Bernstein was a larger-than-life figure on stage as conductor, composer, pianist, and media persona, and off stage, too, in his physicality, sociality, charisma, and sensuous engagement with the world. His artistic and celebrity status granted wide berth to Bernstein’s ‘bohemian’ sexual and relationship practices, but he was not exempt from contemporary social expectations and anxieties. Indeed, Bernstein’s life and career illustrate the pivotal effects of twentieth-century sociosexual norms and homophobia on US musical modernism. A gay man in a heterosexual marriage, Bernstein was both a victim and beneficiary, and a sometime agent, of homophobia. In Bernstein the forces of twentieth-century homophobia converged with talent, ambition, and repression, yielding momentous results for his family, intimates, colleagues, and rivals, and for US and international arts and culture. Bernstein’s life and career were fatefully shaped by prevailing social forms and mores, and ultimately his social and cultural influence would contribute to their reshaping.

In her final work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), George Eliot includes an essay, “Shadows of the Coming Race,” in which the fictionalized narrator speaks of his concerns regarding the growing power of machines. This chapter explores Eliot’s responses to actual machines of her time, and the impact they had on her conceptions of human consciousness and the animal/human/machine divide. It argues that the machine she had in mind for drawing the right conclusion was William Jevons’s “Logical Piano.” The chapter examines this connection, but also, more broadly, the various machines Eliot viewed when visiting laboratories. This was the great age for the development of experimental physiology and of the creation of “self-recording” machines that could measure every aspect of human physiological life and also, it was believed, the flows of thought and emotion. Starting with Lewes’s own work on “Animal Automatism,” the chapter explores how these new conceptions of mind, body, and machine enter into Eliot’s thinking.

Leonard Bernstein’s career-long involvement with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra intersected with the Cold War, the Civil Rights movement, and the growth of television. He first conducted the Philharmonic in 1943, at age twenty-five, and his term as music director (1958−69) is remembered as a particularly vibrant period in the orchestra’s history. On taking over that role, Bernstein embarked on an ambitious agenda both for thematic programming, including focuses on American music and the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, and for public-facing initiatives, such as the televised Young People’s Concerts and touring. In addition, Bernstein used his position to highlight the work of solo performers who were members of minority groups, and he oversaw the orchestra during its period of racial integration.

In working with Stephen Sondheim as lyricist on West Side Story, Bernstein seemed to have forged an important new collaboration with an edgy young writer to contrast with his previous musicals with musical comedy writers Comden and Green. Yet the young Sondheim saw himself as a composer-lyricist, perhaps even with more of an emphasis on the music than the words, so the success of the team was short-lived. This chapter examines primary source accounts of their work together, considering how they met, what they thought of each other, and how productive their creative tensions were. The chapter also briefly addresses their other short-lived projects, including the abandoned The Exception and the Rule.

When psychiatric intensive care units (PICUs) were first created in the United Kingdom, they were mixed-sex wards. As time progressed, evidence grew stronger for the need to create separate PICUs for men and women. Female-only PICUs have been around for about a decade, making them a relatively novel phenomenon within the existing mental health services in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, they play a crucial role within the wide net of mental health services. This chapter summarises the history and development of female-only PICUs and describes some female-specific characteristics of such wards. It then focuses on describing women-specific perinatal mental health presentations and services, including existing provisions for women with mental illness to access family support and contact with their children. Lastly, it discusses the clinical considerations for patients with EUPD and ASPD to access PICU settings.

The growth of Bernstein’s career coincided with the growth of television, so many knew him through his broadcasts. His fifty-three hour-long award-winning Young People’s Concerts (1958−72) are among his most significant television work and were seen at their height by nearly ten million in the USA and in over forty countries. In each show, the maestro would expound on some musical principle, with clarity and appeal, accompanied by demonstrations by him and the New York Philharmonic. While the series clearly shows Bernstein’s brilliant pedagogy, a deeper story lies beneath. No other musician in the late twentieth century so fully addressed the issues of the day as did Bernstein, and no other classical musician has ever been so widely seen. Through his Young People’s Concerts, the maestro not only spread his love of music but also raised his artistic voice from this bully pulpit to work for a better world.

Being able to do activities is an inherent human need and essential to health and well-being. This chapter relates this need to the altered experience of activity participation for people who are patients within a psychiatric intensive care unit (PICU). It explains the negative impact of impaired functioning, occupational deprivation and boredom and the converse positive effect of adequate meaningful activity provision for patients, staff and the service as a whole. It discusses how engaging patients in activity can prevent, reduce and help to manage violence and aggression. This is balanced by a discussion of how enabling positive engagement through use of activity requires careful assessment, which includes considering the environment, different aspects of functioning such as sensory processing and the risks associated with the activities described herein. The chapter provides information on a wide range of activities for individual and group-based programmes, including enabling activity participation in seclusion and using sensory interventions.

