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How does a secret service confront its past, when secrets are kept
for ever? Buried deep in MI6's digital archives is the most
classified directory of all. It doesn't contain war plans or agent
profiles, but shame: the misdeeds of politicians, royalty, business
leaders and the service's own personnel. There are seven decades'
worth of images and recordings, usually acquired for the sake of
assessing risk, sometimes as a guard against betrayal, often
engineered by MI6 for their own purposes. These amount to the most
sensitive two thousand terabytes of data in the Service's
possession. When material from the archive begins appearing online,
the panic is widespread. At first, the security breach only
manifests itself in apparently random events: a suicide, a
disappearance, a breakdown. But when it turns out that the
individuals concerned were all contacted by the same anonymous
person, a connection comes into focus. The archive has somehow
leaked. The hunt is now of unprecedented urgency. That's when they
call for Elliot Kane...
How does a secret service confront its past, when secrets are kept
for ever? Buried deep in MI6's digital archives is the most
classified directory of all. It doesn't contain war plans or agent
profiles, but shame: the misdeeds of politicians, royalty, business
leaders and the service's own personnel. There are seven decades'
worth of images and recordings, usually acquired for the sake of
assessing risk, sometimes as a guard against betrayal, often
engineered by MI6 for their own purposes. These amount to the most
sensitive two thousand terabytes of data in the Service's
possession. When material from the archive begins appearing online,
the panic is widespread. At first, the security breach only
manifests itself in apparently random events: a suicide, a
disappearance, a breakdown. But when it turns out that the
individuals concerned were all contacted by the same anonymous
person, a connection comes into focus. The archive has somehow
leaked. The hunt is now of unprecedented urgency. That's when they
call for Elliot Kane...
In this gritty, white-knuckle crime thriller, Detective Nick
Belsey--introduced in the acclaimed The Hollow Man as a shrewd,
street-smart cynic who is one of London's sharpest, but most
unprincipled, investigators--is plunged into a perplexing mystery
of secrets, danger, and suspense beneath the city's streets.
Trouble once again finds Nick Belsey when he takes a date to an
abandoned bomb shelter buried beneath the heart of London. One
minute the young woman is there, and the next, she's gone,
mysteriously vanishing into the dark labyrinth of secret tunnels. A
seasoned cop with a bad reputation, Nick knows that if he reports
her disappearance, he'll be the prime suspect. Instead, he's going
to find her. It's not just her life at stake--it's his, too.
Determined to discover who else is down in those forgotten
tunnels, and how far this secret network of underground passages
extends, he plunges head first into the investigation--and into a
dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with a ruthless enemy who would
rather let an innocent woman die than reveal old Cold War secrets
hidden deep beneath the city's streets.
An edgy, subversive thriller with the superb characterization of
classic Lawrence Block and the psychological acuity and suspense of
Sophie Hannah, Deep Shelter is a compulsively readable mystery from
a master of literary suspense.
Archaeology for Today and Tomorrow explores how cutting-edge
archaeological theories have implications not only for how we study
the past, but also how we think about and prepare for the future.
Ranging from how we understand migration or political leadership to
how we think about violence or ecological crisis, the book argues
that archaeology should embrace a "future-oriented" attitude.
Behind the traditional archaeological gaze on the past are a unique
and useful collection of skills, tools, and orientations for
rethinking the present and future. Further, it asserts that
archaeological theory is not only vital for how we conduct our work
as archaeologists, and how we create narratives about the past, but
also for how we think about the broader world in the present and,
crucially, how we envision and shape the future. Each of the
chapters in the book links specific theoretical approaches and
global archaeological case studies to a specific contemporary
issue. It examines such issues as human movement, violence, human
and non-human relations, the Anthropocene, and fake news to
showcase the critical contributions that archaeology, and
archaeological theory, can make to shaping the world of tomorrow.
An ideal book for courses on archaeology in the modern world and
public archaeology, it will also appeal to archaeology students and
researchers in general and all those in related disciplines
interested in areas of critical contemporary concern.
