It was the time when the future was an ism. Technology was making a modern epic out of human labour. It was the time when Fernando Pessoa made this metallic exclamation in the paroxysmal, paradoxical, relentless voice of Álvaro de Campos in the opening words of the verbal spark called Triumphal Ode:

By the painful light of the factory’s huge electric lamps I write in a fever. I write gnashing my teeth, rabid for the beauty of all this, For this beauty completely unknown to the ancients.

O wheels, O gears, eternal r-r-r-r-r-r-r!

The French writer and philosopher Michel Erman is a well-known biographer of Marcel Proust, to whom he has devoted several books. In this original essay, he talks about Proust’s relationship with money and what it represented in his work and life, enabling him to be ‘sometimes a friend and altruist, sometimes distant and domineering’. From the inheritance left to him by his parents to how he used it to assert himself in literature, from the mundane comedy to the means to facilitate amorous and sexual relationships, for Proust money was a tool for understanding the world and everyone’s place in it.

The relationship between the public sphere and privacy has been completely changed in our time, similarly to what happens in the relationship between the individual (that invention of the Enlightenment) and society.

These two indirectly conflicting articles speak different languages. They are an eloquent example of a disagreement (i.e. two languages that do not have a common measure) raised by the issue of 'race'. The first is by Vasco M. Barreto, a biologist and researcher at the Faculty of Medical Sciences at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. The second is by Pedro Schacht Pereira who has a PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian studies from Brown University in the United States and often writes about racism in the Portuguese press. Anthony Appiah, an important figure in cultural studies, once said, 'It is time for the biological concept of race to disappear without a trace.' But, as Barreto's article shows, the concept has not disappeared and its traces are still appearing in scientific debates. This debate is far from the 'scientific' racism prior to the Second World War, but still raises controversies, reservations and hesitations. On the contrary, from the point of view of post-colonial studies, it is just a discursive category. And it is precisely on the assumption of race as a discursive construction within a culture and a language that Pedro Schacht Pereira bases the issue of racism in a work by Eça de Queirós.

On 18 January 1892 the Rio de Janeiro newspaper Gazeta de Notícias included a Literary Supplement, which was launched with an introductory article by Eça de Queirós. The text bears the eye-catching title “Europe in a nutshell. Our supplement” and is primarily directed at readers who the author knew were inclined to accept the information coming from Europe with few reservations. What is not immediately clear is the purpose with which the Portuguese writer, who presumably wrote the text in Paris, decided to launch a literary supplement with a description of the social situation in Europe in his day.

In this ‘colonial science’ article, historian Diogo Ramada Curto addresses the disciplines such as geography, anthropology and ethnology that colonisers used to learn more about ‘indigenous races’ and their habits and customs in order to manage their colonial programmes more effectively.

A provocative statement by the famous Spanish food critic Rafael García Santos, often referred to as ‘the most feared critic’, is commented on here by Alexandra Prado Coelho, a journalist who specialises in the areas of food and gastronomy, and also by Gianfranco Marrone, professor and director of the International Center for Semiotic Sciences in Urbino and author of works on the semiology of taste and flavour.

José Miranda Justo, Germanist, translator and artist, comments here on a sentence taken from Letters to a Young Poet, by Rilke, which deals with the complex relationship between the work of art and criticism.

Familiar and ambiguous term, originally referring to the realm of things (from the Latin res, realis) or that which concerns them. In recent years, however, this general definition has acquired a new scope. Whereas the 20th century was the age of ideology, the last decades have brought with them a new fondness for reality. It has become a habit to appeal to common sense, to the power of things, to the weight of facts and circumstances. The great doctrines of the past, deemed too abstract, have given way to concrete principles. Thinkers and politicians have settled down, planted their feet on the ground, and learned to see the world as it really is.

Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas questions the meaning of an ancient and persistent opposition between the city and the countryside (two territories delimited by the walls of the ancient city). Modern society has seen a total urbanisation process unfold, in such a way that the countryside, having been erased, appears today as a reality to be rediscovered.