Ahmed Ali, a founding member of the All-India Progressive Writers Association (PWA), was castigated for his first novel in English which failed, according to its critics, to address the pressing needs of India’s poor and suffering. Ali’s Twilight in Delhi is surprisingly committed to passivity, given the writer’s pioneering affiliation with the activist group. Instead of representing activist struggle, his novel depicts the death of a culture and its lingering afterlife, ironically via the English language and literary form. While there is no doubting the novel’s opposition to empire, it embraces passivity as a formal challenge to the ideological demands of the PWA, whose members openly derided it. Two fragile cultural forms linger even after their extinction in the novel: Urdu poetry, especially the ghazal form, and the ancient art of pigeon-keeping. In the end, the novel aligns itself with the vanquished and vulnerable – whether art or animal – and submits to an imperial form that will paradoxically ensure their survival.

The strategies devised throughout the interwar years and applied in Europe at the beginning of the Second World War were related to the consequences of the Great War. Due to the Third Reich’s aggressive foreign policy, war broke out in September 1939. Germany’s grand strategy consisted in proceeding one front at a time and launching bold onslaughts destined to lead the enemy to the negotiation table. By signing the agreement of August 1939 with the Reich, the USSR expanded its territory and bought time. Italy tried to wage a ‘parallel war’ but failed and had to resort to German help. Britain and France stuck to a defensive strategy of checking the enemies’ offensives on the European continent, building up their forces with US support and finally counterattacking. Britain held on until the US went to war in December 1941, while the USSR narrowly managed to face the first German onslaught. From 1942, the Allies steadily implemented a broad strategy of pushing back the enemy forces on land, at sea and in the air, imposing unconditional surrender on the Axis powers. The latter’s total defeat and the emergence of new superpowers and weaponry paved the way for new strategic perspectives.

The creators of West Side Story were liberal artists who updated Romeo and Juliet amidst youth gangs and racism, and each felt the sting of discrimination because they were Jewish and gay, but neither good intentions nor their own status as ‘Others’ in American society allowed them to realize fully the class advantages they had over the Puerto Rican minorities depicted in their show. Through consideration of Theodor Adorno’s concept of ‘Culture Industry,’ what one learns about Bernstein from his 1970 meeting with the Black Panthers immortalized as ‘Radical Chic’ by Tom Wolfe, Teju Cole’s concept of the ‘White Savior Industrial Complex,’ how the show has been cast, and other lenses, the author demonstrates how West Side Story can be described as insensitive in areas of class, the politics of colour, and race. The chapter also considers Bernstein’s cultural appropriation of African American and Latinx tropes in his music.

Chapter 3 aims to establish whether the new Arab bodies for constitutional review have acquired the potential to subject the executive branch to adequate checks and thus contribute to the processes of democratization more effectively than in the past. The chapter first discusses the origins of constitutional review in the region, as well as the main reasons why, before the Arab Spring, constitutional courts and councils rarely acted as “counter-majoritarian” bodies. The chapter then turns to an analysis of the major changes in the field of constitutional justice introduced by the post-2011 constitutions, including a limited strengthening of the independence of constitutional review bodies, the vesting of these institutions with judicial status, the broadening of access to these institutions, as well as a further expansion of their jurisdiction. The chapter also examines the role that constitutional courts and councils played in the transition processes that followed the outbreak of the Arab Spring. Finally, the chapter discusses the most significant obstacles that constitutional courts and councils still need to overcome in order to emerge as effective guarantors of the principles of constitutionalism.

I first describe how the physical-science and economics literatures have sought to cope with uncertainty about the correct climate model and discount rate, respectively. I next formalize MMR policy choice in an abstract manner. I then present the computational model studied in my research and summarize the main findings.

Based on a unique dataset of questionnaire survey about Chinese homeowners, I found that democratized neighborhoods have enjoyed better governing outcomes than have their nondemocratized counterparts, while also showing that the local government played a helping hand in establishing HoAs and thereby afforded neighborhoods mechanisms for self-governance. I also found that homeowner activists in democratized neighborhoods developed greater trust in the local government and deemed local officials both more supportive of neighborhood self-governance and less likely to collude with real estate management companies and developers than was the case within non-democratized neighborhoods.