Archaeology for Today and Tomorrow explores how cutting-edge
archaeological theories have implications not only for how we study
the past, but also how we think about and prepare for the future.
Ranging from how we understand migration or political leadership to
how we think about violence or ecological crisis, the book argues
that archaeology should embrace a "future-oriented" attitude.
Behind the traditional archaeological gaze on the past are a unique
and useful collection of skills, tools, and orientations for
rethinking the present and future. Further, it asserts that
archaeological theory is not only vital for how we conduct our work
as archaeologists, and how we create narratives about the past, but
also for how we think about the broader world in the present and,
crucially, how we envision and shape the future. Each of the
chapters in the book links specific theoretical approaches and
global archaeological case studies to a specific contemporary
issue. It examines such issues as human movement, violence, human
and non-human relations, the Anthropocene, and fake news to
showcase the critical contributions that archaeology, and
archaeological theory, can make to shaping the world of tomorrow.
An ideal book for courses on archaeology in the modern world and
public archaeology, it will also appeal to archaeology students and
researchers in general and all those in related disciplines
interested in areas of critical contemporary concern.
'Oliver Harris is always pure quality and I'm loving the hell out
of his foray into the contemporary spy novel' Ian Rankin The
intelligence service puts two years and over GBP100k into the
training of new field officers. You're shown how to steal cars,
strip weapons, hack bank accounts. There are courses on the use of
blackmail and improvised explosives, two workshops solely dedicated
to navigating by the stars. But nothing about what I had heard one
old spy call whiplash. No one tells you how to go home. There is a
dark side to MI6 that needs men like Elliot Kane - mercurial,
inquisitive, free floating. He's spent fifteen years managing
events overseas that never make the papers, deniable and deeply
effective. Kane is a ghost in his own life, picking up and dropping
personalities as each new cover story comes into play. But when a
woman he loves, Joanna Lake, vanishes without a trace in
Kazakhstan, he is forced centre stage. Drawn ever deeper into a
realm of deception, Kane moves from merely infiltrating events to
steering them. He's used to a new mode of hybrid psychological
warfare - but snowbound Kazakhstan presents unique challenges.
Poised between China, Russia and the West, dictatorship and
democracy, state intelligence and an increasingly powerful world of
private agencies, it's impossible to work out who is manipulating
who. And Kane's not the only one trying to figure out where Joanna
Lake has gone or what she learned before disappearing. Unable to
trust anyone, hunted by his own colleagues, and with the life of
someone he loves at stake, Kane needs to work out who is driving
events, and why...
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Arthurian Literature XXXIV (Hardcover)
Elizabeth Archibald, David F. Johnson; Contributions by David Carlton, Lindy Brady, Neil M.R. Cartlidge, …
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R1,901
Discovery Miles 19 010
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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The continued influence and significance of the legend of Arthur
are demonstrated by the articles collected in this volume. The
enduring appeal and rich variety of the Arthurian legend are once
again manifest here. Chretien's Erec et Enide features first in a
case study of the poet's endings and medieval theories of poetic
composition. Next follows an essay that comes to the rather
surprising-but- convincing conclusion that the "traitor" spoken of
in the opening lines of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is neither
Aeneas nor Antenor, but Paris. Another essay dealing with Sir
Gawain, this time in Malory's Morte Darthur, offers among other
things an answer to the question of how Gawain knows the exact hour
of his death. Few native Irish Arthurian tales have come down to
us: a discussion of "The Tale of the Crop-Eared Dog" shows it to be
both bizarre and popular, as witnessed by the many manuscripts in
which it is preserved. The materiality of the Arthurian legend is
represented here by a detailed treatment of the lead cross
supposedly found in the grave of King Arthur at Glastonbury Abbey
in 1191. Finally, this volume continues Arthurian Literature's
tradition of publishing unfamiliar or previously unknown Arthurian
texts, in this instance an original Middle English translation of
the story of the sword in the stone, from the Old French Merlin.
