bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Republic of the Centre
Authors: Gildea Robert 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Whereas between 1945 and 1968 the French state had repeatedly been in crisis, after the fall of de Gaulle it enjoyed a period of unprecedented stability. The constitution of the Fifth Republic, which had been shaped by de Gaulle for his own purposes, came to be accepted by the Left as well as by the Right. A regime that was intended to be enfeoffed to the Gaullist majority adapted itself to the alternation of Right and Left in power, becoming a healthy pluralist democracy, and also survived the coexistence of Left and Right in power at the same time. The guerrilla war of Left and Right, fought as if the French Revolution were still going on, became attenuated. People voted on the Right or on the Left but were governed from the Centre. Parties of the Left and Right were seldom able to govern alone, and sought to broaden the majorities on which they were based by ouverture or bridgebuilding to include parties of the Centre in government. Moreover, the alternation of Right and Left in power became less problematic as consensus was established under which governments of both persuasions accepted the mixed economy and a certain level of health and social-security benefits as given, and not to be tampered with from one government to the next. The dominant ideologies were less statist Gaullism or statist socialism but a liberalism that had had a poor track record in France since the Revolution but that now penetrated the thinking of all the major parties.
France in Search of a World Role
Authors: Gildea Robert 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing had the honesty to confess during his presidency that France was now a medium-sized power. This did not mean that it no longer had pretensions to grandeur. It fought hard to retain its permanent seat on the Security Council of the United Nations, struggled to ensure its hegemony in Europe, and proved both stubborn in relinquishing the last vestiges of its empire and remarkably inventive in perpetuating different forms of neocolonial power. Over time, however, many of these ambitions bore bitter fruit. When Soviet power collapsed, France found it increasingly difficult to stand up to the United States. The unification of Germany threatened its leading role in Europe and cooled the European fervour of many French people. In Africa the French lost their ability to arbitrate effectively, while within Francophone countries they gradually lost the initiative to a new rival, Canada.
Introduction to Michael Ignatieff
Authors: Ash Timothy Garton 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
It is a great pleasure to introduce Michael Ignatieff’s lecture. If I had to sum up Michael in one word it would be ‘intellectual’. He is in fact one of our leading liberal intellectuals. Now ‘intellectual’ is a word viewed with some suspicion in Britain. It is regarded as strange and intrinsically foreign. I remember an obituary of Karl Popper, which began with the sentence, ‘Like most British intellectuals of his generation, Karl Popper was born in Vienna.’ Michael wasn’t born in Vienna. He was born in Canada. His education was initially in Canada, then in Cambridge (England), then Cambridge (Massachusetts). He was a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and then became a freelance writer and an extremely well-known broadcaster. He held a number of visiting fellowships, not least the Alastair Horne Fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford, while he was writing his biography of Isaiah Berlin. He is currently at the Carr Center for Human Rights at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard.
Introduction to Gitta Sereny
Authors: Glover Jonathan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
We academics, toiling away in our libraries, writing our books, tend to use the word ‘journalist’ in a somewhat condescending way. We like to think that we write deep, scholarly, researched works, and that ‘journalism’ has a slight tinge of the superficial about it. But it has to be said that Gitta Sereny has written far more profound books than most of us academics. When I read her books, I feel I wouldn’t mind my own work having a journalistic tinge. Her books are not always an unadulterated pleasure to read, because they touch on some very dark things. She asks difficult questions, particularly about the psychological roots of human cruelty.
Introduction to Eva Hoffman
Authors: Foster Roy 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
With her classic study Lost in Translation (1989), Eva Hoffman established her mastery as an analyst of recovered memory and deferred emotion-and also of the way that what we leave behind us follows us around. Her subsequent books dealt with interactions between past and present in Eastern Europe, and demonstrated her Geiger-counter sensitivity to rifts within societies, the stratagems by which they are circumvented, and the ways that they are projected into the future. These preoccupations are clear in her Amnesty lecture, which explores the transmission of remembered wrongs into the future. In dealing with the ‘return of the repressed past’ she avoids, on the one hand, the danger of simply applying the language of individual psychotherapy to the complex question of social consciousness; and, on the other, the equally simplistic assumption that rectification is ever possible for horrific injustices against the dead. The word she prefers to stress is ‘recognition’, which recurs throughout this thoughtprovoking meditation.
Response to Chomsky
Authors: Ryan Alan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Professor Chomsky’s essay provides, as always, an invigorating blast of fresh air that will blow away any complacency about the world’s progress towards implementing a serious human rights regime. Much that he says about the violence and brutality either directly employed by the United States in Indochina and elsewhere or employed by those whom the United States had armed, encouraged, and assisted, is well taken. It is also very hard to resist a good deal of what he says about the failure of the US economy to extend the benefits of prosperity to anything more than the top 10 per cent or so of its own population.
