But how much do you know about the people behind the Internet? Who were the founding fathers and mothers of computer science? Do you know who coined the term ‘computer bug’ or who said “We don’t have the option of turning away from the future. No one gets to vote on whether technology is going to change our lives”?

Take our computing quiz, compiled from resources in Who’s Who, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford Reference, and the American National Biography, to see if you’re a computer genius or if you need an upgrade!

Who’s Who, published annually by A & C Black since 1897, and online exclusively by Oxford University Press since 2008, is the leading source of up-to-date information about over 35,000 influential people from all walks of life, worldwide, who have left their mark on British public life. Written by specialist authors, the Oxford DNB biographies will introduce you to the people behind British history’s great events as well as its literature, science, art, music, and ideas. Oxford Reference is the home of Oxford’s quality reference publishing bringing together over 2 million entries, and more than 16,000 illustrations, into a single cross-searchable resource. Discover the lives of more than 18,700 men and women — from all eras and walks of life — who have influenced American history and culture in the acclaimed American National Biography Online.

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The issue and performance of previously unpublished musical works — juvenilia, early pieces, and even completions by others of music left by composers, for one reason or another, incomplete — always provokes interesting debate. Would the composer have wanted it? Does the newly presented work serve the best interests of the composer’s reputation? Does the music throw new (or even controversial) light on ‘the life and works’?

With Sir Edward Elgar, the recent recording of the quadrilles and polkas that he wrote as a young man for entertainment at the Powick Asylum generated mild interest, but in 1998 Anthony Payne’s completion of the third symphony sketches and fragments left by Elgar at the end his life (and now in the British Library) caused a sensation. Payne called his work an ‘elaboration’ of Elgar’s sketches and — overnight, and fair and square — it gave the world a fine and substantial new piece. If not written by Sir Edward, it is by all counts completely worthy of him, a remarkable tribute, and something by way of repayment by one of his admirers. All the British composers that followed Elgar — such as Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) — owe him a debt.

As a young man and ‘apprentice’ composer, Vaughan Williams wrote much music (chamber works, orchestral pieces, choral works) which received performances at the time, but which he subsequently withdrew. Ursula Vaughan Williams, his widow, ensured that, where possible, the manuscripts for these early works were preserved (the majority were to be deposited in the British Library, along with those of the published works), but during her lifetime generally continued her husband’s policy of not allowing performance or publication.

Towards the end of her life (she died in 2007, almost fifty years after Vaughan Williams) Ursula relaxed her view, realizing the cultural and artistic value of releasing at least a selection of her husband’s early and by now forgotten works (really, the only information about them then available to the public was their listings in Michael Kennedy’s complete catalogue of Vaughan Williams’ works). Since her death The Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust has continued to release selected works, either previously unpublished or earlier versions of works already in the repertoire, to each of the composer’s original music publishers (there were several) or their successors. Such releases include early chamber music to Faber Music and the original (longer) version of A London Symphony to Stainer & Bell.

In 2009 Oxford University Press (OUP) published a small and previously unknown carol by Vaughan Williams (O My Dear Heart), but OUP’s recent issues of unpublished Vaughan Williams titles have been exclusively of orchestral works. The Solent was written in 1902/3 and was planned to be one part of a four-movement orchestral ‘impressions’ of the New Forest. It received a private performance on 19 June 1903 and was then forgotten, although Vaughan Williams made use of one of its themes in at least one later work (his ninth symphony, written shortly before his death). The Serenade in A Minor dates from five years earlier, and was heard at Bournemouth in April 1904 and again in London’s Aeolian Hall in 1908. Like The Solent, it was then forgotten. These two works are being performed on 24 May as part of the English Music Festival, in a ‘Searching for English Music’ concert at Dorchester Abbey, Oxfordshire, with the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Martin Yates. These performances will bring two early scores by Vaughan Williams to the ears of modern audiences for the first time, and will allow listeners to judge for themselves just how and where they fit into the already large and popular oeuvre of this celebrated English composer. The score for Serenade was published by OUP in 2012, and that for The Solent will be issued later this year.

Later this summer, we hear Anthony Payne’s re-imagining not of Elgar but of another Vaughan Williams score. At the request of the BBC he has orchestrated the Four Last Songs, written by Vaughan Williams (originally for voice and piano) to poems by Ursula in the last years of his life, and published posthumously by OUP. Payne’s orchestration will be heard at the Royal Albert Hall in a BBC Promenade Concert on 4 September 2013. New versions of works by Vaughan Williams? The composer would most definitely have approved, but that is another story.

Simon Wright is Head of Rights & Contracts, Music at Oxford University Press. Read his previous blog post: “Sinfonia Antartica: ‘Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free’.”

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Image credit: Portrait of Ralph Vaughan Williams courtesy of OUP sheet music department. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

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The Telegraph Hay Festival is taking place from 23 May to 2 June 2013 on the edge of the beautiful Brecon Beacons National Park. We’re delighted to have many Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year. OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Hay-on-Wye, you won’t miss out. Don’t forget you can also follow @hayfestival and view the event programme here.

Linda Yueh will be appearing at The Telegraph Hay Festival on Sunday 26 May 2013 at 5.30 p.m. to examine China’s growth and the making of an economic superpower. More information and tickets.

By Linda Yueh

China has successfully utilised inward foreign direct investment (FDI) to “catch up” in growth by using foreign investment to help develop manufacturing and export capacity. The next phase requires technological progress and thus will involve outward FDI, including its firms’ “going global.” The “going out, bringing in” policy means that its “open door” policy has been supplemented by the “going out” of its firms as well as “pulling in” FDI. This is a key part of China’s future growth; that is dependent on the ability to produce globally competitive corporations that will help China move up the value chain and sustain its development and overcome the “middle income country trap”. This refers to how countries slow down after reaching about $14,000 per capita – the level that China is forecast to reach before 2020. Thus, the next phase of growth will be characterised by a shift in its growth paradigm and centre on global integration characterised by outward investment as China takes its place as a burgeoning economic superpower.

It also has macroeconomic benefits in reducing foreign reserve accumulation from its record $3.44 trillion by buying more real assets instead of government bonds to balance its current account surplus. China has worried about the value of its holdings with Western economies struggling in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis and the ongoing euro debt crisis. Thus, China has also launched a policy to internationalize the RMB, increasing the use of the Chinese currency internationally, via offshore centres to allow gradual capital or financial account liberalisation. That ambition to develop the RMB, plus the aim to invest rather than buy government debt, will fundamentally transform China’s impact on the global economy.

These are the key steps toward an inevitable structural shift in the economy – both the external sector and also re-orienting more toward domestic demand. These were highlighted in the major policy document of the 12th Five Year Plan (2011-2015) as well as in the World Bank and China’s State Council Development Research Centre’s “China 2030” report, both of which I served as an advisor on.

Re-balancing growth
Re-balancing growth will add to China’s stability and allow it to become more like the structure of the only economy in the world larger than China’s. America is one of the world’s top three traders, but its economy is largely driven by domestic demand. China, too, can become a large, open economy. China would gain greater stability and a more sustainable basis for its future growth if it continues to be globally integrated, but be less subject to the volatility that plagues small, open economies such as those in Asia.

To orient toward domestic demand means boosting consumption in China, i.e. reducing the savings tendencies of households and firms. Consumption fell from around half of GDP in the 1980s and early 1990s to nearly one-third by the late 2000s. In developed economies, consumption is typically between half to two-thirds of GDP.

For Chinese households, precautionary savings motives are important to address, particularly in rural areas. There has also been an increase in savings by firms (state-owned and non-state-owned) during the 2000s where firm savings have rivalled that of households. The reason is thought to be because China’s distorted financial system is biased toward state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and private firms have trouble obtaining credit—whether from banks or the underdeveloped domestic capital markets.

Going global
China also recognizes that its growth will slow in the coming decades, and it is wary of falling into the “middle income country trap”. It therefore wants to upgrade technologically, have globally competitive firms and sponsor greater innovation, which requires having firms that operate, compete and learn in developed markets. This is a trait shared by those countries that have joined the ranks of rich nations, such as Japan, South Korea and others – and China is keen to do the same.

Plus, China has been aiming for some time to diversify out of U.S. Treasury bonds due to worries about the American fiscal position. But, the euro debt crisis has also raised concerns about the eurozone. Thus, the recent thrust of Chinese policy has been to use foreign exchange reserves to finance investments by Chinese companies overseas instead of acquiring more government debt.

There has been exponential growth of outward FDI since the mid 2000s when the first commercial investment by a Chinese firm was permitted in 2004 with TCL’s purchase of France’s Thomson. By last year, China reported that it had invested a record $117 billion overseas. China is aiming to show that its industrial capacity is not only a function of foreign firms producing its exports, but indicative of a more widespread upgrading of its industry.