ELIZABETH ARCHIBALD is Professor of English Studies at Durham
University, and Principal of StCuthbert's Society; DAVID F. JOHNSON
is Professor of English at Florida State University, Tallahassee.
Contributors: Lindy Brady, David Carlton, Neil Cartlidge, Nicole
Clifton, Oliver Harris, Richard Moll, Rebecca Newby.
Chapters 1, 2, and 5 of this book is freely available as a
downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at
http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781138820388 Lacan's Return
to Antiquity is the first book devoted to the role of classical
antiquity in Lacan's work. Oliver Harris poses a question familiar
from studies of Freud: what are Ancient Greece and Rome doing in a
twentieth-century theory of psychology? In Lacan's case, the issue
has an additional edge, for he employs antiquity to demonstrate
what is radically new about psychoanalysis. It is a tool with which
to convey the revolutionary power of Freud's ideas by digging down
to the philosophical questions beneath them. It is through these
questions that Lacan allies psychoanalysis with the pioneering
intellectual developments of his time in anthropology, philosophy,
art and literature. Harris begins by considering the role of Plato
and Socrates in Lacan's conflicted thoughts on teaching, writing
and the process of becoming an intellectual icon. In doing so, he
provides a way into considering the uniquely challenging nature of
the Lacanian texts themselves, and the live performances behind
them. Two central chapters explore when and why myth is drawn upon
in psychoanalysis, its threat to the discipline's scientific
aspirations, and Lacan's embrace of its expressive potential. The
final chapters explore Lacan's defence of tragedy and his return to
Ovidian themes. These include the unwitting voyeurism of Actaeon,
and the fate of Narcissus, a figure of tragic metamorphosis that
Freud places at the heart of infantile development. Lacan's Return
to Antiquity brings to Lacan studies the close reading and
cross-disciplinary research that has proved fruitful in
understanding Freud's invention of psychoanalysis. It will appeal
to psychoanalysts and advanced students studying in the field,
being of particular value to those interested in the roots of
Lacanian concepts, the evolution of his thought, and the cultural
context of his work. What emerges is a more nuanced, self-critical
figure, a corrective to the reputation for dogmatism and obscurity
that Lacan has attracted. In the process, new light is thrown on
enduring controversies, from Lacan's pronouncements on feminine
sexuality to the opaque drama of the seminars themselves.
Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, Queer is an
enigma - both an unflinching autobiographical self-portrait and a
coruscatingly political novel, Burroughs' only realist love story
and a montage of comic-grotesque fantasies that paved the way for
his masterpiece, Naked Lunch. Set in Mexico City during the early
fifties, Queer follows William Lee's hopeless pursuit of desire
from bar to bar in the American expatriate scene. As Lee breaks
down, the trademark Burroughsian voice emerges; a maniacal mix of
self-lacerating humor and the Ugly American at his ugliest. A
haunting tale of possession and exorcism, Queer is also a novel
with a history of secrets, as this new edition reveals.
As this new edition reveals, the cultural reach of "The Ticket That
Exploded" has expanded with the viral logic of Burroughs's
multimedia methods, recycling itself into our digital environment.
A last chance antidote to the virus of lies spread by the ad men
and con men of the Nova Mob, Burroughs's book is an outrageous
hybrid of pulp science fiction, obscene experimental poetry, and
manifesto for revolution--as fresh today as it ever has been.
Edited from the original manuscripts by renowned Burroughs scholar
Oliver Harris, this revised edition incorporates an introduction
and appendices of never before seen materials.
