruction. Important to constructions of East–West difference and to the Christian democratic groundings of Western Europe, pity continues to shape debates on European identity, immigration and humanitarian aid.

Ghostwriting autobiographies has gained so high a profile that novels and films focus on the ghost. To deepen understanding of such collaborations in science and medicine, this article reconstructs the making of A Matter of Life (1980), ‘the sensational story of the world’s first test-tube baby’. Although critiqued by feminist scholars, revised through research and embellished in fiction, this double autobiography of Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe is still the standard history of the British team’s work to achieve in vitro fertilisation (IVF). It is thus high time to investigate the debt acknowledged only by ‘gratitude for his invaluable help’ to the physician and poet Dannie Abse. I use previously unexploited manuscripts to illuminate relationships among authors, rewriter, and editor, and among those they cast as involved in the research. The records show that Abse rewrote underwhelming drafts for a publisher that had bought and sold the doctors’ story of the ‘baby of the century’ and needed a bestseller. To engage readers, he reworked the text so that alleviating infertility appeared as a career-long quest. As a result of adding vivid scenes with characters and expository dialogue, Abse began to give women—wives, assistants and patients—larger roles in the drama. The objections of Edwards and his circle to various literary references and factual claims were overruled. Yet the authors came across more sympathetically, and IVF was promoted more effectively, than in their own drafts. The process puts recent retellings of the story into perspective and exemplifies how collaboration can shape scientific and medical autobiographies.

This article concerns the interpretation of refuse dumps discovered at three abandoned Soviet tactical nuclear bases in Poland and how their analysis prompted a reassessment of archaeological remote sensing results. The study employed a range of methods to document the remnants of these secret sites, including declassified spy satellite images, aerial photographs, airborne and terrestrial laser scanning, UAV prospection, and field surveys, supplemented by CIA reports and Warsaw Pact military documents. These data bridge significant gaps in archival records, offering valuable insights into the history of these sites. However, the discovery of Cold War-era refuse dumps near the bases containing materials that do not conform to other evidence present an interpretative challenge. It exposed ‘survivorship bias’ in the dataset, prompting a re-evaluation of earlier conclusions.

Ideas about morphological complexity have been used to classify languages and to link complexity to language age and social structure. Creoles and sign languages are often framed as younger and structurally simpler than other languages. Concurrently, sign language morphology has been described as paradoxical, as both simple and complex. This paper is a critical examination of claims about morphological complexity and its relationship to language age and social structure. We show that the theoretical and empirical foundations of claims that sign language morphology is paradoxical are flawed. Specifically, argumentation and evidence supporting analogies between creole and sign language complexity adopt theoretically contested and ideologically problematic assumptions about creoles and uncritically apply them to sign languages. We identify four flaws in argumentation: (i) use of limited morphological data to generate claims about global complexity, (ii) association of binary language categories with categorical complexity differences, (iii) use of language age to motivate predictions about morphological complexity, and (iv) extrapolating from creole complexity to sign language complexity. Based on these flaws, we develop nine theoretical and practical recommendations for working with morphological complexity and discuss uncritical cross-disciplinary transfer of ideas.

In this article, the authors contend that three blades, archaeometrically identified as made of obsidian from the Nemrut Dağ source in eastern Anatolia, were recovered from bona fide archaeological contexts at two sites in Poland. This is supported by somewhat contentious contextual evidence, which is thoroughly reviewed. If the findspots are accepted as genuine, these artefacts would mark the furthest western distribution of Nemrut Dağ obsidian, approximately 2200 km away from the source, more than three times the previously recorded western distribution of this material. The known history of recovery and curation of these artefacts, their techno-typological features, and their raw material source (based on EDXRF analysis) are assessed, and an interpretation of this unusual material is offered.

In an earlier note in this journal, I located a contradiction in On Liberty. On the one hand, Mill describes piecework as a self-regarding “private concern” between employees and employers, one that does not harm other workers. On the other, he says that the competitors in economic markets harm each other. But workers compete in the labor market, and Mill does not deny that for some workers to accept payment by the piece may set back the interests of others. Jonathan Riley’s recent reply fails to demonstrate that Mill does not contradict himself. Riley’s argument depends on showing that in On Liberty Mill is presupposing that employers are employing a very specific model of piecework, one which Riley claims is self-regarding. However, Riley fails to establish that Mill is making this presupposition. Moreover, an employer’s choice to adopt piecework would not be self-regarding even if they did employ Riley’s model.

This article traces the visual culture of human genetic engineering over the past decade, focusing on the CRISPR genome editing technology. We argue that the representations surrounding CRISPR exemplify, and to an extent define, this visual culture. We examine the history of CRISPR, particularly its human applications from 2012 to 2022, through a periodization that includes the CRISPR craze, gene therapy initiatives, the He Jiankui controversy and clinical trials. Employing an expanded interpretation of intermediality within science communication, this work addresses the role of figuration across the relationships between specialist science reporting and the mainstream press and between traditional and social media. Using a mixed-methods approach combining visual and social-media analysis, the article presents an empirical analysis of three key figures – the double helix, the scientist and the human subject – and their roles across the discussed phases. The study concludes by articulating the stabilizing, amplifying and affective functions of intermedial figuration within science communication.

This article analyses the agony column ‘Voi e il cinema’, launched in November 1938 in Cine illustrato, one of the most popular film magazines of the time. ‘Voi e il cinema’ invited readers to share their acting aspirations, but also to send in photographs of themselves that might contain the defining feature of a diva: photogenicity. The magazine was flooded with images of ‘ordinary young Italian women’ that created an intermediate visual grammar. Focusing on both the photographs and the editors’ responses, the article reveals how shared consumption practices redefined the relationship between public and private space. It also highlights the distance of the readers’ self-representations from Fascist models and sheds light on the role of American star culture in creating the ‘modern’ subject. Although they were not politically opposed to Fascist models, the photographs reveal a strong desire for social change and the perception of such change, particularly in relation to traditional female roles.

This article analyses the activities conducted by the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) in Spain between 1936 to 1943 to understand Italian policy towards the Francoist regime during that period. In doing so, this piece argues that it is important to adopt a political economy approach that looks at production, trade and industrial investments, always in relation to politics, diplomacy, law, culture and government. In fact, this article establishes that, for the main actors in Rome at the time, all these considerations were inseparable when it came to the Italian policy towards Franco’s Spain. Furthermore, I argue that the BNL initiatives are better understood when situated within the larger history of the Fascist regime in Italy and its imperialistic policies in the Mediterranean area.

Two months after its premiere in Leipzig, Ernst Krenek’s Leben des Orest (1930) came to the Berlin Kroll Opera, a notorious centre for experimental, modernist productions. Inevitably, critics compared the two productions, much to the Berlin production’s detriment. In particular, critics faulted the Berlin stage designs by Greek-Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. I argue that this reception reflected a fundamental divergence in Krenek and de Chirico’s neoclassicism, which was only exacerbated by how neither Krenek nor de Chirico’s neoclassicism aligned with pre-existing expectations about the Kroll Opera’s production aesthetic, as exemplified in Igor Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (staged at the Kroll in 1928). Attending to these differences not only explains the troubled reception of Leben des Orest at the Kroll, but also provides fertile ground to examine the complicated and sometimes contradictory meanings ascribed to neoclassicism in the interwar period, especially as it moved between media and across national borders.