Matthew Arnold's famous series of essays, which were first published in book form under the title Culture and Anarchy in 1869, debate important questions about the nature of culture and society. Arnold seeks to find out what culture really is, what good it can do, and if it is really necessary. He contrasts culture, which he calls the study of perfection, with anarchy, the mood of unrest and uncertainty that pervaded mid-Victorian England.

Natural languages all contain constructions the interpretation of which depends upon the situation in which they are used. In Language and Context, Jason Stanley presents a series of essays which develop a theory of how the situation in which we speak interacts with the words we use to help produce what we say. The reason we can so smoothly operate with sentences that can be used to express very different items of information, Stanley argues, is that there are linguistically mandated constraints on the effects of the situation on what we say.

Powerful Pedagogy: Self-Study of a Teacher Educator’s Practice is the outcome of the author’s systematically questioning her assumptions about teaching and, in various ways, gives voice to the many individuals who have had an impact on the development of the author’s pedagogy as a mathematics teacher educator. Using self-study as both a lens and a methodology to research her practice over the past three years, the author examines the impact of reflection and reflective practice in pre-service teacher education; voice, silence and that which remains “unsaid”; the ways in which teacher identities emerge and develop, and the role of authority and power in learning about teaching.

How do we read a novel?—this is the question which lies behind a new collection of essays on the Victorian novel written by members of the English Board of Studies at the University of Kent. It is a question which leads into a consideration of what happens to our critical judgements in the process of reading, as we turn the pages over and begin to build the detail into form. The Victorian novel provides a particularly rich source for this kind of interest. We are made to think about what it is like to read a long novel, a novel which is illustrated, a novel published in a serial form.