After researching the life of a British Special Operation Executive agent, Oliver Churchill, who operated over the summer of 1944, Andrea Cominini found that his brother, Peter, had also been an SOE agent operating in France during WWII. Peter carried out four missions, spending 225 days in enemy territory. Finally captured, he spent over two years in captivity. After the war he wrote four novels based on his wartime experiences. Reviewing his second book, The Daily Herald wrote: "Now Peter Churchill wrote one of the best spy books of all time". The author describes the different literary genres in which Churchill's works can be situated and – through a subsequent analysis of the novels – how they provide a clear and historical representation of everyday life of a British secret agent during WWII. Peter Churchill’s works are then compared to those of pther novelists of his time, uncovering a range of connections with other related authors and literary genres. After the war, Churchill was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the Croix de Guerre; his wife Odette, who worked with him as an underground courier during the war, was the first woman to receive the George Cross.

Writing in the ancient Mediterranean existed against a backdrop of very high levels of interaction and contact. In the societies around its shores, writing was a dynamic practice that could serve many purposes – from a tool used by elites to control resources and establish their power bases to a symbol of local identity and a means of conveying complex information and ideas. This volume brings together contributions by members of the Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) research team and visiting fellows, offering a range of different perspectives and approaches to problems of writing in the ancient Mediterranean. Their focus is on practices, viewing writing as something that people do within a wider social and cultural context, and on adaptations, considering the ways in which writing changed and was changed by the people using it.

This selection of over five hundred letters gives us the life of John Cage with all the intelligence, wit, and inventiveness that made him such an important and groundbreaking composer and performer. The missives range from lengthy reports of his early trips to Europe in the 1930s through his years with the dancer Merce Cunningham, and shed new light on his growing eminence as an iconic performance artist of the American avant-garde. Cage's joie de vivre resounds in these letters - fully annotated throughout - in every phase of his career, and includes correspondence with Peter Yates, David Tudor, and Pierre Boulez, among others. Above all, they reveal his passionate interest in people, ideas, and the arts. The voice is one we recognize from his writings: singular, profound, irreverent, and funny. Not only will readers take pleasure in Cage's correspondence with and commentary about the people and events of a momentous and transformative time in the arts, they will also share in his meditations on the very nature of art. A deep pleasure to read, this volume presents an extraordinary portrait of a complex, brilliant man who challenged and changed the artistic currents of the twentieth century.

This volume introduces an international readership to the role books have played in the lives and upbringing of young people in the Nordic countries from the 1750s until today. Charlotte Appel and Nina Christensen look beyond an overview of noteworthy texts and characters to address the region’s distinctive reading cultures and the interactions between literature and changing views of childhood, with a special focus on Denmark. The emergence of a dedicated market for children’s books in the Global North coincided with national school reforms, when Luther’s Small Catechism started to be supplemented—or replaced—by new books published for and about young readers, learners, and citizens. Children’s use of books and media is closely related to adults’ wishes to influence the present and future of a child through instruction, entertainment, or play. Chapters point to strong continuities as well as remarkable changes in the relationships between child readers and adult authors, artists, publishers, teachers, librarians, and parents through the centuries. Focusing on children as the central users and producers of texts, this interdisciplinary and transnational history shows how children’s exposure to and use of media impacted the Nordic welfare state, and vice versa. The ways adults facilitated—and in some cases prevented—access to picture books, schoolbooks, textbooks, comics, magazines, and other media to youth between infancy and adolescence reveals the complicated interplay between children’s internal wishes and grown-ups’ external expectations over time. As narratives for young audiences are continuously rewritten, republished, and adapted into new forms, this pithy synthesis brings forward new knowledge about the material and social history of books, literature, and childhood.