China’s changing impact on the world
China can become a large, open economy – developing domestic demand and upgrading industry/promoting globally competitive firms – that recognises its wider impact as it is unlike small, open, export-led economies. China already does and will increasingly do so as it promotes outward investment, the internationalisation of the RMB and the gradual opening of its capital account. With per capita incomes still only at $9,100, there is significant scope for China to continue to grow even though it ranks as the world’s second largest economy. The Chinese government has a 30 year plan that hinges on these components that will undoubtedly transform the world economy in a fundamentally different manner than the past impact via cheap manufactured goods. The new trends will involve the rise of the RMB as a reserve currency, competitive Chinese multinationals and greater opening of the mainland market. Most importantly, successfully re-balancing China will mean a more sustainable growth path for China and perhaps the world economy.

Dr. Linda Yueh is Director of the China Growth Centre and Fellow in Economics, St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, Adjunct Professor of Economics at the London Business School, and Visiting Professor of Economics at Peking University. She is the Chief Business Correspondent at the BBC and the host of a new weekly business programme on BBC World News. She is the author of several books, including two by Oxford University Press: China’s Growth: The Making of an Economic Superpower and Enterprising China: Business, Economic, and Legal Developments Since 1979. You can follow her on Twitter @lindayueh

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Image credit: Flag of China. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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As has often happened in the recent past, this essay is an answer to a letter, but I will not only address the question of our correspondent but also develop the topic and write about Old Nick, his crew, and the goblin. The question was about the origin of the words bogey and boggle. I have dealt with both in my dictionary and in passing probably in the blog, but after more than seven years the archive of “The Oxford Etymologist” has grown to such an extent that even I remember dimly whether certain subjects have been covered in the “gleanings” or in a special essay. So what is the origin of bogey? One should perhaps begin with the word boo!

Nobody will contest the idea that boo is an interjection. However, putting a classificatory label on it does not mean solving its etymology. Most interjections are studied, artificial words, from oops and ouch to jiminy and Gosh, and their origin is often lost. The same can be said about the polite oh, ah, and eh. Only natural shrieks (when we holler with pain) are natural, but they are hard to verbalize. Let us agree for the sake of (the) argument that boo is an imitative word and proceed from there. To put it differently, let us agree that we associate boo with noise. Noisy things deafen people. They swell, burst, explode, and by doing so scare us; they are often huge and inflatable, and their spread is beyond people’s control. The most dangerous step in our search will be the first. Can we assume that various consonants tend to attach themselves to sound complexes like boo or bu and form nouns, adjectives, and verbs of more or less predictable semantics? Once we make such a step, we will be in serious trouble, but there is no choice. If boo is sound imitative, does the same hold for boom? Most language historians think so. And bomb? It matters little that Engl. bomb is a borrowing from French (ultimately from Latin, from Greek). Imitative words are similar all over the world, don’t obey so-called phonetic laws, and are easily borrowed.

Now, if bomb is onomatopoeic, nothing prevents us from drawing pomp, pumpkin, and even pooh-pooh, into this net, and, sure enough, it has been done. Since we have allowed our words to begin with p- and have various vowels, we may try to add consonants other than b ~ mb to b- ~ p-. Along the way, we cannot avoid the adjective big. Its derivation has been the object of involved and largely profitless speculation, with one or two improbable hypotheses thrown in for good measure, but, since we need words designating menacing, noisy objects, big will suit us. Strangely, big is the Dutch for “pig,” and pig (the name of a fat, “big” animal) is another word whose origin has been called unknown.

The next object of horror is buck, designating a particularly corpulent beast. The Germanic spectrum of senses in this word is limited: “the male of a horned animal,” (specifically) “the male of the bovine family,” “male deer,” and “billy-goat,” with the root often ending in -kk (a long consonant, or geminate, to use a technical term, emphasizes the word’s affectionate, expressive nature). Irish bocc and Sanskrit bukka “billy-goat,” Armenian buc “lamb,” and Russian byk “buck” (with similar cognates elsewhere in Slavic) are variants of the same word. They may trace to boo “moo,” but pigs do not moo and yet big ~ pig resemble buck, whose most ancient form must have been bukkaz. Nor is bleating (compare Armenian buc) the same as booing ~ mooing, but we remain in more or less the same sphere.

Once we have done with the cattle, we run into Russian buka “bogyman” and wonder what to do with Russian bukashka (stress on the second syllable) “a small insect of any kind,” a word allegedly (but uncertainly) related to another onomatopoeic verb. Lost among bucks, pigs, and their look-alikes, we cannot avoid bug. Its earlier English synonym (or etymon?) was budde, but consonant and vowel variation has long since stopped bothering us: in this game, everything goes. Besides, buds swell and burst, just as we expected. Norwegian bugge means “big sturdy man.” Bug “an object of dread” and bug “insect” (in British English, mainly “beetle”), along with the verb bug (“What’s bugging you?”) and the bug in our computers, are probably different senses of the same word, originally the name of a creature endowed with the ability to swell (hence ready to explode, produce a lot of noise, and fill its surroundings with fright). In its vicinity we discover bugaboo and its earlier variant bugaboy. The latter need not be a “corruption” of bugaboo, because boy, a noun phonetically close to boo, was attested in Middle English with the sense “devil,” and the phrases at a boy and oh, boy may be relics of that sense. The second element of bugbear is bear (an animal name), because people stood in mortal fear of bears and wolves.

Boogie, as in boogie-woogie, is believed to be a West African coinage, and, if it is true that boogie originally meant “prostitute,” we are dealing with a social bugaboo. Speakers all over the world use the sound complex boog- ~ bog- for naming similar objects. Bogey emerged as a member of a large family. Old Bogey is the Devil, a bug, a bugbear. Bogus, initially, as it seems, part of counterfeiters’ slang, is, like most words being discussed here, of unknown etymology. It may well be a relative of bogey. Boggle means “to bedevil,” that is, not only “to confuse” but also “to frighten.” Russian bog (a Common Slavic word) means “god.” It is akin to several Sanskrit and Iranian words for “endowing with gifts” and so forth. In Modern Russian, bogatyi (stress on the second syllable) means “rich.” Long ago attempts were made to connect Slavic bog with English bogey, but they were given up as fanciful. Yet I wonder whether the positive senses (“riches, gifts”) did not arise later. Pagan gods, an invisible multitude, filled worshipers with dread and were propitiated in the hope of warding off the evil they caused. The development of the generic concept (God), characteristic of monotheistic religions, is particularly hard to trace.

Etymology stopped being guesswork when phonetic correspondences were discovered. The exercise offered above smacks of medieval linguistics. Vowels and consonants play leapfrog at will. It is no wonder that good dictionaries call most of such words etymologically obscure. If one can mention boo, boom, bomb, pomp, pig, big, bud, bug, and bogey in one breath, when and where do we stop and for how many more words should we make special dispensation?  Are we allowed to incorporate bog “swamp,” puddle, and pudding into the list? They do not burst, but they certainly “spread.” No one can give a definite answer to those questions. 

Words are not soldiers marching in single file, but they are not a disorganized crowd either. Neither limitless free trade nor strict planning will do them justice. Boggled by this opportunistic conclusion, we can only say that Old Bogey is a noisy demon, an evil bug and that his name reflects this fact.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: The Buck Stops Here sign from Harry Truman’s White House desk. Image courtesy of the Truman Presidential Library. Public domain.

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22 May 1972

The following is a brief extract from The History of the World: Sixth Edition by J.M. Roberts and O.A. Westad.

In October 1971 the UN General Assembly had recognized the People’s Republic as the only legitimate representative of China in the United Nations, and expelled the representative of Taiwan. This was not an outcome the United States had anticipated until the crucial vote was taken. The following February, there took place a visit by Nixon to China that was the first visit ever made by an American president to mainland Asia, and one he described as an attempt to bridge ‘sixteen thousand miles and twenty-two years of hostility.’

Post War Europe – Economic and Military Blocks (c) Helicon Publishing Ltd

When Nixon followed his Chinese trip by becoming also the first American president to visit Moscow (in May 1972), and this was followed by an interim agreement on arms limitation – the first of its kind – it seemed that another important change had come about. The stark, polarized simplicities of the Cold War were blurring, however doubtful the future might be.

Reprinted from THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD: Sixth Edition by J.M. Roberts and O.A. Westad with permission from Oxford University Press, Inc. Copyright © 2013 by O.A. Westad.

J. M. Roberts CBE died in 2003. He was Warden at Merton College, Oxford University, until his retirement and is widely considered one of the leading historians of his era. He is also renowned as the author and presenter of the BBC TV series ‘The Triumph of the West’ (1985). Odd Arne Westad edited the sixth edition of The History of the World. He is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. He has published fifteen books on modern and contemporary international history, among them ‘The Global Cold War,’ which won the Bancroft Prize.