This chapter traces Robbins’s formative training years, early career, and then focuses on several foundational shows that set-in motion his choreographic career along with lesser-known creations that helped shaped his mode of expression building up to West Side Story. I consider the tensions that continued to mount for Robbins between his personal life and his professional career and how they colour his way of working. This chapter draws out a collection of primary threads that weave together to create the dance-driven storytelling that comes to full fruition in West Side Story. Enroute, the chapter explores Robbins’s choreographic strategies, and ingenuities that began in his early career, helped along by key mentorships and collaborations with fellow artists both in ballet and musical theatre.

Shortly after his death in 1616, Shakespeare’s reputation began to draw tourists to his home in Stratford-upon-Avon. It wasn’t long before interest in Shakespeare became focused on the enormous mulberry tree that grew in his garden at New Place. Peculiar to Shakespeare’s work was a knowledge of the deeply human interest in the ornaments of creation, whose names and qualities are some of the earliest forms of knowledge we acquire as children and whose seasonal changes, whose beauty and decay, continue to shape our adult imagination. After his death, Shakespeare’s own biography became associated with the tree that grew in his garden: the tree and the man who planted it entered the annuls of common childhood knowledge. The first stirring of what would develop in the nineteenth century into a full-blown cult of Englishness began to form in those early seventeenth-century associations between the writer, his town, his plants and the nostalgia – at once nationalist and deeply personal – of the people who experienced in his work a glimpse of the fading realm that hovers always behind us: the homely, the simple, the common.

I trained as a clinical psychologist in the late 1970s, qualifying in 1980, and began practising in the local primary healthcare services in NHS Lanarkshire in Scotland. It was in that context that a general practitioner (GP) asked me one day, likely in 1981, ‘Colin, is there not anything you can do for folks who can’t sleep?’ I had to say that I didn’t know. We hadn’t had much, or even any, training on sleep problems. The GP concerned, along with many other professionals who referred patients, wasn’t satisfied that a pill was the only, or even the best, answer to mental health conditions. I had been seeing people with depression, anxiety, and so on, but could insomnia be addressed using evidence-based psychological therapies? I was curious to find out.

Chapter 11 explores how German criminal procedure, in the same way as German substantive criminal law, builds on a main body of legislation that was drafted in the nineteenth century. While the German Code of Criminal Procedure has been amended numerous times – also with the intention to address digital transformation and the shift to an information society – the obtaining of digital evidence (in particular from service providers), its analysis and its transformation into evidence introduced in a criminal trial remain areas with many challenges, uncertainties of legal interpretation and need of legislative reform. This chapter aims to provide an overview of core themes of digital evidence in criminal justice and the cooperation of service providers in criminal matters in Germany – in particular those that seem of most relevance to an international audience.

Offering two case studies – the economic transformations of Sohar and Duqm – this chapter grounds the book’s argument about Oman’s global labour market in material cases of spatial transformation and the integration into global value chains through which both commodities and labour circulate. The chapter argues that millennial citizen expectations take shape in these developments, from the interaction of ostensible outcomes of economic globalisation, neoliberalism, and government responsibilities of governing hydrocarbon windfalls. Citizen reactions emerge from their perceived right to, or exclusion from, these returns. The chapter further substantiates two points through these cases. First, both neoliberal reform and oil wealth explicitly or implicitly make promises to populations about an improved economic life, which, when unrealised, results in disenfranchisement and discontent. Second, capital needs labour and pursues supplies from the global labour market not only because it is cost effective but deliberately because it is both flexible and controllable. It seeks to avert potential labour disruption and secure seamless operations. Together, these findings show the ways Omani labour organises and the power of labour through the threat of its resistance.

I first review and critique the prevailing use of hypothesis tests to compare treatments. I then describe my application of statistical decision theory. I compare Bayes, maximin, and minimax regret decisions. I consider choice of sample size in randomized trials from the minimax regret perspective.