On Writing Rights
Authors: Bhabha Homi K 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Wherever you live, whoever you may be, once the lights dim in a movie theatre, or the screen lights up on your TV or PC, you become, more or less, a part of the global world. Many of the keywords of twenty-first-century political and cultural life embrace such a worldwide perspective: the global market as the touchstone of ‘free enterprise’; democratic capitalism, as the watchword of the crusade against alternative, socialist systems; or, more recently, the ‘Coca-Colonization’ of the world, that catchword of global theorists, which suggests that from a curvaceous bottle with the profile of a 1950s Vargas model there emerges the genie of the postmodern dream: youth, entertainment, cool technologies, and hot financial markets. A time-worn, singular figure, however, bears contrary witness to the whirligig of our global age fraught, as it is, with the fever of frantic speeds, appetites for expanding size, and the vanity of vast numbers. It is the figure of the human being tethered to the spirit of writing/literature.
Why Read Marx Today?
Authors: Wolff Jonathan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In recent years we could be forgiven for assuming that Marx has nothing left to say to us. Marxist regimes have failed miserably, and with them, it seemed, all reason to take Marx seriously. The fall of the Berlin Wall had enormous symbolic resonance: it was taken to be the fall of Marx as well as of Marxist politics and economics. This book argues that we can detach Marx the critic of current society from Marx the prophet of future society, and that he remains the most impressive critic we have of liberal, capitalist, bourgeois society. It also shows that the value of the 'great thinkers' does not depend on their views being true, but on other features such as their originality, insight, and systematic vision. On this account too Marx still richly deserves to be read.
Home Life Among The Sarts And Kirghiz
Authors: Nazaroff Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
THE domestic life of the Central Asiatic peoples is very little known to Europeans, for few have had the opportunity of observing at close quarters the family life of the Moslems, so jealously screened from outside eyes. Quite apart from my prolonged stay with a Sart family already described, I have had many an opportunity of seeing their intimate affairs during my numerous wanderings in Turkestan and the Kirghiz steppe. and so I venture to interrupt the thread of my story with au account of some of what I have soon. Not Europeans only but even Russians who live in the towns of Turkestan are inclined to look upon the womenfolk among the Sarts, Kirghiz and Turcomans, and the women of Khiva, Bokhara and Kashgar, as nothing more than slaves completely subject to the caprice of their lords and masters, sitting all their life in harems. They think that the natives treat their wives like cattle, that in these lands there is a regular slave trade in women, and they even quote cases where girls have been sold.
Alone With Nature
Authors: Nazaroff Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
ONE thing caused me anxiety. The friends who had organised my disguise considered that I should have difficulty in concealing my ‘non-proletarian’ origin in spite of the beard which I had let grow freely, as my face certainly did not have anything like a’ proletarian’ look. I had learnt, too, under interrogation, that these savage ‘proletarians’ are angered and irritated by the appearance of an educated man. Later, during my wanderings in Semirechie, I was unable to conceal the fact that I belonged to the educated classes. Bolsheviks and Rusman peasants and Kirghiz could all scent out that I was not a ‘proletarian,’ and behaved accordingly, their attitude being hostile or friendly and respectful, as the case might be.
In Semirechie
Authors: Nazaroff Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
MY first expedition was into the mountain forests up the valley of the Chu and in the valley of its tributary the Keben. It was a glorious September day when we drove out of the town and headed for the east. The horses were fresh and made a good pace at a brisk trot along the level road, and the light cart bowled along easily. I felt relieved in my mind, and looked around with interest at a country that was new to me. On my left was the Chu with its water meadows and thickets; on the right the mountains stood out sharply and clearly in the clean morning air, their snowy crest glistening like molten silver, cut by the dark and mysterious clefts of the numerous gorges. After driving through several Russian villages with their inevitable quagmires of mud we came to a slight elevation covered with the extensive ruins of an ancient town, Balasugun. In the dry, clayey, barren soil I could clearly pick out the traces of streets and places where houses had once stood, the irrigation canals and larger buildings. The remains of the city walls were quite distinguishable, and of the towers, fortresses and palaces. In the Middle Ages this was a populous and prosperous city, a mass of gardens and handsome buildings, conducting a busy trade with Western Europe on the west and distant China on the east. Its warehouses were crammed with costly merchandise, embroideries of the east and other rich treasures.
Culture clash
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
August Kekulé von Stradonitz was one of the founders of structural organic chemistry. Born in Darmstadt in 1829, he studied at the University of Giessen with Justus von Liebig, greatest of all organic chemists, then in France, and finally in England. He later took the chair of chemistry at the University of Ghent and then in 1865 he moved to Bonn, where he remained for the rest of his life. Kekulé was a noted teacher, but is now mainly remembered for his celebrated dreams, in which came to him the two inspirations that changed the face of chemistry.
