The lanthanides and actinides (the f elements) are rarely studied in detail by chemistry undergraduates. More often they appear as an afterthought in bonding, spectroscopy, magnetism, coordination chemistry, and organometallics courses. This is largely because of a lack of an accessible text treating the chemistry of these elements in one cover. Moreover, the placement of lanthanides and actinides in the closing pages of standard inorganic chemistry text books serves to marginalise these elements further. The f elements has therefore been written to fill a gap in the undergraduate chemistry...

There is a great deal of current philosophical and scientific interest in emotional feelings. However, many of the feelings that people struggle to express in their everyday lives do not appear on standard lists of emotions. For example, there are feelings of unreality, heightened existence, surreality, familiarity, unfamiliarity, estrangement, strangeness, isolation, emptiness, belonging, being at home in the world, being at one with things, significance, insignificance, and the list goes on. Such feelings might be referred to as 'existential' because they comprise a changeable sense of...