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For the basset horn, the second chapter develops a precise definition; lists defining features; identifies and defines terminology; establishes origins and history; paints an historical picture; discusses instructional materials; lists makers chronologically; and describes extant instruments.

Deception can be defined roughly as intentionally causing someone to have false beliefs, but this definition needs to be qualified to deal with certain cases, including the following. I intentionally cause you to believe statement X and X is false, but I neither believe that X is true nor believe that X is false. The chapter also discuss several other cases that may require modifications of this definition and formulate several revised versions of the definition; the chapter counts cases in which people intentionally cause others to persist in false beliefs as cases of deception. There are two main differences between lying and deception. First, unlike “lying,” “deception” implies success. An act must actually cause someone to have false beliefs in order to count as a case of deception. Intentional false statements need not succeed in deceiving others in order to count as lies. Second, although a lie must be a false statement, deception need not involve making a false statement; true statements can be deceptive, and many forms of deception do not involve making statements of any sort. Thus, many instances of deception do not constitute lying. The chapter also explains the relationship between deception and the notions of withholding information, concealing information, “keeping someone in the dark,” “spin,” and “half‐truths,” and the chapter analyzes the relationship between lying, deception, and bullshit. Harry Frankfurt, to the contrary, suggests bullshit does not require the intent to deceive and bullshit can constitute lying. The chapter also argues that Frankfurt's famous claim that bullshitters, qua bullshitters, are unlike liars in that they are unconcerned with the truth (unconcerned with knowing “how things are”) is mistaken. As Frankfurt claims that unconcern with the truth is the essence of bullshit, this shows that his analysis of bullshit is mistaken.

While the lord lieutenant and the bishops were grappling as best they could with the problems posed by the Famine, European attention was focusing on Rome. By 1847 Pius IX’s position had become the centre of intense diplomacy, a pivotal point in the liberal and revolutionary movements as the events that took place in Italy began to have an impact on other European countries. The British government felt obliged to enter into this world of political manoeuvres. The events that took place in Rome and the decisions taken there were to influence government attitudes up to and beyond the Ecclesiastical Titles Act three years later. The repercussions of the Mahon murder and the wave of violent denunciations it evoked were damaging enough. Other events in the momentous year of 1848 were to affect relations between Britain and Ireland. A revolutionary fever swept Europe and Ireland had not remained immune.

Eavan Boland writes in ‘The Pomegranate’ that ‘as a child in exile in | a city of fogs and strange consonants’ she first encountered Ovid’s Metamorphoses version of the myth of Ceres and Persephone as a form of consolation. This chapter argues that Boland’s poetry employs Ovidian poetics to represent Boland’s isolation and linguistic alienation, but also the hope of restoration.Derek Mahon’s ‘Ovid in Tomis’ may seem far from the poetics figured by Ovid in Boland’s work but this chapter demonstrates suggestive links between these Irish poets. At the end of the poem, as the poet weeps ‘for our exile’, the banishment of the centrality of poetry—especially a certain, Ovidian kind—from our culture comes to the fore. This chapter explores Mahon’s poem within its collection, Hunt by Night, and analyses its introduction of metamorphosis and exile as key poetic themes of the collection as a whole.

In his volume Visitations (1957), Louis MacNeice published the short poem ‘To Posterity’, in which a speaker in mid-career (MacNeice was fifty years old) tries to look beyond the horizon of his own contemporary reception. In fact, that career was closer to being over than either the poet or his readers could reasonably have supposed, for MacNeice was to publish only another two collections, Solstices (1961) and the posthumous The Burning Perch (1963), dying a week or so short of his fifty-sixth birthday. That MacNeice's poetry persists in British and, especially, Northern Irish literature as a living influence, does not answer completely the kinds of question which ‘To Posterity’ raises. This chapter examines MacNeice's perspectives on posterity in his poem ‘To Posterity’ and posterity in the poem ‘Heraclitus on Rivers’ by Derek Mahon.

Chapter 4 investigates the issue of “regulatory takings” through an investigation of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ foundational case, Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, Antonin Scalia’s Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council and the takings theory of Richard Epstein. Epstein’s theory, a key theory for the modern resurrection of takings jurisprudence, is outlined and utilized as an example of formalist and deductivist legal reasoning. Epstein emphasizes the importance of bright-line rules and critiques Holmes’ Mahon “matter of degree” style of reasoning as incoherent and theoretically weak. As opposed to this, the argument offered in the chapter critiques Epstein’s assumptions, showing them to be empirically and formally weak. Indeed, his argument is only as strong as every link in his argument, and many of the links are controversial and easy to dispute. In contrast, the basic reasoning shown in Holmes’ opinion exemplifies a stronger braided style of argument as Peirce advocated for.