This chapter looks at popular culture through the lens of lived religion, with a particular focus on the late antique countryside. After an initial discussion exploring the dimensions of ‘lived religion’, it is then explored through two extended case studies. The first looks at ritual practices associated with the midsummer feast of John the Baptist, including ritual bathing. The second case study looks at ritual activities aimed at mitigating the effects of hail, a persistent threat to agriculture and viticulture in the region. These rituals, and the responses from church and secular elites and authorities alike, are examined in their social and economic context. A range of different types of evidence is considered, from charms through to imperial legislation, as well as ecclesiastical texts of various kinds.

No one so inspired the generation of American musicians born in the 1940s and 1950s as did Bernstein, an ‘inescapable’ and ‘incontroverible’ icon of the 1960s and beyond. His celebrity was particularly linked to the explosive growth of television, beginning with appearances on Omnibus (from 1954) and the New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts (from 1958). Two texts complicate his reputation as Wunderkind of American music: Tom Wolfe’s ‘Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s’ (1970) and Leon Botstein’s ‘The Tragedy of Leonard Bernstein’ (1983). But by the time of his 100th birthday celebrations in 2018, Bernstein’s stature as cultural icon seemed intact and secure, resting largely on West Side Story.

Donald J. Trump’s election portended fundamental changes in America’s relations with its major trading partners and allies. However, Japan’s prime minister, Abe Shinzō, in developing a relationship with Trump as well as an understanding of how to deal with him, positioned Japan as a reliable partner of the US in its assertive stance against China and North Korea. Abe also understood the importance to Trump of image and perception and used this to Japan’s advantage throughout Trump’s term, particularly in his careful use of flattery and in Japan’s agreement to accept largely symbolic trade concessions. The Trump administration’s “America First” approach and its consequent abandonment of America’s leadership role in the region left a vacuum that Japan filled, notably in the resurrection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Japan’s concept of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” found support in Washington. However, Tokyo’s calibrated approach to China, which blended competition and cooperation, was not adopted by the US, which prioritized competition.

Economic tradecraft is a set of duties, responsibilities and skills required of diplomats working in economic affairs. It is a key instrument in the diplomatic tradecraft toolbox. As is the case with their colleagues in the political career track, economic officers work both at diplomatic missions abroad and at headquarters. On the surface, it may appear that a country’s economic and commercial diplomats do the same type of work abroad, but that is not quite the case. Economic officers inform policymaking at headquarters by monitoring and analyzing economic trends and developments in the receiving state. They also advocate for host-government policies aimed at leveling the playing field for companies from the home country and against regulations that hurt those businesses. Commercial diplomats directly help industries and individual companies in starting or expanding business and investment in the host country. Conversely, they facilitate investment by local firms in the home country.

This chapter completes the book’s examination of the impossible narrative position faced by refugee applicants by examining how specific genres enter the hearing room and further determine the ‘authentic’ refugee that states are willing to accept. Drawing on Joseph R Slaughter’s engagement with the genre of human rights discourse, it argues that like the protagonist of the classic Bildungsroman and human rights narratives, refugee applicants are expected to narrate a linear progression from a non-citizen ‘outsider’ towards full civic incorporation through the seeking of protection and the resolution of refugee status. In this generic mode, refugee applicants were expected to present evidence as omniscient narrators with sovereignty over self and others, and the ability to account not only for their own actions but also the decisions and interior worlds of others. Crucially, the ‘good’ refugee’s story moves steadily towards complete resolution that is the determination of refugee status and the realisation of a liberal personhood, marked by self-possession and autonomy, and readiness to become a refugee-citizen.

While scholars have often acknowledged the relationship between Bernstein and Blitzstein by focusing on their Jewish immigrant backgrounds, shared love for the musical theatre, modernist approach to music, and socio-political goals, there is little discussion on how their sexual orientation might have shaped this friendship and their work. Yet, attempting to understand the bond between the two composers, both married yet unequivocally gay, without considering their queer identities leaves a major component out of the picture. In this chapter, I consider the queer intimacies that are at the core of their bond and how works that they dedicated to each other – Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, an opera about gender alienation; and Blitzstein’s Six Elizabethan Songs, a set of pieces concealing possible homoerotic meanings – can uncover new perspectives on their friendship and compositional approaches.