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Oxford University Press recently partnered with The Poetry Archive to support Poetry by Heart, a new national poetry competition in England which saw thousands of students aged 14 to 18 competing to become national champion for their skill in memorising and reciting poems by heart. OUP provided free content from OED Online, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the American National Biography Online to support students participating in the competition. Here, 18 year old winning contestant Kaiti Soultana writes about the experience.

By Kaiti Soultana

What impelled me to participate in Poetry by Heart? Like many of the other contestants, I wanted both to galvanize others and to be inspired myself. It seems that poets strive to enhance the minds of those reading and listening, and I find this so philanthropic. Though a cliché, it is true to say that although I won the competition, I would have won even if I had not gained first place; the experience was invaluable and truly irreplaceable.

What Poetry by Heart offered was an opportunity to deliver a poem aloud and consequently for me to retain it. What I think makes the spoken word superior to reading a poem silently is that delivering a poem aloud allows for both the poet’s and the speaker’s voices to truly be heard. Quite often you find that it is not only the words of the poem but also the sound of it that attracts us to it, even before fully understanding the message it is giving.  That is something I experienced when exploring the part of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that I chose to recite. As competitors, we were provided with an anthology of poems of two categories to choose from and recite: a pre-1914 and a post-1914 list. It was the work of that anonymous 14th century poet that aroused within me such delight, though amusingly I initially understood very little of what I was reading.

It was that yearning to learn, and to explore what would otherwise go unexplored, which I found so inviting about Sir Gawain. I took up the challenge to inspire others through this astonishing, demanding, and somewhat alien ‘old’ English language. The alliterative threads that bound the poem made it easier to immerse both myself and the audience in such an unfamiliar realm, and it was this, I believe, that made my recitation successful.

My choice of post-1914 poetry developed from a somewhat different quality that poetry as a medium triumphs in: the ability to reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary. Elizabeth Bishop seemed to express such perplexed beauty in her poem The Fish, so much so that it established an abnormal yet completely natural and loving bond between myself as a reader and a mere fish.

I began preparing my recitations by acquiring as much basic contextual knowledge about both poem and author, attempting to understand what message each one was trying to convey, yet interpreting it personally and intimately. My progression in understanding each of my poems grew from a minimal surface reading to one where my own interpretation and ideas worked alongside that of the poet’s. I seemed to gain companionship with a person I had never met or talked with. I began to gain an insight into their minds, into the worlds they had constructed. It wasn’t just a poem by rote I had gained, but the appreciation and understanding of a poet’s imagination.

The competition itself seemed far more like a humble gathering of young literary enthusiasts. Through the stages – from school heats to county contests and finally the regional and national finals weekend – the rounds seemed more like a programme of complementary performances. They allowed for initial introductions to mature into lasting friendships – I have experienced the development of such friendships with people across the country thanks to Poetry by Heart.

Though enjoyable, I was unsuccessful in casting away the nerves I am often plagued with. However, it was participating in a competition that I sincerely valued and appreciated, that motivated and inspired me, and allowed me to at least control those nerves.

In addition to viewing others’ regional heats, Poetry by Heart’s organisers scheduled excursions for participants to the London Eye, the British Library and tours of the National Portrait Gallery, none of which I had been privileged to visit before. I was stimulated to explore a small part of London, an opportunity that was exciting, fun, and invaluable.

The weekend itself was nothing shy of extraordinary. It seems unanimous that what we had gained by offering ourselves as orators of the poems was more than just the memory of the poem itself. What I gained was far more remarkable; I discovered the importance of poetry to human beings, and how this importance has spanned generations. It continues to grow as a form of universal expression, and with great thanks to Poetry by Heart I have truly understood its often unacknowledged value.

Kaiti Soultana is 18 and studying A levels at Bilborough College, Nottingham.

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By Pat Rogers

There’s never been a shortage of readers to love and admire Alexander Pope. But if you think you don’t, or wouldn’t, like his poetry, you’re in good company there too. Ever since his own day, detractors have stuck their oar in, some blasting the work and some determined to write off the writer.  A noted poet and anthologist, James Reeves, wrote an entire book in 1976 to assail Pope’s achievement and influence. But it has never succeeded; Pope, a combative as well as a marvellously skilled author, keeps coming back for more. He produced more first-rate poems than anyone else in the eighteenth century, as we might guess from his fame across Europe and his huge appeal in America before and after the Revolution.

In truth, much of the hostility he faced in his lifetime had to with fear of his scathing wit. “Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see / Men not afraid of God, afraid of me,” he wrote late in his career. The stark clarity with which he states the idea must have made quite a few contemporaries shuffle another step backwards.

It doesn’t take much more to enjoy Pope than a reasonably good ear and a feeling for language. To read his works carefully will give anyone a grounding in how lines sing, how to make words bend and let meanings fold into each other. It will spare you a whole module on the creative writing course. Sound and sense are delicately adjusted, rhyme and rhythm subtly integrated, wit and wisdom dispersed with the utmost economy.

The most single brilliant item is The Rape of the Lock, completed in 1714 when he was only twenty-five. On the surface this relates how a brutal upper-class twit attacks an airhead socialite. You can find the tale amusingly retold by Sophie Gee in her novel The Scandal of the Season (2007). Actually the ravishing of a beauty in this ravishingly beautiful poem amounts to cutting off just one of her curls, but the text constantly insists that a more serious violation has gone on.

Queen Anne, whose court is satirized in Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’.

The main trick is to build up this critique from a phrase, a verse, a couplet, a paragraph, and a canto, all serving as fractals which contain within themselves the central paradox announced in the first two lines: “What dire offence from am’rous causes springs, / What mighty contests rise from trivial things.” The contrasting terms here form what we call antithesis, borrowing an expression originally used in classical rhetoric. Pope extends antithesis to his grammar, his versification, his metaphors, and his narrative.

A single bit of wordplay encapsulates this process. It comes in the famous pun that describes the queen’s routine at Hampton Court, where she “sometimes counsel take[s] — and sometimes tea.” In the previous couplet, British statesmen plot the fall of “foreign tyrants,” but also of “nymphs at home.” Everything from the tiniest unit up to the overall shape of the work is designed to enforce the same balanced oppositions between the grand and the slight. And none of it ever ceases to be funny.

Pope’s supreme technique meant he could excel in almost every genre available to him. His powerful satire The Dunciad makes mincemeat of the vapid scribblers in Grub Street. You don’t have to know who they were to get most of the jokes. An Epistle to a Lady might have been written as a set text for modern feminists, so provocatively does it raise issues on the gender front for debate and appraisal. An Epistle to Bathurst provides a telling picture of the repercussions of the South Sea Bubble in 1720. While Pope doesn’t forget the investors who lost everything, he bothers less about perpetrators in the financial industry than about the hypocrisy of a corrupt crew in government and parliament whose regulatory touch was so light as to be invisible.

For a long time An Essay on Man was about the most cited treatise worldwide on morals and metaphysics, while An Essay on Criticism wittily expounds – well, criticism. Pope’s version of Homer remains among the few translations of a masterpiece to constitute a major work in its own right when converted to the host language. He also wrote superb prose, for example in his good humoured but damning retorts to the scandalous publisher Edmund Curll.

In case you thought Pope sounds a bit remote, you might recall when you last heard someone use phrases like these: “To err is human, to forgive divine” ; “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread” ; “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” ; “Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” ; “A little learning is a dangerous thing” ; “Damn with faint praise.” We owe them all to one man. These and many more have entered the stock of colloquial language, an idiom Pope learnt to utilize in sparkling poems that explore the full range of the human comedy.

Pat Rogers, Distinguished University Professor, University of South Florida, editor of The Major Works of Alexander Pope for the Oxford World’s Classics, and author of works on Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Johnson, Boswell, and Austen among others.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Portrait of Queen Anne by John Smith (1652–1742) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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The centenary of the 29 May 1913 premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is being celebrated by numerous orchestras and ballet companies this year, which is always worth mentioning when that first performance incited a riot. The ballet (also performed as an orchestra piece) depicts a collection of pagan spring rituals involving fortune telling, holy processions, and culminating in l’élue (the elected one) dancing herself to death. It was not the subject matter but the music and choreography that upset that first audience 100 years ago. Indeed, according to this interview with Stravinsky, even during the compositional process the composer was upsetting people, namely his collaborators:

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s clear from the video that Stravinsky knew how uncommon-sounding and challenging the work would be for his listeners. He also seemed delightfully aware of the piece’s significance for the story of Western art music. The eight-note chord is “new,” and the accents are “even more new.” New how? Taking into consideration Stravinsky’s education (the musical part, not the law school part) and the cultural milieu in which he placed himself, it’s safe to say he was thinking in terms of the circa 250 year old Western European tonal tradition when he used the word “new.” The eight note chord was new because it eschewed the traditionally three or four note construction of tonal chords.

The chord that Stravinsky plays in the video is notated above (the chord is the left-most one in the example). By taking two traditionally constructed chords, F-flat major and E-flat seven, and stacking them on top of each other, he has created a polychord that has a much more complex sound than either of the two chords as heard separately.

