An extraordinary, ambitious, globe-spanning novel about what we owe our consciences.

Fleeing her moribund marriage in Cape Town, Beth accepts a diplomatic posting to Shanghai. In this anonymous city she hopes to lose herself in books, wine, and solitude, and to dodge whatever pangs of conscience she feels for her fealty to a South African regime that, by the 21st century, has betrayed its early promises.

At night, she hears the sound of typing, and then late one evening Zhao arrives at her door. They explore hidden Shanghai and discover a shared love of Langston Hughes–who had his own Chinese and African sojourns. But then Zhao vanishes, and a typewritten manuscript–chunk by chunk–appears at her doorstep instead. The truths unearthed in this manuscript cause her to reckon with her own past, and the long-buried story of what happened to Kay, her fearless, revolutionary friend…

Connecting contemporary Shanghai, late Apartheid-era South Africa, and China during the Great Leap Forward and the Tiananmen uprising–and refracting this globe-trotting and time-traveling through Hughes’ confessional letters to a South African protege about the poet’s time in Shanghai–How to Be a Revolutionary is an amazingly ambitious novel. It’s also a heartbreaking exploration of what we owe our countries, our consciences, and ourselves.

This book studies the Dutch mathematician Simon Stevin (1548-1620) as a new type of 'man of knowledge'. Traditionally, Stevin is best known for his contributions to the 'Archimedean turn'. This innovative volume moves beyond this conventional image by bringing many other aspects of his work into view, by analysing the connections between the multiple strands of his thinking and by situating him in a broader European context. Like other multi-talents ('polymaths') in his time (several of whom are discussed in this volume), Stevin made an important contribution to the transformation of the ideal of knowledge in early modern Europe. This book thus provides new insights into the phenomenon of 'polymaths' in general and in the case of Stevin in particular.

A once famous actor, brain damaged by a horrible accident, using his once famous skills of deception, mimicry and illusion to enter into innocent lives, commit crimes in their names and vanish. Until one detective finds one frame too perfect and in his investigation, draws this elusive nemesis from the shadows, who can become anyone he wants to, making the detective suspect everyone around him. And in one final play, the detective baits the enemy out, in hopes of ending his reign of destruction and prove to the world, there really is a Mr. X.

This collection of seventeen essays takes its inspiration from the scholarly achievements of the Dutch historian Jan Lucassen. They reflect a central theme in his research: the history of labor. The essays deal with five major themes: the production of specific commodities or services (diamonds, indigo, cigarettes, mail delivery by road runners); occupational groups (informal street vendors, prostitutes, soldiers, white-collar workers in the Dutch East India Company, VOC); geographical and social mobility (career opportunities on non-Dutch officers in the VOC, immigration into early-modern Holland; the influence of migrants on labor productivity; income differentials as migration incentives); contexts of labor relations (late medieval labor laws, subsistence labor and female paid labor, Russian peasant-migrant laborers, diverging political trajectories of cane-sugar industries); and the origins of labor-history libraries and archives.