This contribution reflects on the ways in which Irishness is enacted and conveyed in recent literary articulations of multiculturality. In this essay on contemporary Irish poets Derek Mahon, Sinéad Morrissey, Mary O'Donnell, and Seamus Heaney, the author focuses on the ways in which clichéd versions of identity are projected in relation to tourism in Ireland. Their poems on tourism can be studied comparatively with other more explicit literary discussions of immigration, as they also reveal interesting cross-cultural views and prejudices in the encounter between the Irish host and the foreign Other.

Dylan Thomas’s work is indebted in many ways to the two giants of early twentieth-century Irish literature, W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, as many critics have acknowledged. Yet Thomas’s work has also left legacies of its own within subsequent Irish writing. As Seamus Heaney commented in his 1993 Oxford Professor of Poetry lecture on Thomas, the Welsh poet was a key ‘part of the initiation’ of his postwar ‘11+ generation into literary culture’, not only through his books but also through his broadcasts and recordings. This chapter argues that within modern Irish poetry, and especially Northern Irish poetry, not least against the backdrop of the failures of the Northern Irish political status quo, Thomas’s work has helped to open up an alternate and less restrictive sense of the poet’s place in relation to the public realm. The impact of Thomas’s adolescent notebook mining and poetic responses to war, as well as the whimsy of his prose and radio work, are traced in this chapter, especially in relation to the work of Heaney and Derek Mahon.

Using a rich store of documents, this chapter tracks the creation of a series of calculating machines by the English nobleman Charles Stanhope. Stanhope’s materialized design practice emerged from late eighteenth-century ways of forming materials, of coordinating different practitioners, of representing forms and matter—all linked to political economies of innovation devised to encourage the dense intertwining of design and making. A close examination of the collective process of devising and creating these machines illuminates a distinctive late eighteenth-century moment in the coordination among practitioners and ways of designing and implementing. This chapter chronicles the abandonment of a vision of how philosophers and elite artisans might coordinate and collaborate better to make new things and improve older ones.

This chapter looks at the history of Gallery Press, one of the major players in the publishing industry in Ireland. It first considers Gallery Press’s early years since its establishment in 1970 by Peter Fallon, to its evolution from a broadsheet series into an alternative press for Irish poets. It then examines the 1960s Irish publishing context from which Gallery Press emerged, the evolution of its list, its critical reception across three decades of existence, and its contribution to the shaping of the Irish book in the late twentieth century. It also discusses Fallon’s socio-political agenda of ‘repatriating’ Irish artists such as Derek Mahon and Gallery Press’s publication of ‘interim texts’ or ‘pamphlets’. Finally, the chapter analyses Gallery Press’s book design that reflects its corporate identity.

In The Midnight Verdict (1993), Seamus Heaney combines extracts from two texts taking the poet into the underworld: Ovid’s description in Metamorphoses of Orpheus’ pursuit of Eurydice and subsequent death, and Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an Mheán-Oídhche (The Midnight Court). As a poet of conflict, Heaney was forced to produce his art amid hostile crossfire. Heaney’s fellow Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon draws heavily on ironized self-sacrifice as a response to conflict in his ‘Rage for Order’ (1979). When Thomas Kinsella attempts to tackle the Northern Irish Troubles by apportioning blame to guilty parties, in Butcher’s Dozen (1972), his response to Bloody Sunday, the results are uneven. In a series of readings centred on themes of gender and the self-representation of the poet, this chapter identifies what redress Heaney, Mahon, and Kinsella find for the ‘the atrocities against his sacred poet’ of which Bacchus complains in The Midnight Verdict.

The previous chapter addressed the state’s reaction capacity as specific supply problems occurred, such as a battle calling for mass movements of men and supplies. This chapter examines the development of Mahón as a supply base and the amphibious expedition and conquest of Minorca in 1781 to 1782. The state appears fairly fleet-footed in its approach, tweaking its provisioning methods as necessary and therewith its relations with entrepreneurs. The initial idea was to enforce cast-iron administrative control of these supplies by constant state intervention, the state thereby choosing to operate with a small clique of monopoly-protected entrepreneurs. This failed to meet the need. Shortages and shoddiness beset the supplies of the expeditionary army and navy, forcing the state to react. Ideology had to give way to greater flexibility; more entrepreneurs and more markets were brought in, which finally proved to be an efficient solution.

Arguing that Yeats's very strong interest in the visual arts almost of itself programmed such an interest in a succeeding generation of Irish poets, this chapter demonstrates the relationship – in Yeats himself, and then in John Montague, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney. The chapter argues that ekphrasis – the writing of poems on paintings – is a prominent element of modern Irish poetry and that it has various effects: personal, social, cultural and political. Individual poems are read to uncover such things as: an exploration of the gallery as post-religious cultural space; the rendering of pictorial stasis as literary narrative; attitudes to Irish political violence meditated and mediated out of art history; the ambivalences of poems written about self-representation by painters. The chapter centrally includes a long discussion of Derek Mahon's famous poem ‘Courtyards in Delft’ and Seamus Heaney's ‘A Basket of Chestnuts'.