Metchnikoff restored to life
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Ilya (later Élie) Metchnikoff was a Russian, born in the Ukraine in 1845, who spent most of his working life at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. During a stay in Italy he discovered the phenomenon of phagocytosis, when he observed amoeba-like cells surging towards a foreign body (a thorn) thrust into a translucent starfish larva. In the human body the phagocytes—white blood cells—are the first line of defence against invaders, such as bacteria, which they engulf and destroy. In later years Metchnikoff was captivated by the notion that our phagocytes run riot when we age and that all symptoms of senescence result from their destructive action. He believed this was fomented by waste products formed in the gut; these, he proclaimed, could be eliminated by promoting the proliferation of benign bacteria. All we needed to do was to ingest massive quantities of ‘kephir’ or yogurt, which would ensure a thriving population of Lactobacillus bulgaricus in the gut. Metchnikoff presumably followed his own prescription to avert the ravages of age, but died nevertheless at seventy-one.
Farmyard themodynamics
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Walther Nernst, born in 1864, was one of the German moguls of physics and physical chemistry. His most famous contributions were in thermodynamics (of which he formulated the Third Law) and in electrochemistry. In 1920, he acquired Zibelle, an extensive estate in East Prussia. There were cows, pigs, a pond with carp, and a thousand acres of land, which included fields of cereals and other crops. Nernst pursued his new interest in farming with characteristic single-mindedness.
Newton ponders
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) attracted many legends. His nature in maturity was sour and ungenerous; he was jealous of contemporaries and ferociously competitive. In his interminable dispute with his Hanoverian contemporary Gottfried Leibniz over who had first hit on the differential calculus, he was ruthless to the point of dishonesty. At the end he exulted that he had finally ‘broken Leibniz’s heart’. John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal (1646-1719), and himself no easy character, was once heard to sigh: ‘I dreamt Newton was dead.’
Rutherford finds a solution
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Ernest Rutherford, later Lord Rutherford of Nelson, was born in 1871 on a sheep farm in New Zealand. ‘Always’, one of his contemporaries greeted him, ‘on the crest of the wave, eh Rutherford’, he was responsible for a remarkable series of discoveries in atomic structure, which made him arguably the preeminent experimental physicist of his generation. ‘Well, I made the wave, didn’t I?’ had been his response. A. V. Hill [115], the physiologist, recalled how Rutherford had remarked to him one day, without preamble: ‘I’ve just been reading some of my early papers; and when I’d read them for a bit I said to myself, “Ernest my boy, you used to be a damned clever fellow”.’ Modesty was never a weakness of Rutherford’s: he was a boisterous extrovert, and so good- natured that he seems never to have incurred envy or malice.
But what use is it?
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
When Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone, having witnessed Michael Faraday’s demonstration of the newly discovered phenomenon of electromagnetic induction, asked: ‘But what use is it?’ Faraday famously replied, ‘l don’t know, but one day, sir, you maybe able to tax it’. (According to another version, however, or perhaps even on a different occasion, his riposte was supposed to have been, ‘What use is a newborn baby?’)
Of life and death
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Isidor Rabi, born in Poland in 1898, grew up in some poverty in New York and became one of the world’s great physicists. He won a Nobel Prize in 1944 for discovering a phenomenon that led ultimately to nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, one of the most powerful methods for the study of molecular structure and later of generating images of living tissue. This involved observing the flip in an oscillating field of atomic nuclei, which had been discovered to possess a magnetic moment, like minuscule bar magnets.
Rabi, who spent most of his working life at Columbia University in New York, became after his Nobel Prize a statesman of science. His enthusiasm for the laboratory seemed to have deserted him; he once said of the Nobel Prize: ‘Unless you are very competitive you aren’t likely to function with the same vigour afterwards. It’s like the lady from Boston who said, “Why should I travel when I’m already there?” The prize also attracts you away from your field because other avenues open up.’
Mathematical peril
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
George Gamow, the physicist [81] who escaped to the United States from Stalinist Russia, tells the following tale of what can befall an innocent scholar in times of political turbulence.
Here is a story told to me by one of my friends who was at that time a young professor of physics in Odessa. His name was Igor Tamm (Nobel Prize laureate in Physics, 1958). Once when he arrived in a neighbouring village, at the period when Odessa was occupied by the Reds, and was negotiating with a villager as to how many chickens he could get for half a dozen silver spoons, the village was captured by one of the Makhno bands, who were roaming the country, harassing the Reds. Seeing his city clothes (or what was left of them), the capturers brought him to the Ataman, a bearded fellow in a tall black fur hat with machine-gun cartridge ribbons crossed on his broad chest and a couple of hand grenades hanging on the belt.