John D. Bengston offers a detailed analysis of the Euskaro-Caucasian hypothesis in this new volume, exploring the idea that the Basque language is most closely related to the North Caucasian language family. He builds on ideas proposed by prominent scholars in the 20th century, notably the work of C. C. Uhlenbeck, Georges Dumézil, and René Lafon. Whilst important, their ideas were rather sporadic and consisted of scattered articles, and they never developed a comprehensive phonological and morphological model of Euskaro-Caucasian.Now thanks to advances in our understanding of Basque phonology and etymology, and in North Caucasian phonology and etymology, and improved linguistic methods, it has become possible to develop a comprehensive Euskaro-Caucasian phonological structure, including regular sound correspondences of vowels and consonants supported by significant numbers of etymologies. These correspondences, in turn, have allowed the author to evaluate objectively the etymological proposals of earlier investigators (which led to the modification or outright rejection of many of them), and have also provided clues to discovering some original etymologies. The nucleus of the Euskaro-Caucasian hypothesis is 'old', beginning in the 19th century, but the 'new paradigm' alluded to in this volume's subtitle refers to a focus on the North Caucasian language family as the closest surviving relative of Basque (as opposed to the 'South Caucasian' = Kartvelian family); a new and comprehensive scheme of comparative phonology; new discoveries in comparative morphology; and finally several hundred lexical and grammatical etymologies that supersede the more haphazard comparisons offered in earlier research.

The Journal of Language Relationship is an international periodical publication devoted to the issues of comparative linguistics and the history of the human language. The Journal contains articles written in English and Russian, as well as scientific reviews, discussions and reports from international linguistic conferences and seminars.

This volume, with origins in a panel at the 2018 Celtic Conference in Classics, presents creative new approaches to epigraphic material, in an attempt to 'shake up' how we deal with inscriptions. Broad themes include the embodied experience of epigraphy, the unique capacities of epigraphic language as a genre, the visuality of inscriptions and the interplay of inscriptions with literary texts. Although each chapter focuses on specific objects and epigraphic landscapes, ranging from Republican Rome to early modern Scotland, the emphasis here is on using these case studies not as an end in themselves, but as a means of exploring broader methodological and theoretical issues to do with how we use inscriptions as evidence, both for the Greco-Roman world and for other time periods. Drawing on conversations from fields such as archaeology and anthropology, philology, art history, linguistics and history, contributors also seek to push the boundaries of epigraphy as a discipline and to demonstrate the analytical fruits of interdisciplinary approaches to inscribed material. Methodologies such as phenomenology, translingualism, intertextuality and critical fabulation are deployed to offer new perspectives on the social functions of inscriptions as texts and objects and to open up new horizons for the use of inscriptions as evidence for past societies.

This book explores the myth of the Cyclops across western history, and how its changing form from ancient Greece until the modern day reveals fundamental changes in each era’s elite understandings and depictions of cultural values. From Homer’s Odyssey to Hellenistic poetry, from Roman epic to early medieval manuscript glosses, and from early modern opera to current pop culture, the myth of the Cyclops persists in changing forms. This myth’s distinct forms in each historical era reflect and distil wider changes occurring in the spheres of politics, philosophy, aesthetics, and social values, and as a story that persists continually across three millennia it provides a unique lens for cross-historical comparison across western thought.

Between 1890 and 1893, Ignaty Potapenko published a number of works (including Not a Hero) in which he presented the Russian intelligentsia with a new role model, the “mediocre but commonsensical man” whose diligence and steady devotion to the improvement of society are depicted as being more productive than the reckless heroism of the regime’s most outspoken, and often violent, opponents. Not a Hero introduces the twenty-first-century reader to an important debate of the pre-revolutionary period, a debate that is still relevant today: how to bring about social change within an oppressive and ossified political system without resorting to violence.