The accents were “even more new” because they disrupted the metrical norms of the tonal style (in which the strongest beat happens at the beginning of the measure) by rendering the beat uneven.

Traditionally, accents denote the beginning of a measure that contains a recurring number of beats; it’s part of how we mentally divide up time when we play or listen to music. As you can see in the example above, Stravinsky disrupts that regularity by essentially restarting the beat-division at unusual points in the measure (I’ve tried to demonstrate this by numbering the eighth notes).

What’s interesting is that Stravinsky’s polychords and persistent syncopating of the beat weren’t actually the newest “new” sounds around at the time of Rite’s premiere. A group of Austrians were already composing music that disregarded tonality and meter altogether. Nevertheless, Stravinsky’s music deviated sufficiently from tonal norms for it to sound somewhat shocking to his first listeners.

Today The Rite of Spring still sounds new, even to someone like me who spends so much time listening to recently composed, avant garde music. If you haven’t heard the piece, I highly recommend doing so (perhaps this recording from jazz trio The Bad Plus will spark your interest); better yet, see it live if you can. And no need to worry, it’s been nearly a century since it caused a riot.

Meghann Wilhoite is an Assistant Editor at Grove Music/Oxford Music Online, music blogger, and organist. Follow her on Twitter at @megwilhoite. Read her previous blog posts on Sibelius, the pipe organ, John Zorn, West Side Story, and other subjects.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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In 1984 a 6-3 majority of the US Supreme Court established the “public safety” exception to Miranda in a case called New York v. Quarles. Unfortunately, the factual basis for the exception the Court made in this case was quite weak.

A woman told the police she had just been raped, that the rapist had just entered a specified supermarket and that he was carrying a gun. Officer Kraft entered the store, only a few steps behind Mr. Quarles, the alleged rapist. Upon seeing the officer right behind him, Quarles ran toward the rear of the store. Officer Kraft pursued him with a drawn gun and ordered him to stop and put his hands over his head.

A minute or two later, three other police officers arrived on the scene. But Kraft was the first one to reach Mr. Quarles. After frisking the defendant, the officer noticed he was wearing an empty shoulder holster. The officer then handcuffed Mr. Quarles and — without giving him the Miranda warnings — asked him where his gun was. Quarles nodded in the direction of some nearby empty cartons and told the officer “the gun is over there.” In a couple of minutes, the police found the gun.

The Supreme Court admitted the defendant’s statement as well as the gun. Justice Rehnquist, who wrote the majority opinion, summed up the situation as follows: “So long as the gun was concealed somewhere in the supermarket, with its actual whereabouts unknown, it obviously posed more than one danger to the public safety: an accomplice might make use of it, a customer or employee might later come upon it.”

This summary of the facts is misleading. Although the arrest took place in a supermarket, it occurred some time after midnight. The store was completely deserted except for the clerks at the checkout counters. All that one of the four officers had to do was stand outside the entrance to the store and tell any potential customer that because of a police emergency he or she could not enter the store for ten or fifteen minutes. Moreover, Officer Kraft was so close behind Quarles before he apprehended the defendant that he must have known Mr. Quarles’s gun was almost within reaching distance of him.

Nobody indicated that Mr. Quarles had an accomplice. (Nor did he in fact have one.) Moreover, as the New York courts (which had dealt with the case before it reached the US Supreme Court) had pointed out when they rejected the contention that under the circumstances the police were entitled to a “public safety” exception to Miranda, the arresting officers were sufficiently confident of their safety to put away their guns once they surrounded the defendant.

To sum up, applying a “public safety” exception to the facts of the Quarles case looks like quite a stretch. On the other hand, applying the exception to the recent Boston Marathon bombing case appears quite different. The Boston case is one that does call for a “public safety” exception to Miranda immediately after the bomber was apprehended.

When the explosions first occurred, law enforcement officials had no idea what they were up against. They knew neither the size nor shape of a possibly large conspiracy to wreak havoc or to terrorize the public.

There is reason to believe that the Department of Justice reads the “public safety” exception to Miranda more expansively than I think it should be read, applying it even when there is no immediate threat to public safety. I disagree. It should be plain that law enforcement officials could not delay giving the Miranda warnings indefinitely. However, I believe that in the Boston case the police could have done so long enough to satisfy themselves that the bombing was not part of, or not being coordinated with, another or larger act of terrorism. If law enforcement officers had done so (and at this point it is unclear precisely what actually happened), then they would have made a proper use of the “public safety” exception.

Yale Kamisar is the Clarence Darrow Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Michigan and a nationally recognized authority on constitutional law and criminal procedure.

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In its December press release, the European Commission agreed to reopen the debate on copyright. A dialogue will be launched to tackle several major issues with the current copyright framework, including the topic ‘user-generated content’. The outcome of this open discussion should guide the Commission in its mission to modernize the European copyright framework and adapt it to the digital economy. ‘User-generated content’ is a major bone of contention in the copyright debate. It is also a confusing concept in that it fails to distinguish original content from derivative works, which is the actual point of disagreement between rights holders, providers of online services and their users. Derivative works are based on one or more pre-existing copyright protected works and the right to create them is exclusively reserved to their original creators. The standard practice for rights holders is to license such rights on an individual basis, so as to control the adaptation of their work and to generate income from the commercialization of derivatives. This classic licensing model has arguably lost some of its relevance in the internet age, whereas copyright is at best misunderstood if not simply ignored by most users.

Nowadays everyone has easy access to user-generated content. Recent advances in technology have reduced the costs of creating and sharing derivative works, and the mass popularity of social media such as YouTube, Facebook or Tumblr has prompted the emergence of new social and cultural behaviours, where people are now empowered to become active creators. This phenomenon, called the ‘read/write culture’ by Lawrence Lessig but often referred to as the ‘remix culture’, has radically transformed our creative landscape and favoured the rapid development of social media, which provide the backbone for instantaneous content distribution. Over a few years these companies have also built vibrant audiences eager to consume, create and share, and they have found innovative ways to serve these audiences and to fuel a new type of creativity.

The fast development of social media companies in Europe has also been enabled in part by the ‘hosting’ provision of the e-Commerce Directive, which is loosely based on similar provisions in the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and analogously limits the liability of internet service providers for hosting infringing content, provided they swiftly remove that content as soon as they become aware of it, usually upon a rights holder’s notification. Even if it is true that this limitation of liability is indispensable for ISPs, it places the monitoring burden on the rights holders, since the directive clearly states that there is no obligation on ISPs to monitor for infringing content. This is the apple of discord for them, as they strongly disagree with the sheer principle of monitoring their own content. This situation affects in turn social media users who are immersed in the remix culture. That culture does not recognize the complexities of copyright law: for example, crediting the original author is deemed sufficient when a derivative work is created for non-commercial purposes, although this is clearly not sufficient from a legal point of view, absent any fair use defences. Users are often left confused about how and why the content they intend to share is infringing on someone else’s copyright.

It is clear that user-generated content is here to stay. Finding inspiration in the works of others and building upon it has become a socially—if not legally—endorsed process of self-expression and this fact is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, when 72 hours of video are uploaded on to YouTube every minute. One can only welcome the decision of the European Commission to prioritize this issue and hope that its cultural and social dimensions won’t be underestimated. It is in the interest of all stakeholders to closely collaborate, so as to find a solution that works for everyone. Rights holders might want to become more open to the concept of user-generated content and show more flexibility towards the use of their rights. ISPs and social media must act responsibly and go beyond the minimal requirements in limiting their liability in case of copyright infringement. Focus should be put on educating their users, so that they understand basic copyright concepts and feel more secure when sharing content online. Finally, the European Commission should supervise the debate as transparently as possible without neglecting its social and cultural implications. To that extent, the involvement of the digital agenda team and of the Culture Directorate is a sign that advancing towards a balanced copyright framework has been understood as a concerted effort and this acknowledgement alone should be praised.

A version of this article originally appeared as an editorial in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice.

Grégoire Marino is a IP & IT enthusiast who likes to look at copyright and patent issues from a social and public policy perspective. He currently works as a rights and privacy specialist for a leading social sound platform and serves as editorial board member of OUP’s Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice. Feel free to ask him anything here.

Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to intellectual property law and practice. Published monthly, coverage includes the full range of substantive IP topics, practice-related matters such as litigation, enforcement, drafting and transactions, plus relevant aspects of related subjects such as competition and world trade law. Read the JIPLP blog.

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Notwithstanding the many privacy concerns it raises, the role of video surveillance footage in cracking the Boston terror attack case in a matter of days is well known. Such footage played an equally critical role in tracking down the bombers of the 2005 London attacks. However, in 2005 investigators took weeks to manually sift through about two thousand hours of video footage. This time around, thousands of hours of video were analyzed in barely 48 hours.