‘You son-of-a-bitch, you Communistic agitator, undermining our mother Ukraine! The punishment is death.’
Lordlv disdain
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Lord Rutherford of Nelson I16], Cavendish Professor of Physics in Cambridge, was a majestic figure. Here is how he dismissed a theory he simply did not care for. The setting is the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford and the writer, R. V. Jones [106].
Rutherford came across occasionally from Cambridge, and his lectures were always memorable. In the question session after one of them E. A. Milne [64] [a noted theoretician and cosmologist] asked for his views on what was known as the Tutin atom. This concept had been started by a Dr Tutin, who argued that the Rutherford model of the atom [the planetary system, with a nucleus, made up of protons and neutrons, as the sun, and the electrons in orbits around it at defined radii] was all wrong, for everyone knew that if you spin a mixture of light and heavy particles, the heavy ones fly to the outside while the light ones stay close to the centre. So in an atom the electrons should be in the middle with the protons orbiting outside. The theory had achieved notoriety because F. W. Soddy [149], the Professor of Inorganic Chemistry, who had given isotopes their name, had communicated Tutin’s paper to the Chemical Society, which had refused to publish the paper in its Journal, whereupon Soddy had resigned from the Society and had promptly advertised the sale of all his volumes of Journal of the Chemical Society in Nature. Milne asked Rutherford how he could be sure that Tutin was wrong and he was right. I can still see Rutherford, who was a big man, bending over towards Milne, who was a small one, and booming ‘When you’ve got an elephant and a flea, you assume it’s the flea that jumps’.
A martyr to science
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Pliny the Elder, or Gaius Plinius Secundus, was the author of Natural History, the most comprehensive survey of scientific learning in the ancient world. He met his end, a martyr to scientific curiosity, during the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum in ad 79. The disaster was vividly described by his nephew, Pliny the Younger. The family was at Misenum on the other side of the Bay of Naples and the elder Pliny had command of the fleet, then stationed in the bay. He was made aware of a large and rapidly growing cloud, ascending on a column of smoke, which was ramifying, dike a Mediterranean pine tree’. ‘My uncle,’ the nephew recorded, ‘who was a great scholar, just could not keep away.’ He took ship and headed for the source of the smoke. As the ship approached Pompeii hot ash and pumice rained down, but Pliny would not turn back and ordered his helmsman to sail on into the gathering gloom until the ship became trapped in the shallows by an unfavourable wind. His nephew continues:
Pythagoras’s theme
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Pythagoras of Samos (d. 510 BC), known to every schoolchild for the square on the hypotenuse, founded a great school of mathematics, dedicated to both practical and philosophical ends. The Pythagorean Brotherhood consisted of some 600 votaries, who abjured worldly ambitions and dedicated themselves to the advancement of learning. Pythagoras is now viewed by historians as a shadowy figure of uncertain identity (which appears to imply that Pythagoras’s theorem may have been discovered not by Pythagoras but by another scholar of the same name). Yet Porphyry, the philosopher, wrote a biography of Pythagoras, admittedly some 800 years later, full of circumstantial detail. Pythagoras’s fame rests not only on his mathematics but also on his discovery of the laws of music—the numerical relation between the intervals of the harmonic scale. According to legend and the account of one of Porphyry’s followers, lamblichus, he happened to pass by a brazier’s shop, where he heard the hammers beating out a piece of iron on an anvil, producing sounds that harmonised, except one. But he recognised in these sounds the concord of the octave, the fifth and the fourth. He saw that the sound between the fourth and the fifth [the augmented fourth, as we would now call it] was a dissonance, and yet completed the greater sound among them.
The trick of the tick
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
David Keilin (1887-1963) was a highly respected Russian-born biologist, who spent most of his working life in Cambridge. His fame rested on his early studies of parasitic insects and, more especially, on his investigations of the iron-containing haem proteins. The following reminiscence comes from an affectionate memoir of Keilin by Max Perutz [88].
In 1931, when Keilin had succeeded Nuttall as Quick Professor of Biology, an elderly lecturer called Warburton complained that he had been appointed before the University Superannuation Scheme had been instituted, so that he had no pension and would have to die in harness. When Keilin told the University Treasurer that Warburton was in his late seventies and had no pension, the Treasurer agreed that in view of Warburton’s advanced age the University could afford to be generous. He failed to foresee that 24 years later we would celebrate Warburton’s 100th birthday! On that occasion he told us a wonderful story. In his prime Warburton had been the world’s authority on ticks. One day in the twenties, some of his students were eating their lunch of bread and cheese when they found a tick in their butter.