Adventure stories, produced and consumed in vast quantities in 18th, 19th and 20th-century Europe, narrate encounters between Europeans and the non-European world. They map both European and non-European peoples and places. Robinson Crusoe maps a white, male, Christian, middle-class adventurer - a vision for Britain - and it maps a petit-bourgeois, settled island with a white master and a black slave - a vision for British colonialism. Exotic, malleable, uncomplicated settings serve to neutralise and normalise constructs, that seem implausible in more immediately familiar, textured settings....

Adventure stories, produced and consumed in vast quantities in 18th, 19th and 20th-century Europe, narrate encounters between Europeans and the non-European world. They map both European and non-European peoples and places. Robinson Crusoe maps a white, male, Christian, middle-class adventurer - a vision for Britain - and it maps a petit-bourgeois, settled island with a white master and a black slave - a vision for British colonialism. Exotic, malleable, uncomplicated settings serve to neutralise and normalise constructs, that seem implausible in more immediately familiar, textured settings....

Fifteen years have passed since I was working at a dam site super vising grouting work. That was not the first time that I had to car ry out engineering geological investigations for several similar projects, which always included testing programmes to find out the permeability of the rock, and often I was in charge of grouting work. It thus attracted my attention when this particular grouting programme did not run as intended: most of the grout holes took only very little grout It could not be the aim of the invested work simply to drill holes and fill them again without bringing about any...