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Ascension (Paperback)
Oliver Harris; Read by James Langton
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R444
R365
Discovery Miles 3 650
Save R79 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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'One of our finest thriller writers' Evening Standard A BBC2
BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOK CLUB PICK 2021 'Oliver Harris is always
pure quality' Ian Rankin 'A fascinating tale of modern espionage in
a unique setting' Irish Independent Three friends from a mission
many years ago reconnect when one of them dies in mysterious
circumstances on remote Ascension Island. Rory Bannatyne had been
tasked with tapping a new transatlantic data cable, but a day
before he was due to return home he is found hanged. When Kathryn
Taylor, on the South Atlantic MI5 desk, begs ex-spy Elliot Kane to
go over and investigate, he can't say no, but it's an uneasy
reintroduction to the intelligence game. Entirely isolated from the
world, the disappearance of a young girl on the island at the same
time as Rory's death means local tensions are high. Elliot needs to
discover what happened to her as well as to Rory. But the island
contains more secrets than even the government knows, and it's not
going to give them up without a fight. WHAT READERS ARE SAYING
'Captivating...Gripping, relevant and frenetic. You'll be hard
pressed to put this one down for a second' Amazon reader five star
review 'Stunning spy novel...This is the best of its genre I've
read' Amazon reader five star review 'A bit like a thinking
person's Lee Child' Amazon reader five star review
A total assault on the powers that turn humans into machines by
writing and fixing our life scripts, Burroughs' original "cut-up"
book was itself rewritten in three different forms. This new
edition of "The Soft Machine" clarifies for the first time the
extraordinary history of its writing and rewriting, demolishes the
myths of his chance-based writing methods, and demonstrates for a
new generation the significance of Burroughs' greatest experiment.
Edited from the original manuscripts by renowned Burroughs scholar
Oliver Harris, this revised edition incorporates an introduction
and appendices of never before seen materials.
Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium provides an account of
the changing world of archaeological theory and a challenge to more
traditional narratives of archaeological thought. It charts the
emergence of the new emphasis on relations as well as engaging with
other current theoretical trends and the thinkers archaeologists
regularly employ. Bringing together different strands of global
archaeological theory and placing them in dialogue, the book
explores the similarities and differences between different
contemporary trends in theory while also highlighting potential
strengths and weaknesses of different approaches. Written in a way
to maximise its accessibility, in direct contrast to many of the
sources on which it draws, Archaeological Theory in the New
Millennium is an essential guide to cutting-edge theory for
students and for professionals wishing to reacquaint themselves
with this field.
Celebrating and analyzing a landmark novel that is aberrant,
obscene, and blasphemous, ""Naked Lunch"" was banned, ridiculed,
and castigated on publication in 1959, and yet fifty years down the
line it has lost nothing of its power to astonish and inspire. A
lacerating satire, an exorcism of demons, a grotesque cabinet of
horrors, and a landmark experiment in linguistic derangement, it is
a work of ecstatic, excoriating laughter and great, transcendent
beauty. The first book ever to take on William Burroughs'
masterpiece, this critical collection brings together an
international array of writers, scholars, musicians, scientists,
and artists who cast new eyes on the writing and reception of
Burroughs' unique work. Tracing its origins from Texas to Tangier,
from Mexico City to New York and Paris, crossing time zones and
cultures, ""Naked Lunch @ 50"" breaks new ground in understanding
this most influential but elusive of texts. ""Naked Lunch @ 50""
includes studies of the text's manuscript and textual history, of
its origins in and creative debts to a range of specific locations,
of its reception in different societies over time and in relation
to broader cultural, artistic, and personal histories. Contributors
discuss the novel's existence as a physical object in regard to
both design and collectability, the history of its critical
reception, its cultural importance in relation to censorship and
visionary art, its relationship to literary genres - from science
fiction to the horror film - and its significance as a work
prophetic of current trends in electronic culture and biology. A
series of introductory sections, or 'Dossiers', written by Ian
MacFadyen, provide glimpses of further horizons of research and
reading, while a set of endpapers by the artist Philip Taaffe
offers a visual correlative to Burroughs' extraordinary text.
'Oliver Harris is an outstanding writer... he combines violence and
romance, a sense of place and humour, in the same exciting way as,
for example, Michael Connelly' The Times 'An intelligent,
brilliantly plotted and paced thriller...If you need to feed your
Mick Herron habit, Oliver Harris could be just the fix' Irish Times
'One of our finest thriller writers' Evening Standard 'Oliver
Harris is always pure quality' Ian Rankin Nick Belsey's on the run.
