Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
The magic of fairy tales doesn’t just lie in their romantic landscapes and timeless themes of good against evil. The best fairy tales are always populated with compelling and memorable characters – like the rags-to-riches princess, the gallant prince on horseback set to save the day, or the jealous and lonely evil king or queen. Which famous fairy tale character do you think you’re most like?
In their search for the origin of blunt, etymologists roamed long and ineffectually among similar-sounding words and occasionally came close to the sought-for source, though more often look-alikes led them astray. One of such decoys was Old Engl. blinn. Blinn and blinnan meant “cessation” and “to cease” respectively, but how can “cease” and “devoid of sharpness; obtuse” be related?
Happy 240th birthday, Jane Austen! Jane Austen was born 16 December 1775 in Hampshire, England. Birthdays were important events in Jane Austen’s life – those of others perhaps more so than her own.
There are so many reports of agents that may cause cancer, that there is a temptation to dismiss them all. Tabloid newspapers have listed everything from babies, belts, biscuits, and bras, to skiing, shaving, soup, and space travel. It is also tempting to be drawn into debates about more esoteric candidates for causative agents like hair dyes, underarm deodorants, or pesticides.
Every winter the child inside us hopes for snow. It brings with it the potential for days off work and school, the chance to make snowmen, create snow angels, and have snowball fights with anyone that might happen to walk past. But as the snow falls have you ever wondered how it is formed? What goes on in the clouds high above our heads to make these snowflakes come to life?
People often find their interest in a cause awakened by a dramatization on stage, screen, between the pages of a book or, these days, on YouTube. This fall, Americans are learning about the highly dramatic battle in Britain to win the vote for women.
Like Mansfield Park, the novel that precedes it, Emma is a closely defended study of English life. Begun, according to Cassandra Austen’s chronology of her sister’s compositions, 21 January 1814, before the Fall of Paris and Napoleon’s exile to Elba, it was completed on 29 March 1815, just months before the battle of Waterloo (June 1815) and Napoleon’s second and final abdication.
This year, many in government and civil society will be focused on the Syrian refugee crisis and other urgent human rights situations. The seemingly-endless stream of human rights emergencies demands immediate action.
One of classical music’s greatest guilty pleasures—the music of Gilbert & Sullivan—celebrated an historic event in late October when the famed D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, the 144 year-old company founded by the team’s original producer, Richard D’Oyly Carte, sold some of their last remaining original Gilbert & Sullivan treasures to the British Library.
As we reflect on Human Rights Month and the implications of conflict throughout 2015, we have asked some of the humanitarian law scholars who contributed to the new Geneva Conventions Commentary to explore the interplay between these two important legal disciplines, and how we should approach them in the future.
When the ancient resort city of Herculaneum disappeared under more than 65 feet of hot ash and stone in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE, a large library of important philosophical texts was buried with it. Like the city and everything in it, the library’s large collection of papyrus scrolls was burned to a crisp, and the efforts to recover, conserve and read these texts has a long, intriguing history.
Today’s carceral state has its roots in the “war on crime” that took hold in America in the 1980s. That “war” was led by the political forces that I associate with Reaganism, a conservative political formation that generally favored a rollback of state power. A notable exception to this rule was policing and imprisonment. Both Reaganism and the “war on crime” had a racial politics embedded in them, so that these three phenomena—Reaganism as a movement, the “war on crime,” and the resulting carceral state, and the racial politics of the 1980s—strengthened and reinforced the others.
The tort of intentional infliction of harm would seem to encapsulate a basic moral principle – that if you injure someone intentionally and without just cause or excuse, then you should be liable for the commission of a tort – in addition to any crime that you commit. Occasionally, judges have held that there is such a principle, which is of general application: eg, Bowen LJ in Mogul Steamship v McGregor Gow & Co (1889).
Public debates have long been a tradition in India and have played a major role in shaping the country’s politics. This especially held true following India’s struggle for independence as national leaders considered the kind of country India should aspire to be.
A free media system independent of political interference is vital for democracy, and yet politicians in different parts of the world try to control information flows. Silvio Berlusconi has been a symbol of these practices for many years, but recently the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, has been in the spotlight. The latter case shows that young and emerging democracies are particularly vulnerable to media capture by political and corporate interests because of their fragile institutions, polarised civil society and transnational economic pressures.
Holograms are an ironic technology. They encompass a suite of techniques capable of astonishingly realistic imagery (in the right circumstances), but they’re associated with contrasting visions: on the one hand, ambitious technological dreams and, on the other, mundane and scarcely noticed hologram products.