Suchergebnisse

Professor David Kennedy's 2018 Montesquieu Lecture considers the role of expert legal knowledge in our political and economic life. As politicians, citizens, and experts engage one another on a technocratic terrain of irresolvable argument and uncertain knowledge, a world of astonishing inequality and injustice is born. Kennedy draws on his experience working with international lawyers, human rights advocates, policy professionals, economic development specialists, military lawyers, and humanitarian strategists to describe the conflicts, unexamined assumptions, and assertions of power and entitlement that lie at the center of expert rule. He explores how we can harness expert knowledge to remake an unjust world.

The B-vitamins comprise a group of eight water soluble vitamins that perform essential, closely inter-related roles in cellular functioning, acting as co-enzymes in a vast array of catabolic and anabolic enzymatic reactions. Their collective effects are particularly prevalent to numerous aspects of brain function, including energy production, DNA/RNA synthesis/repair, genomic and non-genomic methylation, and the synthesis of numerous neurochemicals and signaling molecules. However, human epidemiological and controlled trial investigations, and the resultant scientific commentary, have focused almost exclusively on the small sub-set of vitamins (B9/B12/B6) that are the most prominent (but not the exclusive) B-vitamins involved in homocysteine metabolism. Scant regard has been paid to the other B vitamins. This review describes the closely inter-related functions of the eight B-vitamins and marshals evidence suggesting that adequate levels of all members of this group of micronutrients are essential for optimal physiological and neurological functioning. Furthermore, evidence from human research clearly shows both that a significant proportion of the populations of developed countries suffer from deficiencies or insufficiencies in one or more of this group of vitamins, and that, in the absence of an optimal diet, administration of the entire B-vitamin group, rather than a small sub-set, at doses greatly in excess of the current governmental recommendations, would be a rational approach for preserving brain health.

It has been customary to see elegies by male poets as exceptional rather than typical poems. W. H. Auden wrote that 'Poets seem to be more generally successful at writing elegies than at any other literary genre'. Peter Sacks reads Milton's 'Lycidas' as a combination of a career move to secure immortality and a deliberate exploitation of 'the pastoral elegy's potential for theological criticism or political satire'. The poetry of R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) contains a body of love poems to his first wife Mildred (Elsi(e)) Eldridge (1909–91), which culminate in a number of elegiac poems published in Mass for Hard Times (1992), No Truce with the Furies (1995), and the posthumous Residues (2002) assembled by Thomas's literary executor M. Wynn Thomas. Thomas's elegiac poems for Elsi challenge critical assumptions about the exceptionality and separability of elegy outlined above. The relative informality of Thomas's poems in terms of the subgenre's conventions is, then, one interest of this article. My discussion will also focus briefly on Welsh aspects of the poems and how Thomas's late poems for Elsi do not stand apart from his other poetry but are of a piece with it. It will also become apparent that many of Thomas's poems are interested in commemorating a continuing shared subjectivity as opposed to describing a process of moving on from grief.