Touching down in Mexico City, he doesn't have much in the way of
funds, but he has a new continent and surely that's enough to start
afresh. But it's not as easy as that. An idyllic interlude in a
coastal village is interrupted when men turn up who seem to know
exactly who he is. And they have some very urgent questions. DI
Kirsty Craik had also hoped she'd left Nick Belsey behind her, in
the wilder days of her career. When a five am call instructs her to
track him down or she'll be dead by Christmas, it seems he's walked
back into her life with characteristic commotion. Craik is forced
to break the rules once more to find out what her former lover is
up to. She needs to save herself, and, just maybe, to save Belsey
too.
'Anti-hero Nick Belsey, a policeman so maverick as to make Rebus
look like a jobsworth, has burnt his bridges and fled to Mexico in
Harris's latest marvellous thriller' Telegraph, 50 Best Books of
2022 Praise for Oliver Harris: 'One of our finest thriller writers'
Evening Standard 'Oliver Harris is always pure quality' Ian Rankin
Nick Belsey's on the run. Touching down in Mexico City, he doesn't
have much in the way of funds, but he has a new continent and
surely that's enough to start afresh. But it's not as easy as that.
An idyllic interlude in a coastal village is interrupted when men
turn up who seem to know exactly who he is. And they have some very
urgent questions. DI Kirsty Craik had also hoped she'd left Nick
Belsey behind her, in the wilder days of her career. When a five am
call instructs her to track him down or she'll be dead by
Christmas, it seems he's walked back into her life with
characteristic commotion. Craik is forced to break the rules once
more to find out what her former lover is up to. She needs to save
herself, and, just maybe, to save Belsey too.
In January 1953, William Burroughs began a seven-month expedition
into the jungles of South America, ostensibly to find yage, the
fabled hallucinogen of the Amazon. But Burroughs also cast his
anthropological-satiric eye over the local regimes to record
trademark vignettes of political and psychic malaise. From the
notebooks he kept and the letters he wrote home to Allen Ginsberg,
Burroughs composed a narrative of his adventures that appeared ten
years later as "In Search of Yage" within The Yage Letters. That
book, published by City Lights in 1963, was completed by the
addition of Ginsberg's account of his own experiences with yage as
he traveled through South America in 1960, and by the addition of
other Burroughs letters and texts. For this new edition, Burroughs
scholar Oliver Harris has gone back to the original manuscripts to
untangle the history of the text, telling the fascinating story of
its genesis and cultural importance in his wide-ranging
introduction. Also included in this edition are extensive
materials, never before published, by both Burroughs and Ginsberg
that shed new light on their adventures in exploration and writing
"A complete understanding of the literary legacy of William
Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg is impossible without reading this
amazing collection of letters and documents centered on yage, the
fabled hallucinogen of the Amazon. . . . These crucial texts go
beyond simple curiosity about mind-changing drugs to set the
foundation of what would later become a literary movement that
changed American literature."-Bloomsbury Review "Burroughs' book
about his search for the 'ultimate fix', The Yage Letters,
possesses an equally strange and secret history. Published in 1963
but written a decade earlier, it has long been seen as a
fascinating curio in the Burroughs canon, yet a new edition of the
book, edited by Oliver Harris, places it more centrally in the list
of key Burroughs texts. . . . The Yage Letters marks the point when
Burroughs moved full-time into his own, fully realised
universe."-The Independent UK William Burroughs is widely
recognized as one of the most influential and innovative writers of
the twentieth century. His books include: Junky, Naked Lunch,
Queer, The Wild Boys and The Place of Dead Roads. Oliver Harris is
a professor in literature and film in the School of American
Studies at Keele University. He is the editor of The Letters of
William S, Burroughs (Penguin) and the 50th anniversary edition of
Junky (Penguin).
