Client confidentiality expresses the duty of loyalty to our clients, but our secrets are shrinking. Social media, hacking and surveillance are increasingly modern realities. Globally, concern about leaky ‘cloud’ storage, terrorism, corruption, organised crime and money laundering, as well as economic and trading challenges to state and public security, are reportable and create an environment in which lawyers cannot guarantee clients’ privacy. Nevertheless, professional secrecy remains important for lawyers to observe, because clients will not trust us if they think their affairs will be disclosed. We tabulate the confidentiality conduct rules across Greater China and analyze several scenarios according to the four frameworks of general morality. Deciding to keep a secret for good reasons can be a moral act that increases the stability of society. In the mainstream of cases where there are no state secrecy issues, lawyers need to re-legitimize support for client confidentiality because keeping secrets is still important to our communities, so that filial and personal relationships are respected and the common privacy we all need is retained.

Providing the healthiest and safest environment in the first 1,000 days of life is the greatest gift which parents can give to their children. We return to the theme of control over our lives to ask who is in control of this gift, and whether today’s medicine and public health hold the answers. We explore the dilemmas facing today’s governments and the decisions that individuals make in terms of personal responsibility when maternal and child health are not prioritised by health policy-makers. We discuss sexual and reproductive rights, why women’s health has not been prioritised – especially during the pandemic – and reasons for high maternal mortality in some countries. We offer an optimistic close to the book; a call to action. We explain that, while planning for parenthood is important, the actions needed do not have to be sustained over a long period. We emphasise the many opportunities which adolescents and young people can seize as the parents of the future. This hope can generate the resolve to make the first 1,000 days of life as good as possible for the next generation. Knowing the secrets of our first 1,000 days is a vital part of this.

Here we uncover the mysteries of the baby as it develops in the womb, discussing how fetal development is controlled. We give insights into aspects of pregnancy not widely known, from the fetus starting to breathe months before it is born, to the question of whether it sleeps – and dreams. We discuss the ways in which information about the mother’s life and her environment affect the baby’s development. Although birth may seem the first major milestone for a baby, we emphasise that many other milestones have been passed before that, inside the womb, out of sight but over which parents can have substantial influence. We give insights into new discoveries about how the organs of the fetal body develop in prediction of the world in which that individual ‘expects’ to live, and what happens when the prediction turns out to be wrong. The idea that the fetus is preparing for life after birth will get the reader thinking about the long-term consequences of the way a fetus develops. Each of us is unique as a result of our development – and nobody is perfect. Our unique development starts from the moment of conception, which introduces the next chapter on sex.

Chapter 2 establishes the context usually neglected by histories of agricultural literature: how farming was learned without books in the prevailing system of knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines the discourse on the ‘mystery of husbandry’ (and closely associated discourse of ‘secrets’), a term denoting the knowledge and skills acquired by experienced practitioners that were inaccessible to amateurs, to both elucidate contemporary beliefs about learning through labour and to indicate the ways in which the publication of husbandry manuals disrupted existing notions of expertise. In doing so, it explores the parallels between craft and farming knowledge and borrows ideas from modern studies to argue that early modern husbandmen and housewives would have possessed a ‘peasant epistemology’ analogous to an ‘artisanal epistemology’. The chapter argues that when linked to broader socio-economic changes in farming, the emergence of the term ‘mystery of husbandry’ in the seventeenth century can be seen as a symptom of tectonic shifts in the social system of agricultural knowledge. In short, the knowledge of husbandry was being commodified in an increasingly competitive commercial environment.

This chapter looks at how the postcolonial negotiates the Gothic. Both are informed by a degree of suspicion about European Enlightenment rationalism and its constructs, but the Gothic also depends on colonial European elements – the Devil as Black, the Oriental artefact, obeah – for its effects. The postcolonial Gothic needs these effects – for the scream, as I argue, is central to the Gothic – but cannot use the same instruments because, by definition, postcolonialism adopts a critical and questioning attitude to colonial European discourses as well. By looking at a number of texts, especially the Caribbean Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, the South African André Brink’s Devil’s Valley, the Australian Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, and the British-Indian Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, I show how the Gothic villain or the Gothic secret is manipulated by postcolonialism to combine its critical perspectives with the Gothic’s generic requirements.

