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Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

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A Darwinian Reflects on the Coronavirus Pandemic

I am seventy-nine years old and I have Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis. It is a pretty severe lung disease and, until recently, if you developed it, make sure your will is in order and you might think...

Michael Ruse | 14 May 2020

Classics and Crisis

In the preamble to his History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides declares that the twenty-year conflict between Athens and Sparta was a war like no other, an object lesson for humanity involving what...

M. D. Usher | 14 May 2020

Cambridge

In 1923 two precocious and fury-filled Cambridge undergraduates – Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward – co-wrote some extraordinary, inventive, and obscene stories. Together they imagined...

Leo Mellor | 14 May 2020

Treading the Paths of Exile: Enduring Isolation and Solitude in Early Medieval England

Early medieval England experienced nothing quite like the Coronavirus, although plagues and afflictions of other kinds came all too frequently. The venerable Bede (d. 735) and other contemporary writers...

Rory Naismith | 14 May 2020

Romanticism and the Corona Virus

I have been asking myself what wisdom or solace the Romantic poets might offer us during this time of death and fear and self-isolation. We won’t be climbing Mont Blanc or Mount Snowden anytime soon,...

Michael Ferber | 13 May 2020

The Pandemic, as seen from the First World War

Endless war. I caught onto this phrase several decades ago, already several decades into my work on the literature and history of the First World War. There, as the conflict wore on, the phrase gained...

Vincent Sherry | 13 May 2020

Behavioural Science and the UK’s Initial Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic

In the early stages of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s strategy to tackle the coronavirus pandemic, much was made of, and much criticism was directed at, the advisory input from behavioural scientists....

Adam Oliver | 13 May 2020

Pandemic: One Traditional Approach

There is an image, associated with the covid-19 pandemic, that I am unable to forget among the countless reports of the crisis one encounters every day in newspapers and online. It is not an image of...

Frederick Neuhouser | 13 May 2020

Songs for a Sad Season

Singer-songwriter John Prine fell ill with the Covid-19 virus in March and eventually succumbed to it on April 7. He was a balladeer of the common man, a poet of everyday life with a knack for folding...

James Chandler | 13 May 2020

In Search for an Anchor: Using international law to discuss transitional governance

A common language and forum for debate on state transitions is essential today. Our age is indeed characterised by the increasing involvement of diplomatic actors in the constitutional and transitional...

Emmanuel H. D. De Groof | 13 May 2020

Hoarding in Times of Corona: Thoughts on Storage, Stuff, and the Future

Toilet paper has become the unlikely posterchild of the coronavirus. Toilet paper, and its absence. Much has been written about what seems, at first sight, an unlikely association: after all, diarrhea...

Astrid Van Oyen | 13 May 2020

South Africa

Tucked away in my North Yorkshire home, in the surreal tranquility of Newton-on-Ouse—since the floods of February and March a little welcome sunshine has brought out the bluebells to replace the daffodils...

David Attwell | 12 May 2020