This volume is published in honour of Professor Takamitsu Muraoka on the occasion of his retirement from the Chair of Hebrew, Israelite Antiquities and Ugaritic at Leiden University, a date which coincides with the celebration of his sixty-fifth birthday. The laureate is well known for his expertise in the languages of the Bible and cognate studies and this volume includes contributions covering as far as possible the wide field of his interests. Some of his friends and colleagues from all parts of the world are presenting him with this valuable collection of forty-two articles. They include studies on the Greek of the Septuagint; Hebrew (Biblical and Qumran); Aramaic (Old, Offical and Qumran; Syriac and Neo-Aramaic); Canaanite (Amarna, Ugaritic and Phoenician-Punic); Medieval Jewish exegesis and Karaite studies. M.F.J. Baasten and W.Th. van Peursen, two former students of Muraoka at Leiden, have edited the volume.

Shortlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award in Poetry and the 2017 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry Before his tragic death, Szilárd Borbély had gained a name as one of Europe's most searching new poets. Berlin-Hamlet—one of his major works—evokes a stroll through the phantasmagoric shopping arcades described in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, but instead of the delirious image fragments of nineteenth-century European culture, we pass by disembodied scraps of written text, remnants as ghostly as their authors: primarily Franz Kafka but also Benjamin himself or the Hungarian poets Attila József or Erno Szép. Paraphrases and reworked quotations, drawing upon the vanished prewar legacy, particularly its German Jewish aspects, appear in sharp juxtaposition with images of post-1989 Berlin frantically rebuilding itself in the wake of German reunification.

Do you long to be seductive? Have a desire to be seduced? Then “let lips do what hands do” and put into practice the most enticing baubles of seduction ever written. Shakespeare and the Art of Verbal Seduction contains the Bard’s best seducing lines to cajole, charm, and even proposition the object of your desire. Shakespeare is the master of persuasion. He induces the hardest of hearts to give up mind, body, and soul with a brilliant flash of words. Here they’re collected for you, his little miracles of language, arranged in ten strategies for every stage of a love affair, from first encounter to the full throes of passion. Never again let your desire flounder in bad come-ons. Learn the art of seduction from the greatest seducer of all time, and get what you want.