Housed in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the assiduously organized (and carefully curated) Coetzee Papers include manuscript drafts of Coetzee’s novels (formerly available at the Houghton Library, Harvard College), as well as notebooks, correspondence, teaching materials, and photographs. Only recently opened, this archive has prompted a new wave of critical studies, only some of which have been sufficiently alert to, or indeed sceptical of, the procedures and decisions involved in its establishment and organization. Reflecting on this, this chapter considers the provenance and particular character of these papers in light of Coetzee’s career-long quarrying of autobiographical materials, his project of self-archiving, his explorations of archival themes and use of archival energies in his fictions, and his particular interest in the nature of secrets and lies, of concealment, distortion, and revelation. It argues that it is vital that critics think carefully about their own purposes in reading the archives; about the writer’s purposes in producing them; and about the kinds of truth at stake in the works, the archives, and the literary criticism they occasion.

This chapter is a case study of the Histories of Gregory of Tours (d. 594). Other case studies in this book focus on letters of one particular author who criticised a person in power. This chapter is the exception, in that it treats not letters but a historiographical narrative, to see how the author presents himself as a truth-telling actor in the historical events he describes. It examines the models that may have inspired Gregory to present himself as a fearless defender of truth, and analyses the ways in which he embeds criticism in the autobiographical parts of his narrative. Two well-known episodes that Gregory described in his Histories, in which he confronts a Merovingian king, is studied in more detail; one concerns a clash with Chilperic I (d.584), king of Neustria, and the other a brush with Guntram (d. 592), king of Burgundy. A question that is addressed towards the end of this chapter is that of how Gregory’s professed ideal of telling the truth frankly relates to the reports of rumours and gossip in his Histories.

Epistemic trust is an axiom of dialogical epistemology. It refers to the ethical relation between the Ego-Alter and has deep roots in daily life. Epistemic trust makes sense only in relation to its opposite, whether distrust, mistrust, doubt, risk or danger. I have explored two basic and mutually overlapping forms of epistemic trust/distrust. One form concerns the participants’ presupposition, or the lack of it that they live in a temporarily shared social world comprising a common ground for understanding and interpretation of their social reality. The other form refers to the capacity and readiness of participants (or the lack of it) to learn and accept knowledge and experience from one another. When established, epistemic trust is implicitly taken for granted, and it forms the common ground for understanding of the social reality, of common values and intentions to aim at ‘good life’. Epistemic trust is historically and culturally embedded and it ranges from micro-social to macro-social forms. The chapter discusses epistemic trust focusing on authority and positions of trust, on communicative contracts of secrets and non-disclosure, the hermeneutics of trust and the hermeneutics of suspicion. It shows some examples of complex relations of trust/distrust, such as the dialogicality of confession.

This Chapter is concerned with axioms and concepts of dialogical epistemology derived from the Ego-Alter interdependence. This interdependence is always about something, i.e. about objects or events, or about reflections on the Self’s and the Other(s)’ thoughts, imaginations and actions. I have referred to triangular relations between the Ego-Alter-Object in two ways. First, following Serge Moscovici’s ideas, there is a triangular relation between the Ego-Alter-Object of knowledge. Second, following the ideas of the anthropologist Louis Dumont, I have introduced the consumerist triadic relation the Ego-Alter-Thing of desire. Ethics in these two kinds of triangle follows different routes. In the former case, ethical relations between the Ego-Alter stem directly from intersubjectivity and the search for social recognition as the primary ontological relations. In the latter case, the ethical relations between the Ego-Alter are masked by the apparent priority given to the relation between the Self and the Thing of desire. In this case, the Ego’s search for social recognition, which superficially appears as craving for the Thing of desire, is in fact the desire for the desire of the Other’s desire. In other words, obtaining Objects of Others provides the Self with a social status and thus, with illusory social recognition.