Like Aristotle, the Roman epic poet Lucretius was mistakenly credited with knowledge, or even use, of the camera obscura. Few classical scholars today are aware of this strange but fascinating facet in Lucretius’ intellectual afterlife. The error arose from the misunderstanding of a passage in On the Nature of Things, in which Lucretius referred to the changes and movements of bodies in dreams. Nineteenth-century scientists compared Lucretius’ lines to stroboscopic light effects. Although Belgian scientist Joseph Plateau, inventor of the phenakistiscope, set the record straight, the misunderstanding continued into the age of cinema. The first part of this chapter traces the error through the historiography of the cinema with all its amusing misconceptions, which include an anecdote about Lucretius himself. The chapter’s second part examines the striking resemblances to Lucretius’ epic in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The war launched in February 2022 by Russia against Ukraine has become a stress test for the role of the Security Council, and it confirms some findings of the three Trialogue authors. Congyan Cai, Larissa van den Herik, and Tiyanjana Maluwa have examined the manifestations of law and power in the Council, the substance and procedure of its workings, and the relationship between the Council as the centre and its periphery in the form of regional organisations. This concluding chapter revisits the three dichotomies in the light of the Russian invasion, asking: has power eclipsed law? Are empty ritualistic procedures unable to deliver substantive outcomes? And has the centre been disabled, so that peripheral actors dominate the scene? The chapter concludes that the Security Council remains important not only as a centre of power but also as a creature of law and as a law-producer. The Council’s action and inaction are highly dependent on legal procedures (as opposed to mere ‘politics’). Finally, the Council, also in its response to the Ukrainian war, is firmly embedded within a network of other international bodies and actors.

Brain imaging tests such as CT and MRI scans can be helpful biomarkers for frontotemporal dementia because of the typical atrophy of the frontal and temporal lobes sparing more posterior parts of the brain. For other types of dementia, these imaging tests are not as helpful, although they may be important to rule out tumors, strokes, and hydrocephalus (excess fluid in the brain). Over the last ten years or so, PET scans that can image beta-amyloid plaques and tau-containing tangles have been developed and are now clinically available. These scans can be very useful in confirming a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and staging the severity of the disease in research settings. However, they are very expensive and often not covered by insurance, presenting barriers for clinical use outside of research.

Cartography can help us understand how European knowledge of the topography and toponymy of the Delta has evolved over the centuries; however, we must be aware of the intellectual, social, religious and economic conditions under which maps were produced. Their content is far from exclusively geographic and the same map could show many levels of miscellaneous knowledge. Often, no European traveller had ever seen the cities drawn on the map. Consequently, before the nineteenth century, maps of Egypt and the Delta were unstable and contradictory – different maps expressed different Deltas, different representations of the world. The maps discussed in this chapter will paint a picture – a necessarily uncertain, shifting and composite picture – of knowledge acquired on the north of Egypt. This chapter will hopefully be a useful tool for understanding the evolution of European knowledge of the Delta and the research conducted in different places. By providing a list of the main documents, both cartographic and textual, relevant to the evolution of the cartography of the Delta, I hope to make place-specific research possible for those who wish it. It will also allow us to better understand what a thirteenth- or eighteenth-century map can say and not say.

The “crisis of evangelicalism” that arose in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump, who was supported by 80 percent of American evangelicals, provides a case study in the challenge of determining who counts as a “true evangelical” or a “true Christian.” The distinction between descriptive and prescriptive approaches to Christianity helps to clarify much of the controversy. The anxieties of modernity have forced all Christians, liberal and conservative, to explore new approaches to prescriptivism.

At some point while I was a medical student in the 1970s, I had my cholesterol checked. I think it was part of a pedagogical exercise, and as I recall, only the total cholesterol was measured. Surprisingly, the cholesterol level was near the upper limit of normal. Too many burgers and fries said Lois. I laughed it off. There wasn’t much heart disease in the family. One of my grandfathers died of a heart attack, a myocardial infarction, but he was in his mid-70s. I was in my 20s and invincible. As I grew older, my cholesterol levels, especially the LDL cholesterol, crept higher, and the upper limits of normal were revised down so that by the time I was in my 40s, my cholesterol was unambiguously elevated. By the time I was in my 50s, I was taking medications to keep my cholesterol levels and blood pressure under control. As the years went by, the doses of these medications continued to climb. My hyperlipidemia and hypertension have always been a bit of a puzzle to me, but they have both been manageable with medications and diet.

Chapter 6 follows Ilf as he photographed New York City and analyzes the “New York” installment of the writers’ photo essay. It argues their photo essay resembled the work of the many Western and Soviet writers and photographers, who in the 1930s were experimenting with the hybrid documentary genre of the photo essay or photobook. Tracing the transnational networks that connected authors and photographers across the ideological divide, the chapter interprets Ilf and Petrov’s photo essay as a modernist documentary.

Chapter 3 examines how American fears of “pernicious” Soviet propaganda threatened to undermine Soviet–American relations on the eve of Ilf and Petrov’s visit. The long history of American politicians and government officials equating advocacy of revolution and actual revolutionary violence made a Soviet promise to desist from distributing propaganda in the United States a requirement of the 1933 normalization of relations. In the summer of 1935, the participation of American communists in the Comintern (Communist International) congress in Moscow outraged American officials. But their desire for “friendly” relations prevented a diplomatic break. Still, as Ilf and Petrov found when they applied for visas, American officials exercised caution in allowing authors – even funny ones – into the United States.

The introduction of the book provides the heuristic, analytical, and methodological keys for the interpretation of the concepts of the classic and the canon in historiography. It details the interdisciplinary approach that has made this study possible, blending literary criticism, the critical analysis of historical texts, the theory of history, the history of historiography, hermeneutic philosophy, sociology, and biblical studies. It exposes the difficulties presented by the analysis of historiographical categories such as the classic and the canon, which privilege stability over instability and permanence over change. Finally, it lists the main primary sources used and synthesizes the content of each of the five chapters of the book, each of them dedicated to the main concepts analyzed: durability, classic, canon, genre, and genealogy.

For much of history, from the dawn of Greek historiography to the postmodern 1970s, genealogy has been synonymous with continuity of origins and blood identity, and therefore closely connected with the concepts of the classic and the canon. Yet, during the last half century, specially thanks to the Nietzschean and Foucauldian philosophical deployment, it has shed its narrative garb to become an agent of discontinuity, and thus the nemesis of the classic and the canon. Many scholars have analyzed the modern development of genealogies after Nietzsche’s alleged foundational statement and its Foucauldian reception. But none of them has provided a systematic history of the trajectory of this concept, from antiquity to the present. This chapter attempts to fill this gap by providing a history of the concept of genealogy and its associated ideas, delving specifically into its historiographical uses, and connecting it to the four previous concepts discussed in the book. I will, specifically, emphasize its polysemy, try to locate what has remained and what has changed in this long trajectory, and explain the (only recently) radically opposed nature (nemesis) between the concepts of genealogy and canon – and the implications that this opposition brings to historiography.

The Young Englishman’, Edward, aged nineteen, arrived in London destined for the law. Living as a student on a meagre allowance, he observed London society from its fringes and began to write a periodical and fiction for publication. He was greatly influenced by the debates over taste and its civilizing effects. The Seven Years War mobilized patriotism, anti-French feeling and reflections on the distinctive characteristics of Englishness. Faced with the untimely death of his father in 1757 and the news of his modest inheritance, the advice Edward received was to head for Jamaica where he might hope to secure a fortune.