The city of Boston is smaller than London; still, it has thousands of surveillance cameras, very similar to the London of 2005. What has changed is technology: video analysis has become significantly more sophisticated in the years since 2005. For example, pre-processing tools are able to filter hours of video footage in, say, an empty subway station at night. Investigators are able to focus only on periods of activity rather than patiently watch footage of an empty platform for hours on end.

Of course, more crowded scenes, especially those as packed as the sidewalks alongside the marathon route require far more sophisticated technology, much of which is still in its infancy. Today there are many commercial video analytics tools that claim to be able to detect a person leaving a bag or backpack and walking away. Such tools are certainly very useful in narrowing down portions of video footage to be analyzed manually during post-incident investigations. But can they reliably alert us in real-time without generating too many false positives? For example, you lay down a brief case and move behind a pillar to find a quiet place to make a phone call. A video surveillance system might well conclude that you have left the scene and your bag is a potential threat. Hundreds of such warnings might be generated every minute — who is to monitor and decide which ones to follow up on?

Another technique that has seen significant advances in recent years is tracking moving objects in videos, especially human beings. Further, it is now possible (only barely though), to track the same person as he moves across large distances as he moves in and out of the field of view of multiple cameras. So, in principle, a hypothetical `big brother’ central server that processes feeds from multiple cameras should be able to track anyone suspected in a ‘left bag’ event and verify whether they rapidly walk away from the scene or not. Of course, bandwidth remains a limitation, which is why many video analytics solutions rely on local ‘event detection’ at the camera level so as to minimize transferring too much data across a network. Further, in such situations, different cameras need to be ‘told’ to track a ‘particular’ person seen by another camera, and that too in a bandwidth efficient manner. So much work remains to be done for efficient large-scale multi-camera tracking.

But there is more: Many recent terror attacks, especially in India, share a similar modus operendi — the terrorist leaves his dangerous cargo on a bicycle that he parks in a crowded market and walks away, seemingly on an innocent shopping errand. Should our central server raise an alarm? After all, many people genuinely shop while their two-wheeled vehicle, bicycle or motorbike, lies parked nearby, perhaps also loaded with their recent purchases. Do we warn citizens of dire consequences if they leave packets on their bikes?

Clearly our central server needs to work harder, track more people, for longer. Most importantly, it needs to reason. However ubiquitous video cameras might be, they still cannot be everywhere — certainly not in every store, restaurant, or loo! The central server would need to explain away the actions of most of the people it tracked, and narrow down on only a few, such as someone entering a subway station, leaving a bag and then boarding a train. (Such ‘explaining away’ to home in on the right answer is an example of ‘abductive reasoning’. If it appears difficult for a machine to mimic, take note that just such reasoning has in fact already been used by IBM’s Watson program that won the 2009 Jeopardy! competition.)

Moreover, how might the video surveillance servers of the future come to know what is normal behavior and what is not? Certainly it would be impossible to catalogue every instance of normalness for the machine to ‘look up’ and compare against. Instead, the machine would need to learn, using massive amounts of ‘normal’ video footage. Difficult, but by no means impossible any more. Consider this: each year over 15 million hours of video is uploaded onto YouTube. In contrast, a human being is exposed to barely half a million hours of ‘video experience’ over a lifetime (90 years × 365 days × 16 hours/day). Yet we learn, and rather early on, the difference between normal and abnormal, be it suspicious or merely eccentric. Granted that eccentricity is not entirely absent from YouTube videos, still, there is more than enough ‘normal’ video available today for machines to learn from, if only they knew how.

Intelligent systems such as our hypothetical central video-surveillance server need to go beyond merely looking at the world while watching us. They also need to continuously learn from the data they experience, so as to see and focus on what is actually important. Only then can they connect the dots and make reasonably accurate predictions, so corrective action can be taken in time, and not only after a tragedy has occurred.

Finally, the cycle we just described above: Look, Listen, and Learn, so as to Connect, Predict and finally Correct, will be a common feature of the highly connected ‘web-intelligent’ systems of the not too distant future, be they for video surveillance, self-driving cars, or even the smart-grid.

Gautam Shroff is Vice President & Chief Scientist, Tata Consultancy Services and head of the TCS Innovation Lab in Delhi, India. He occasionally teaches in an adjunct capacity at the IIT Delhi and IIIT Delhi, as well as online via Coursera. He is the author of The Intelligent Web: Search, smart algorithms, and big data.

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Gender studies begin by asking how you understand gender, the boundary, the space, the difference, the divergence and the sameness between m and f. How femininity and masculinity are knowable, reversible, collapsible, forgettable, changeable and open to renegotiation, supposedly given, fixed, yet mutable.

As a feminist theorist who writes on international law with a particular focus on collective security, the use of force and peacekeeping, I examine the constructed spaces of international law and its institutions. I attempt to delineate the rules and practices of the Security Council, the International Criminal Court, the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and the work of UN Women and the UN Secretary-General’s Special Advisor on Sexual Violence. Of course there will be controversies but they will be contestable in defined and expected (legal) spaces.

Yet feminist approaches to international law began with a foundational engagement with the boundaries and biases in international law rather than a focus on specific arenas of rights and protections applied to women. In The Boundaries of International Law, Charlesworth and Chinkin wrote of re-drawing the boundaries of international law in 2000 and was labelled ‘structural bias feminism’ for its analysis of the structures and foundations of the discipline. They analysed the mechanisms, forms, and functions at the foundations of international law through the lens of gender. They sketched their gender theory from contemporary feminist writing outside of international law and legal scholarship, drawing on gender theory and feminist thinking to develop insight and approaches to the structures of international law. Feminist approaches to international law need to re-connect to these wider approaches to gender, sexuality, and feminist thinking and activism.

Recently, the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies workshop on Border Crossings showcased scholarship on gender across faculties, departments, schools and centres at SOAS, University of London. Staff and students spoke on ‘New Directions in Gender at SOAS’ and organised around the theme of Border Crossing. Over 10-11 May 2013 gender studies scholars at SOAS demonstrated the strength and resonance of the discipline in papers that crossed places and spaces, temporalities as well as disciplines and methods. This was as challenging as it was invigorating. When does an international lawyer listen to an anthropologist, historian, ethnographer, or South Asian studies scholar and hear resonance in her own work?

Mainstream approaches to international law recognise the nexus between the international and the everyday, yet this boundary crossing is little explored within the discipline of international law. If gender is a primary human organising principle that influences our everyday lives (before you were born somebody asked, are you a girl or boy?) once we disrupt the f and m binary we bring wonder and engagement with a whole list of further binaries: rational/emotional, nature/culture, objective/subjective, written/visual, hard/soft, international/everyday, high culture/low culture, public/private, home/diaspora, mind/body. Binaries are transposed into continuums of knowing and not knowing, and positives constructed by the existence of the negative, the other.

At the same time we are forced to remember that we all create borders and we must be mindful of creating new boundaries within our thinking, especially in terms of who speaks, how we speak, who is visible, and who is heard. Multidisciplinary spaces are not the same as interdisciplinary spaces. Asking how we can speak across borders (of knowledge, space, language) is a question of continual importance. Interdisciplinary work shifts beyond the bounded interaction within other disciplines towards a reinvigoration of our methods and thinking.

As international lawyers we must also recall the preoccupation with land and territory that borders dictate, even in crossing. Boundaries and borders privilege land and enclosure or corporeality over the flow of unbounded spaces. Spaces undefined by borders (for example, the ocean, airspace, and cyberspace) are increasingly relevant to post-millennium international law. New forms of regulation and disciplining take place alongside the unbounded, interdisciplinary forming of ideas and revolutions. For example, the freedom of the ocean alongside the unseen bodies and boats left untethered to land, untethered from statehood and often denied citizenship (belonging), presents a conundrum. Finite legal distinctions about who may cross from sea safely onto land require attention from international lawyers preoccupied with sovereignty as known lands, borders, and boundaries laid neatly via rules.

Feminist approaches within international law must see the body bag, the state, the border as equally as we might conceive of interrogating the ocean as a regulated space despite its lack of boundaries. In the era of remote airstrikes, airspace presents a similar challenge, as does the unconfined yet regulated space of our virtual worlds. The failure to see unbounded space as regulated is to reproduce the bodies of war and law whose enclosure and death international law remains complicit in. The contradiction, equivalent to the fixed yet mutable space of knowing gender, is that the space of the ill-defined border also represents a new way of crossing and is a space of innovation. Gender studies ask the international lawyer to hear the peripheral subject in the borderless space, to cross her borders of knowing, and to see outside the boundaries of the discipline.

Gina Heathcote is the author of The Law on the Use of Force: a Feminist Analysis and a contributor to the forthcoming The Oxford Handbook of the Use of Force in International Law. She lectures in Gender Studies and Public International Law at SOAS, University of London.

Oxford University Press is a leading publisher in Public International Law, including the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, latest titles from thought leaders in the field, and a wide range of law journals and online products. We publish original works across key areas of study, from humanitarian to international economic to environmental law, developing outstanding resources to support students, scholars, and practitioners worldwide.

