In April 1960, the conductor Kathleen Merritt (1901–85) led an all-woman programme at London’s Wigmore Hall. Despite the fact that concerts entirely of music by women composers had been performed in Britain since at least the 1920s, by 1960 it was still unusual to find a woman’s name on a UK concert programme. Merritt’s concert, therefore, attracted press coverage focusing on her gender, and that of the composers whose music she was performing. In a promotional interview, the Sunday Times gave an account of the conductor that today reads very much like a description of a feminist, declaring: ‘[She] fights not only for women, but for new music by living composers.’1 Merritt herself, however, was adamant that she was ‘not a feminist’.2 The Sunday Times was quick to reassure readers that ‘Merritt has none of the alarming if admirable trappings of women who fight for women’s causes.’3

Late in the Gorgias, Socrates urges Callicles to take their conversation seriously and speak his mind: “for our discussion is about this: how one should live” (500b–c). Many find the work’s treatment of this topic profoundly moving. An example in antiquity is the Corinthian farmer who supposedly abandoned farming for philosophy after reading the Gorgias. The dialogue’s effect is not usually so drastic, but the Gorgias still speaks urgently to many readers on this central question we all face.

Elasticity of demand is introduced and it is shown how this characterises how revenue will change upon a price increase (the two distinct possibilities being represented by elastic and inelastic demand). Profit maximisation is considered in general, and it is shown that, when maximising profit, marginal revenue and marginal cost must be equal. Two very different cases are then studied: that in which the firm is a monopoly and that of perfect competition.

Why did Nikita Khrushchev send missiles to Cuba? This chapter argues that Cuba was important to him for two reasons: it bolstered his self-perception as an equal to the United States and addressed his concerns over a potential US invasion of Cuba, which would affect his reputation in the revolutionary world. He faced a challenge from Mao Zedong, who wanted to wrest the mantle of revolutionary leadership from the Soviets. Yet, having come to the brink over Cuba, Khrushchev backed off, understanding that reputational concerns were not as important as the imperative of avoiding a global nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis provides not just a useful window into understanding Khrushchev's American policy, with its perennial fears of humiliation and sensitivity to slights, but also a crucial snapshot of Sino-Soviet relations on their downward slide towards an outright confrontation.

This chapter focuses on the learning and teaching of second language pronunciation. It starts by asking basic questions such as: Why is it so hard to sound like a “native speaker”? and Should second language learners even sound like native speakers? The chapter reviews the components of pronunciation including phoneme, segmentals, and suprasegmentals. It then explores the topics of comprehensibility, intelligibility, and accentedness, in order to consider which are most important for second language communication and learning. It argues that native-like pronunciation should not be the goal of pronunciation instruction; rather, the goal should be comprehensibility (i.e., how well a second language learner is understood by a listener). It reviews other issues related to pronunciation learning such as the distinction between receptive and productive knowledge, the role of identity in maintaining a first-language accent, and the role that biology plays in affecting second language pronunciation mastery. Finally, the chapter explores both explicit and implicit methods of pronunciation instruction.

Understanding Stalin's foreign policy requires examining his shifting approach to the unfolding Cold War. Up until 1945, he sought great power cooperation in Europe, but later rejected compromise with the United States for fear of exposing Soviet weakness. Stalin’s failed gambit for influence in Iran and Turkey showed the limitations of heavy-handed bullying of neighboring countries: in both cases, he had to retreat and retrench. Meanwhile, in Greece, Stalin shifted opportunistically from a cautious noninvolvement to increasing support for the Communist insurgency. But his Balkan strategy was complicated by an unexpected quarrel with Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito, fueled by Stalin’s jealousy and mistrust. Stalin’s realization in 1947 that left-leaning coalitions that he sponsored across Eastern Europe were not electable marked a turning point towards confrontation with the West. Stalin began to prioritize security over legitimacy. This logic led him towards an attempt to dislodge the Allies from divided Berlin, resulting, by 1949, in a complete division of Europe.

This chapter considers the consequences of the low-to-non-existent marginal value of shareholders’ individual voting power in America’s widely held companies. It reviews the empirical literature on rational ignorance and rational irrationality in civic voting. It argues that we should expect similar levels of ignorance and irrationality in shareholder voting. The chapter then considers the evidence for this ignorance and irrationality in: (1) various measures of the value shareholder put on their voting rights; (2) what appears to drive voting outcomes in uncontested director elections; (3) the failure of shareholders to meaningfully hold directors accountable for failures and fraud; (4) the changes in the voting behavior of shareholders once majority voting is introduced; (5) shareholder responses to boards refusing to accept the resignation of a director who loses an election; (6) the evidence that contested director elections (proxy fights) have nothing to do with corporate governance; (7) the ways the economic decisions of shareholders are at variance with their voting behavior; and (8) the evidence shareholders do not pay attention to their own votes, and generally try to keep them purely symbolic.

For many, public speaking is nothing less than terrifying. But the art is indispensable if you want to get on in life, and can be mastered by learning certain techniques. These include how to start and end a talk, effective structures and the use of slides and data, as well as incorporating your character to help make presentations come alive.