Essays on the links between film and fiction, and their mutual
influence. Fiction and film interrelate closely to each other, and
the specially commissioned essays in this volume all consider
different aspects of this relationship. Beginning with discussions
of Dickens and Victorian literature, the contributors, all leading
scholars in this field, demonstrate how visual devices like the
magic lantern caught the interest of writers and affected their
choice of subject and method. The impact of the cinema on the
British modernistsis then discussed, and the remaining essays
provide detailed case studies on such subjects as Hemingway,
Updike, and the depiction of women in contemporary fiction and
film.
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Dead Fingers Talk (Paperback)
William S. Burroughs; Introduction by Prof. Oliver Harris
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R315
R257
Discovery Miles 2 570
Save R58 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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First published in 1963 and representing Burroughs's literary
breakthrough in the UK, Dead Fingers Talk is, in the words of
Burroughs scholar Prof. Oliver Harris, "a prophetic work of
haunting power", and is perhaps the most commercial and accessible
of his works. Combining new material with selections from Naked
Lunch and his cut-up novels The Soft Machine and The Ticket That
Exploded, the book is also a fascinating precursor to remix and
mash-up forms in art and music, which owe much to Burroughs's
influence. This newly edited edition of Dead Fingers Talk, based on
the restored text of the novel, will delight all Burroughs fans and
lovers of experimental literature, and offer a new insight into the
artistic process of one of the most original and influential
writers of the twentieth century.
Chapters 1, 2, and 5 of this book is freely available as a
downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at
http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781138820388 Lacan's Return
to Antiquity is the first book devoted to the role of classical
antiquity in Lacan's work. Oliver Harris poses a question familiar
from studies of Freud: what are Ancient Greece and Rome doing in a
twentieth-century theory of psychology? In Lacan's case, the issue
has an additional edge, for he employs antiquity to demonstrate
what is radically new about psychoanalysis. It is a tool with which
to convey the revolutionary power of Freud's ideas by digging down
to the philosophical questions beneath them. It is through these
questions that Lacan allies psychoanalysis with the pioneering
intellectual developments of his time in anthropology, philosophy,
art and literature. Harris begins by considering the role of Plato
and Socrates in Lacan's conflicted thoughts on teaching, writing
and the process of becoming an intellectual icon. In doing so, he
provides a way into considering the uniquely challenging nature of
the Lacanian texts themselves, and the live performances behind
them. Two central chapters explore when and why myth is drawn upon
in psychoanalysis, its threat to the discipline's scientific
aspirations, and Lacan's embrace of its expressive potential. The
final chapters explore Lacan's defence of tragedy and his return to
Ovidian themes. These include the unwitting voyeurism of Actaeon,
and the fate of Narcissus, a figure of tragic metamorphosis that
Freud places at the heart of infantile development. Lacan's Return
to Antiquity brings to Lacan studies the close reading and
cross-disciplinary research that has proved fruitful in
understanding Freud's invention of psychoanalysis. It will appeal
to psychoanalysts and advanced students studying in the field,
being of particular value to those interested in the roots of
Lacanian concepts, the evolution of his thought, and the cultural
context of his work. What emerges is a more nuanced, self-critical
figure, a corrective to the reputation for dogmatism and obscurity
that Lacan has attracted. In the process, new light is thrown on
enduring controversies, from Lacan's pronouncements on feminine
sexuality to the opaque drama of the seminars themselves.
Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium provides an account of
the changing world of archaeological theory and a challenge to more
traditional narratives of archaeological thought. It charts the
emergence of the new emphasis on relations as well as engaging with
other current theoretical trends and the thinkers archaeologists
regularly employ. Bringing together different strands of global
archaeological theory and placing them in dialogue, the book
explores the similarities and differences between different
contemporary trends in theory while also highlighting potential
strengths and weaknesses of different approaches. Written in a way
to maximise its accessibility, in direct contrast to many of the
sources on which it draws, Archaeological Theory in the New
Millennium is an essential guide to cutting-edge theory for
students and for professionals wishing to reacquaint themselves
with this field.
|
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