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Historically, law was not generally considered an important part of gerontological science. As noted by Doron & Hofman in 2005, the law was, at best, considered part of gerontology in that it played a part in the shaping of public policy towards the older population, or was incidental to ethical discussions connected with old age. At worst, gerontology has simply ignored those aspects of the law connected with the old, and kept lawyers out of its province.

Yet in recent years there have been winds of change. Lawyers and gerontologist have started to work together and have slowly but surely developed what is becoming  known as “Jurisprudential Gerontology” (or “Geriatric Jurisprudence“): a true inter, multi, and trans-disciplinary project that looks into the fascinating interactions between law, society, and aging, in all its different aspects. These changes have become much more relevant as the UN has started to engage in the process to establish a new convention for the rights of older persons.

As part of this attempt to “connect” law, human rights, and gerontology, I have recently conducted a study on the European Court of Justice. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) is considered by many to be the most important judicial institution of the European Union today. Nevertheless, despite the potential importance and relevance of the ECJ rulings to the lives and rights of older Europeans, no research has attempted to analyze or study the ECJ rulings in a gerontological context.

Using a mixed, quantitative method (measuring and testing through statistical tools) and qualitative method (understanding the content through textual analysis), a sample of ECJ cases involving older persons were collected and descriptively analyzed. In establishing the sample, an internet-based computerized keyword search was conducted within the ECJ official website. The preliminary search identified 1,325 cases, out of which 123 “direct cases” were found (i.e. cases that included issues directly relevant to rights of older persons).

Analyzing these results found that the 123 cases were spread throughout the period of 1994 to 2009 in the following way:

Number of cases per year

As seen above, there is no clear pattern of either increase of decrease in the number of cases throughout the years, and on average, in most of the time period, each year between 5–10 cases were filed. This equals to 1%-2% of the general annual new case load of the ECJ.

From a legal issue perspective, almost half the cases (58/47.2%) were categorized by the ECJ as “Social Policy” issues, while the two other major legal issues were Free Movement of Persons (29/23.6%) and Social Security for Migrant Workers (26/21.1%). Only very few elder rights cases involved issues like Competition (3 cases), or Principles of Community Law (1 case). Attempting to move beyond the ECJ’s own categorization, and analyzing the actual legal issues, it was found that the vast majority of the cases involved issues of pensions: either state funded pensions (61/49.6%) or employer-based occupational pensions (36/29.3%). The rest of the cases were mostly age discrimination, mandatory retirement, or attendance/home care (all of them 6 cases each).

In conclusion, it could be said on the one hand that the number of elder rights cases brought before the ECJ is very low, and their overall quantitative weight is minor at best.  Yet on the other hand, within these limited numbers of cases and narrow scope of legal decisions, the outcomes are encouraging. In the majority of the cases the court rules in favor of the elderly. Overall then, the findings of this study suggest that the ECJ can potentially serve as an important protector of rights of older Europeans, if, and to the extent that, these cases reach its jurisdiction.

Prof. Israel (Issi) Doron is the Head of the Department of Gerontology at the University of Haifa, Israel, and the Past President of the Israeli Gerontological Society. His research focuses on the relationships between law, aging and human rights, with specific interest in international human rights of older persons. His paper ‘Older Europeans and the European Courts of Justice’ appears in the journal Age and Ageing and can be read in full and for free for a limited time.

Age and Ageing is an international journal publishing refereed original articles and commissioned reviews on geriatric medicine and gerontology. Its range includes research on ageing and clinical, epidemiological, and psychological aspects of later life.

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The failures of leadership… the destructive power of beauty… the quest for fame… the plight of women… the brutality of war… Such themes have endured for over 2,700 years in Homer’s classic The Iliad — from the flight of Helen and Paris, to the fury of Menelaus and Agamemnon, to the fight between Hector and Achilles. We sat down with Barbara Graziosi and Anthony Verity, the writer of the introduction and translator respectively, to discuss the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Iliad.

How did the Ancient Greek performance tradition inform the text of The Iliad?

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What can you tell us about the writer of The Iliad?

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How is the anger of Achilles portrayed in the poem?

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How is war, violence, and death portrayed in the poem?

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Describe the translation process.

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Barbara Graziosi is Professor of Classics at Durham University. She has written extensively on Homer.

Anthony Verity taught Classics in several schools in England, his last job being Master of Dulwich College. He has translated Theocritus and Pindar for Oxford World’s Classics, his OWC edition of The Illiad was published in September, and he is currently working on a version of Homer’s Odyssey. Read his previous blog post: “Who needs another translation of Homer’s Iliad?”

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is a classification of all diagnoses given to patients by mental health professionals. Since the publication of the third edition in 1980, each edition has been a subject of intense interest to the general public. The current manual, DSM-5, is the first major revision since 1994.

DSM-5 is not, as sometimes claimed, “the bible of psychiatry”. It is not based on a thorough understanding of the causes of mental disorder, which remain largely unknown. Nor does it provide guidance concerning treatment. What DSM does is to allow mental health professionals to communicate with each other by listing criteria by which diagnoses can be made reliable.

When DSM-5 was in the planning stage, there was talk of radical changes, leading to a “paradigm shift”. This did not happen, as the scientific reviewers of proposals for revision insisted that major changes could not be made without very strong scientific evidence. A few changes attracted attention in the media (such as allowing a diagnosis of depression in people suffering from grief). By and large, the manual is not that different from its predecessors.

The problems with DSM-5 are the same as those affecting all earlier editions. If we do not understand what causes mental illness, it is very difficult to classify it. Unfortunately, the use of certain diagnoses is so widespread that people get the impression that categories in psychiatry are as real as hepatitis or multiple sclerosis. They are not. They are simply convenient ways of describing what clinicians see in practice. None of them have a correlation with biomarkers such as blood tests, genes, or brain imaging. They remain entirely dependent on signs and symptoms, which is all that mental health practitioners can currently observe.

The DSM system has led to an inflated prevalence of certain disorders, sometimes producing diagnostic epidemics. These problems affect some of the most common disorders in practice. Thus “major depression” is a very disparate collection of signs and symptoms that cannot be used to determine the correct treatment. Bipolar disorder is being diagnosed in patients who do not have its classical features, and has even been applied to young children. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has no definite boundaries, and is being greatly over-diagnosed, both in children and adults. Autism spectrum disorders, once considered rare, are now being seen as among the most common of all conditions that professionals see.

The real problem behind diagnostic epidemics is the failure of the DSM system to distinguish between mental disorder and normality. There is no agreed on definition of mental illness, whose scope has been steadily expanded. This trend is associated with a dangerous over-prescription of drugs that were originally developed for patients with severe and clearcut illnesses.

The DSM system can be described as flawed but necessary. Clinicians need to communicate to each other, and even a wrong diagnosis allows them to do so. However it will require many decades before we know enough about mental illness to produce a truly scientific classification.

Joel Paris is a professor of psychiatry at McGill University (Montreal, Canada), and a research associate at the SMBD-Jewish General Hospital, Montreal. He is the author of 15 books, most recently The Intelligent Clinician’s Guide to the DSM-5®, and 183 peer-reviewed scientific articles.

The OUPblog is running a series of articles on the DSM-5 in anticipation of its launch today, 18 May 2013. Read previous posts: “DSM-5 will be the last” by Edward Shorter, “The classification of mental illness” by Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman, “Personality disorders in DSM-5″ by Donald W. Black, and “American psychiatry is morally challenged” by Michael A. Taylor.

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Love it or hate it, you can’t deny that the Eurovision Song Contest has a unique appeal. Although often seen as tacky, extravagant and occasionally politically controversial, that doesn’t stop around 125 million people around the world watching it each year! It has helped to launch careers, in the cases of ABBA and Bucks Fizz, as well as destroy them (cast your memories back to Jemini, aka ‘nul points’).

To celebrate the 58^th contest which takes place tomorrow night, we’ve put together a playlist of the best and worst entries in Eurovision history as well as some interesting (as well as bizarre) facts about the competition.

Fun facts about Eurovision

• The first Eurovision Song Contest took place in Switzerland, with only 7 countries competing.
• This year’s competition takes place in Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city. Did you know that Malmö’s football team, Malmö FF, is where footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović began his professional career?
• Ireland is the most successful country in the Contest, winning 7 times, 3 of which were in consecutive years (1992, 1993 and 1994).
• Portugal has competed since 1964 and is yet to finish in the top 5. The highest they have placed is 6^th, which was in 1996.
• Norway’s Alexander Rybak is the record-holder for the highest amount of points, scoring 387 in 2009. Closely followed by last year’s winner, Loreen from Sweden, who won with 372 points.
• The maximum duration of each performance is 3 minutes.
• A Eurovision song must always have vocals; purely instrumental music is not permitted.
• No live animals are allowed on stage during a performance.
• However, the costume options are pretty much limitless . . . . .