Much focus in research on alphabetic writing systems has been on correspondences between graphemes and phonemes. The present study sets out to complement these by examining the linguistic denotation of markers of word division in several ancient Northwest Semitic (NWS) writing systems, namely, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Moabite, and Hebrew, as well as alphabetic Greek. While in Modern European languages words on the page are separated on the basis of morphosyntax, I argue that in most NWS writing systems words are divided on the basis of prosody: ‘words’ are units which must be pronounced together with a single primary accent or stress, or as a single phrase. After an introduction providing the necessary theoretical groundwork, Part I considers word division in Phoenician inscriptions. I show that word division at the levels of both the prosodic word and of the prosodic phrase may be found in Phoenician, and that the distributions match those of prosodic words and prosodic phrases in Tiberian Hebrew. The latter is a source where, unlike the rest of the material considered, the prosody is well represented. In Part II, word division in Ugaritic alphabetic cuneiform is analysed. Here two-word division strategies are identified, corresponding broadly to two genres of text: viz, literary, and administrative documents. Word division in the orthography of literary and of some other texts separates prosodic words. By contrast, in many administrative (and some other) documents, words are separated on the basis of morphosyntax, anticipating later word division strategies in Europe by several centuries. Part III considers word division in the consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition of Biblical Hebrew. Here word division is found to mark out ‘minimal prosodic words’. I show that this word division orthography is also found in early Moabite and Hebrew inscriptions. Word division in alphabetic Greek inscriptions is the topic of Part IV. Whilst it is agreed that word division marks out prosodic words, the precise relationship of these units to the pitch accent and the rhythm of the language is not so clear, and consequently this issue is addressed in detail. Finally, the Epilogue considers the societal context of word division in each of the writing systems examined, to attempt to discern the rationales for the prosodic word division strategies adopted. Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) is a project funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 677758), and based in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.

Samuel R. Delany is one of literature's most iconic voices. An acclaimed writer of literary theory, queer literature, and fiction. his works have fundamentally altered the terrain of science fiction through their formally consummate and materially grounded explorations of difference. This anthology of essays, talks, and interviews addresses topics such as sex and sexuality, race, power, literature and genre, as well as Herman Melville, John Ashbery, Willa Cather, Junot Diaz, and others. The second of two volumes, this book gathers more than twenty-five pieces on films, poetry, and science fiction. This diverse collection displays the power of a towering literary intelligence. It is a rich trove of essays, as well as a map to the mind of one of the great writers of our time.

The Journal of Language Relationship is an international periodical publication devoted to the issues of comparative linguistics and the history of the human language. The Journal contains articles written in English and Russian, as well as scientific reviews, discussions and reports from international linguistic conferences and seminars.

"Chinese Internet Vernacular," a complex of novel language varieties associated with the Chinese internet, is usually thought to consist of an increasing host of linguistic memes currently or once virally spread. Focusing on the vernacular's most prominent character - meaning change, this book attempts to account for the different dimensions and aspects that contribute to the memes' meaning and function variations, based on the quantitative and qualitative data meticulously collected by following and recording the various memes' diffusions on Chinese social media over four years. Through the discussion of four comprehensive case studies, what we experience as noticeable meaning change throughout a viral meme's diffusion may in fact be indexical to, under different circumstances, interpersonal communicative effects, collective identities, and community affiliations, as well as larger sociocultural values and ideologies, all of which can be reflexively performed, enacted, and calibrated in social media interactions. With such efforts, this book hopes to do justice to the complexities and dynamics of the "Chinese Internet Vernacular" as a holistic sociolinguistic phenomenon.

Despite the flourishing of epichoric studies on the Archaic Greek scripts in the 1960s, embodied by archaeologists Lilian Hamilton Jeffery and Margherita Guarducci, most scholarship on early alphabetic writing in Greece has focused on questions around the origin of ‘the Greek alphabet’ instead of acknowledging the diversity of alphabetic systems that emerged in Geometric and Archaic times. The present book proposes to bring back the epichoric approach by focusing on the different ways in which the earliest epigraphic evidence represents the spoken Greek dialects. However, instead of continuing the palaeographic methodology of previous studies, this analysis follows the latest trends in grapholinguistics, more specifically the methodology of comparative graphematics. By examining the grapheme-phoneme relationships across Greek-speaking regions, it is possible to recognise that diversity and to draw connections with neighbouring contemporaneous alphabets, such as those for Phrygian, Eteocretan and Etruscan. This work, carried out within the Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) project, aims to contribute towards the conceptualisation of the so-called epichoric scripts as independent alphabets, as well as their framing within the ecology of ancient Mediterranean writing systems. Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) is a project funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 677758), and based in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.

A translation of Beatrix Potter's Tale of Peter Rabbit in Koine Greek, using only vocabulary found in the Greek New Testament and Septuagint (including the Apocrypha), and illustrated with Potter's original drawings.