Mastering the art of compelling communication can be a passport to success, as this introduction explains.

This chapter describes both the centrality of Morris’s work as a public lecturer and his feelings of ambivalence about speaking out in this way. It moves from Raymond Williams’s characterisation of the lectures as where Morris spoke as a ‘whole man’ to Thomas Carlyle’s mixed feelings about the form, poised as it was between conflicting ideas about preaching, about political life and about celebrity. It examines how Morris’s career as a lecturer was an aspect of his deepening engagement with public controversy from 1877, and was imagined as a duty that Morris was obliged to take up. It considers Morris’s resistance to rhetoric, which he connected to the deceiving modes of contemporary conventional politics. It argues that Morris’s own rhetoric was more compelling when he spoke at dramatic occasions, such as his Oxford lecture on ‘Art and Democracy’, rather than when he considered the lecture to be part of the grind of socialist agitation, where Morris sometimes worried about the capacities of his working-class audiences to understand his central message. The chapter ends by considering Morris’s speaking in Northumberland in 1887, as a temporary utopian moment when public speaking and the condition of the people were integrated and not separated.

Diplomacy skills matter, and the widespread perception that anyone with common sense can be trusted with a diplomatic position, even without proper qualifications, is misguided and dangerous. Diplomacy is a serious business. The matters that diplomats deal with are too important to be left to amateurs. There are careers that do not require a new hire to possess any special skills on day one; diplomacy is not such a profession. Diplomats must have most basic skills so that they can hit the ground running. In fact, they are expected to have them before joining a diplomatic service, because most governments do not provide much substantive training to new officers. Although different career tracks–political, economic, consular, management and public diplomacy–require some specialized knowledge and abilities, most diplomatic skill sets are universal. This chapter covers the key aspects of diplomatic tradecraft, on which the rest of the book will elaborate and expound.

Nonius Marcellus’ intellectual tendencies, contemporary concerns and treatment of the Roman literary past are the subject of this study, which contends that the author’s predilections and intended readership often guided his selection of quotations, affected his presentation of them, and, consequently, shaped our reception of early Latin we know principally or exclusively from the De compendiosa doctrina. Nonius was selecting not merely ‘old words’ regardless of their valence, but more precisely those old words that could be incorporated with minimal accommodation into the speech patterns of fourth-century North Africa. This means that his collection of Latinity often has as much to do with imperial, provincial, and formal public speech as it does with republican Latin literary styles; that Nonius was more attuned to the philosophical, intellectual, theological, and cultural implications of the texts that he was excerpting than has yet been recognised; and that he probably bequeathed us a collection of literary Latin distorted by his own interests and concerns, and by his readers’ particular needs.

Oratory played a significant and enduring role in the public life of Frederick Douglass. This chapter charts the various eras, genres, places, topics, and traditions in which Douglass’s speaking traversed. For example, this chapter addresses Douglass’s early rhetorical education, how his contemporaries described his speaking, his connection to religion, his long career as a lecturer, the threats of violence he experienced while speaking publicly, and the array of subjects about which Douglass spoke. Such a capacious understanding of context allows for a fuller depiction of Douglass’s skill as an orator while also acknowledging his failures that are often elided from the general account of his rhetorical prowess.