Annie Leyman is Marketing Executive for Music books at Oxford University Press.

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Image credits: (1) Photo of ABBA. By AVRO (FTA001019454_012 from Beeld & Geluid wiki) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons (2) Photo of Lordi performing at ESC 2007. By Indrek Galetin (http://nagi.ee/photos/sAgApO/824612/in-set/17031/) [see page for license], via Wikimedia Commons (3) Photo of Verka Serduchka performing at ESC 2007. By Indrek Galetin [see page for license], via Wikimedia Commons (4) Photo of Jedward at ESC 2011. By Frédéric de Villamil (Flickr: DSC_9298) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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The Trojan War may be well known thanks to movies, books, and plays around the world, but did the war that spurred so much fascination even occur? The excerpt below from The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction helps answer some of the many questions about the infamous war Homer helped immortalize.

By Eric Cline

The story of the Trojan War has fascinated humans for centuries and has given rise to countless scholarly articles and books, extensive archaeological excavations, epic movies, television documentaries, stage plays, art and sculpture, souvenirs and collectibles. In the United States there are thirty-three states with cities or towns named Troy and ten four-year colleges and universities, besides the University of Southern California, whose sports teams are called the Trojans. Particularly captivating is the account of the Trojan Horse, the daring plan that brought the Trojan War to an end and that has also entered modern parlance by giving rise to the saying “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” and serving as a metaphor for hackers intent on wreaking havoc by inserting a “Trojan horse” into computer systems.

But, is Homer’s story convincing? Certainly the heroes, from Achilles to Hector, are portrayed so credibly that it is easy to believe the story. But is it truly an account based on real events, and were the main characters actually real people? Would the ancient world’s equivalent of the entire nation of Greece really have gone to war over a single woman, however beautiful, and for ten long years at that? Could Agamemnon really have been a king of kings able to muster so many men for such an expedition? And, even if one believes that there once was an actual Trojan War, does that mean that the specific events, actions, and descriptions in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, supplemented by additional fragments and commentary in the Epic Cycle, are historically accurate and can be taken at face value? Is it plausible that what Homer describes actually took place and in the way that he says it did?

In fact, the problem in providing definitive answers to all of these questions is not that we have too little data, but that we have too much. The Greek epics, Hittite records, Luwian poetry, and archaeological remains provide evidence not of a single Trojan war but rather of multiple wars that were fought in the area that we identify as Troy and the Troad. As a result, the evidence for the Trojan War of Homer is tantalizing but equivocal. There is no single “smoking gun.”

According to the Greek literary evidence, there were at least two Trojan Wars (Heracles’ and Agamemnon’s), not simply one; in fact, there were three wars, if one counts Agamemnon’s earlier abortive attack on Teuthrania. Similarly, according to the Hittite literary evidence, there were at least four Trojan Wars, ranging from the Assuwa Rebellion in the late 15th century BCE to the overthrow of Walmu, king of Wilusa in the late 13th century BCE. And, according to the archaeological evidence, Troy/Hisarlik was destroyed twice, if not three times, between 1300 and 1000 BCE. Some of this has long been known; the rest has come to light more recently. Thus, although we cannot definitively point to a specific “Trojan War,” at least not as Homer has described it in the Iliad and the Odyssey, we have instead found several such Trojan wars and several cities at Troy, enough that we can conclude there is a historical kernel of truth — of some sort — underlying all the stories.

But would the Trojan War have been fought because of love for a woman? Could a ten-year war have been instigated by the kidnapping of a single person? The answer, of course, is yes, just as an Egypto-Hittite war in the 13th century BCE was touched off by the death of a Hittite prince and the outbreak of World War I was sparked by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. But just as one could argue that World War I would have taken place anyway, perhaps triggered by some other event, so one can argue that the Trojan War would inevitably have taken place, with or without Helen. The presumptive kidnapping of Helen can be seen merely an excuse to launch a pre-ordained war for control of land, trade, profit, and access to the Black Sea.

In 1964, the eminent historian Moses Finley suggested that we should move the narrative of the Trojan War from the realm of history into the realm of myth and poetry until we have more evidence. Many would argue that we now have that additional evidence, particularly in the form of the Hittite texts discussing Ahhiyawa and Wilusa and the new archaeological data from Troy. The lines between reality and fantasy might be blurred, particularly when Zeus, Hera, and other gods become involved in the war, and we might quibble about some of the details, but overall, Troy and the Trojan War are right where they should be, in northwestern Anatolia and firmly ensconced in the world of the Late Bronze Age, as we now know from archaeology and Hittite records, in addition to the Greek literary evidence from both Homer and the Epic Cycle. Moreover, the enduring themes of love, honor, war, kinship, and obligations, which so resonated with the later Greeks and then the Romans, have continued to reverberate through the ages from Aeschylus and Euripides to Virgil and thence to Chaucer, Shakespeare, and beyond, so that the story still holds broad appeal even today, more than three thousand years after the original events, or some variation thereof, took place.

Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology and chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, as well as director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University. He is Co-Director of the ongoing excavations at Megiddo (biblical Armageddon) in Israel and the author of Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction, winner of the 2011 Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Award for the Best Popular Book on Archaeology. His recent addition to the Very Short Introductions series is The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with Very Short Introductions on Facebook, and OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image Credit: The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy 1773. Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. Via Web Gallery of Art. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Those of us in the mental health professions anxiously await the release of the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Others may wonder what the fuss is about, and may even wonder what the DSM-5 is. In short, it is psychiatry’s diagnostic Bible. While some imbue it with the reverence given a religious tract, it is not inerrant and only reflects the collective wisdom of those entrusted with the charge of revising it. The current manual, DSM-IV, came out in 1994 with a text revision in 2000, so in some ways the march to DSM-5 has been a 19 year journey.

As a psychiatrist, I am interested in classification, but I am particularly interested in how antisocial personality disorder, or ASP, has been classified over time. Over the past 200 years, ASP has been consistently recognized as one of the most identifiable and important of the psychiatric disorders, whether called manie sans délire, moral insanity, or even psychopathic personality. These terms all describe, at their most fundamental, bad behavior unconnected to medical illness or psychosis. During the DSM-5 deliberations, I and others became concerned that the committee dedicated to discussing personality disorders (the Personality and Personality Disorders Work Group) might decide to ditch the current diagnostic criteria and replace them with a combination of new diagnostic criteria and a “dimensional,” rather than categorical, evaluation of various personality traits.

The DSM-5 deliberations, for the most part, took place quietly and behind closed doors by clinicians and researchers who devoted many hours to their deliberations. They were tasked with considering the literature, research advances, and the users and patients’ needs when recommending changes to a diagnosis. Having watched the process as an interested observer, I can say that it was — for the most part — open, transparent, and free of conflicts of interest, despite loud and strident complaints from some quarters. Yet the Personality and Personality Disorders Work Group still produced a plan deemed by many as unworkable and overly complicated. This new plan was rejected by the leadership of the American Psychiatric Association in December 2012. The Personality and Personality Disorders Work Group was the only committee involved with the DSM-5 revision process in which two members openly and publicly resigned. No other work group had its many years of work rebuked.

So what went wrong? My own belief is that the work group overreached. In response to researchers on the committee whose life’s work was to understand and test dimensional schemes for describing personality traits, the committee wed itself to developing a scheme to replace the existing criteria for personality disorders. They came up against considerable pushback. I believe they never fully grasped that psychiatrists and many other clinicians tend to think categorically (is trait ‘x’ present or not?), rather than dimensionally (how much of trait ‘x’ is present?), and are very concerned with insurance reimbursement (would an insurer pay for the care of someone with some, but not all, of these traits?). The scheme itself appeared overly time consuming to busy practitioners; instead of simply deciding on a diagnosis, they might have to rate up to 5 personality ‘domains’ and 25 trait ‘facets’. Many clinicians, too, were concerned that some of the personality disorders that are well-researched and whose criteria were known to be valid (antisocial and borderline personality disorders, for example) would be changed for no good reason. In my view, the committee members have only themselves to blame for what proved to be an embarrassing turn of events. To preserve comity, the American Psychiatric Association leadership agreed to place the new scheme in the appendix of DSM-5 so as to be available to researchers and clinicians.

So, to those who wonder what has happened with antisocial personality disorder in DSM-5: the answer is nothing. After all those hours of deliberation and discussion, the criteria set for ASP, and all the other personality disorders, in the DSM-5 is exactly the same as it was in DSM-IV.

Donald W. Black, MD, is the author of Bad Boys, Bad Men: Confronting Antisocial Personality Disorder (Sociopathy), Revised and Updated Edition. He is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine in Iowa City. A graduate of Stanford University and the University of Utah School of Medicine, he has received numerous awards for teaching, research, and patient care, and is listed in “Best Doctors in America.” He serves as a consultant to the Iowa Department of Corrections. He writes extensively for professional audiences and his work has been featured in television and print media worldwide. Read his previous blog posts.

The OUPblog is running a series of articles on the DSM-5 in anticipation of its launch on 18 May 2013. Stay tuned for views from Michael A. Taylor and Joel Paris. Read previous posts: “DSM-5 will be the last” by Edward Shorter and “The classification of mental illness” by Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman.

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I recently travelled with the band Victoire for a brief residency at the music school of a large university. As well as performing a concert, we spoke to the music majors there on the topic of “alternative career paths” in classical music. By “alternative” I mean career paths other than playing in an orchestra or teaching at an academic institution. In our case, the musicians of Victoire all work predominantly in the performance and composition of contemporary classical music.

During the workshop one of the school’s composition students asked me how I approach playing the clarinet in Victoire differently from how I approach playing clarinet in Newspeak, another contemporary music ensemble I perform with and co-direct. It was a good question, and showed that the asker had done enough background research to know how much these two ensembles differ. It was the kind of question that might lead to long and interesting discussions. But it stumped me; I simply hadn’t thought about my playing in these terms before.

In some ways the question made no sense to me. All I could answer was, “I don’t.” As far as I was concerned my approach to these two projects was the same as my approach to any piece of music. I put the music on my stand, figure out the technical requirements and stylistic characteristics, and play it. Does that count as an approach? If so, I approach all music in the same way. Compare these two excerpts from Newspeak and Victoire:

Newspeak
B & E (with aggravated assault)
By Oscar Bettison
From the album sweet light crude

Listen to this track.

Victoire
Cathedral City
By Missy Mazzoli
From the album Cathedral City

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s true that these two excerpts sound different from one another. Oscar Bettison’s work is louder and more aggressive (as well as being played on bass clarinet). The Victoire track (written by Missy Mazzoli) is less accented, more mellifluous. But I don’t put on vastly different hats when I perform with these two groups. Over the next few weeks the question continued to bother me. Did I have different approaches? Should I have different approaches?

Perhaps, I thought, I would have answered differently if the question had mentioned projects I’ve worked on that were stylistically further from one of these excerpts — like playing works by Matthias Spahlinger with Wet Ink or Oliver Knussen with Signal Ensemble. If I moved between more widely separated styles — like classical music or jazz or Klezmer — then perhaps I would switch “approaches” between styles (a question I look forward to discussing with colleagues). Or perhaps it would have made more sense if I had been asked if I approach playing something older like Mozart differently to the more contemporary music I usually play. In that case, having considered the piece stylistically, I would try to use Mozart-appropriate timbres, phrasing and articulations. But it’s all the same process — choosing techniques and stylistic elements that are appropriate — that I would follow for any piece. The specifics of the end result are different, but it doesn’t seem like an entirely different approach.

Most musical instruments (and I might with bias say especially the clarinet) have the potential to make an enormously wide range of sounds. This is one of the underpinnings of the explosion of modern music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the classical tradition for various reasons — acoustic and aesthetic (enough for another post) — instrumentalists have tended to stay within a smaller range of possible sounds. However, from the 1950s onwards, composers and performers, perhaps spurred on by the infinite sonic possibilities of electronic music, experimented a lot more with sounds that in the past had been rejected as incorrect — so-called extended techniques: multiphonics, air sounds, squeaks, different articulations, etc. These days as a performer it is pretty much de rigueur to learn to use and control at least some of these extended techniques.

The compositional landscape we inhabit now is, happily, stylistically diverse, with composers taking inspiration from any and all past streams of classical music, as well as from other kinds of music and from pure sound. So instead of always having exactly the same set of tones and articulations, an instrumentalist might at times use not just “extended” techniques but timbres and techniques borrowed from other kinds of music or even other instruments.

The result is that one player can be equipped with a huge range of sound possibilities. Each piece, or situation, involves the choice of a range of sounds, like colors from a paintbox: for Mozart a particular sound world; for Spahlinger another; still others for Knussen or Mazzoli or Bettison. Of course there is almost always overlap, as many of the basic sounds and techniques will be the same. So, to answer the original question: instead of “approach” I would say that each piece has a different “palette” and within that are different techniques and timbres that are achieved in various ways (which is perhaps what the question was intended to be about). The important thing is to “approach” each piece as being open to a full range of possibilities, so that a piece by Lachenmann doesn’t necessarily have to sound like one by Mozart, or Mazzoli like Bettison.

Clarinetist Eileen Mack grew up in Australia and is now based in New York. She is a member of post-minimalist band Victoire and the amplified ensemble Newspeak (which she also co-directs), and has performed with many other New York new music groups including Wet Ink, Alarm Will Sound, Signal Ensemble, the Bang on a Can All Stars and the Wordless Music Orchestra.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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Image credit: Clarinet. © THEPALMER via iStockphoto.

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I’ve been working on the ‘lived experience’ of early modern religion: what it was actually like to be a Protestant in 16^th or 17^th century Britain. And I’ve become more and more convinced there’s a crucial element of the story almost completely missing from the standard accounts: children.

Read most histories of early modern religion and you could be forgiven for concluding that there were no children in this period. But we are dealing with huge numbers of people: perhaps a third of the population of early modern England was under 12. And while every adult had of course been a child at some point, large numbers of children never became adults.

The sources are very thin. Most early modern Protestants saw childhood as a period of mere depravity, needing only correction. The period’s most popular devotional work, Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety, asked, “what is youth but an vntamed Beast? … Ape-like, delighting in nothing but in toyes and baubles?” But a few patterns do emerge. Saying grace at table was, almost routinely, a child’s role in a family. Children’s patterns of prayer can be glimpsed sometimes – learning prayers by rote, or making vows. And we do have occasional testimonies of children’s actual religious experience – a seven year old finding “unexpressible joys” in reading and prayer, a four year old stargazing and meditating on God’s power.

A unique image of a Protestant family at prayer, from Auckland Castle, County Durham. As usual, the children are there only as an afterthought.

But we would be stuck with these glimpses if it not for two extraordinary accounts written in the 1630s. Richard Norwood and Elizabeth Isham had both read Augustine’s Confessions, newly translated into English, and had learned from it that it was worth paying close attention to how God had worked in their lives before their actual conversions. So Norwood described his schoolboy psalm-singing, and how, aged seven or eight, he was “taken with great admiration of some places” in the Bible. He remembered (and counted as a sin) “at several times reasoning … about whether there were a God”. Adults assured him that God loved him, but he was not sure “how they could know it was so”. And when he tried to share his enthusiasm for Scripture with his parents, “they made me little answer (so far as I remember) but seemed rather to smile at my childishness”. This made him wonder whether what the preachers taught was true, “or whether elder people did not know them to be otherwise, only they were willing that we children should be so persuaded of them, that we might follow our books the better and be kept in from play.” Norwood was that rare thing: an adult who could remember what it was really like to be a child.

Or again, the Northamptonshire gentlewoman Elizabeth Isham described how her religion took shape in counterpoint to her mother. She was taught to pray from infancy, but when she was eight years old, “I came to a fuller knowledge of thee”, through praying earnestly “to avoyde my mothers displeasure”. Her mother’s wrath was no joke: in her rages, Judith Isham had a servant hold her daughter down, the better to beat her. Elizabeth recalled that “in these dayes feareing my parents I had no other refuge but to flie unto thee”.

It was her grandmother who showed her another way. When the old lady was ill, and the nine year old Elizabeth was caring for her, she was struck by the delight her grandmother took in her devotional reading. For Elizabeth, as for so many other children before and since, books were her liberation. As her reading accelerated from her tenth year, her religion blossomed. It also brought greater peace with her mother, who took advice from a clergyman friend and developed a new way of dealing with her daughter. When she saw Elizabeth misbehave, instead of flying into a rage, she would “holde her fan afore her face”, praying for patience and judgement. This gave Elizabeth time to reflect on her error, so that as soon as the fan was lowered she would go and ask forgiveness, and would be set a penitential task, “which I performed with the more dilligence she having delt so well with mee”. We rarely come so close to a happy ending.

These are very individual stories, and that is part of the point: children are individuals, and neither happy nor unhappy families all resemble one another. But they do remind us that children take their own lives, including their religion, immensely seriously, and can be very finely attuned to managing the loving, unpredictable, condescending, inattentive and sometimes incomprehensibly punitive adult world.

They also suggest to me that there is much more to be done here. We have long learned the importance of gender to any serious historical analysis. It is time to pay attention to this equally pervasive division, and to this even more forgotten slice of humanity.

Alec Ryrie studied History and Theology at the universities of Cambridge, St Andrews, and Oxford. He is now Head of Theology and Religion and Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University. His most recent book, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain, published in April 2013. His previous books include The Age of Reformation (2009), The Sorcerer’s Tale (2008), The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (2006) and The Gospel and Henry VIII (2003).

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Image credit: Courtesy of Alec Ryrie. Do not use without permission.

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