Today we’re going to talk about the Bank of Hell, and also Dutch traffic lights. For the FT can now announce an intellectual breakthrough. Many publications offer readers a digest of the week’s news. This column offers a round-up of recent articles in the scholarly periodicals, and the chance to amaze your friends with your erudition.

For instance, among the interesting items you may have missed, Recusant Studies (A Journal of Research in Reformation and Post-Reformation Catholic History in the British Isles) covered the quatercentenary (in 2006) of the death from torture in the Tower of London of St Nicholas Owen, “master-builder of priest-holes”.

Owen went round the houses of secretly Catholic nobles undertaking routine renovations; then, at night, when the servants and other possible spies were asleep, he would construct hidden rooms in which priests still loyal to Rome could evade capture. Betrayed, he remained silent under torture. “Otherwise,” says the author, Michael Hodgetts, “Catholic England would have been entirely destroyed.”

Less heroic Britons populate “Face Him Like a Briton: Tiger Hunting, Imperialism and British Masculinity in Colonial India 1800-1875” in Victorian Studies. “Tiger-hunting represented imperial domination not just of India’s politics but also of its natural environment,” says author Joseph Sramek. He added that even then the practice had critics but the imperialists justified the hunt by insulting the animal as stealthy and skulking. In an 1866 memoir, army captain JT Newall said the animal was “as deceitful as a woman” in its hunting.

In The American Historical Review, James Grehan of Portland State University considers “Smoking and Modern Sociability: The Great Tobacco Debate in the Ottoman Middle East”. He tells how north African pilgrims, en route to Mecca in 1699, went berserk in a Cairo market and beat up smokers for insulting Islam. Smoking remained controversial until “a consensus of tolerance” emerged in the 18th century.

A consensus of what? Just try lighting up in a seminar room at Portland State.

The Economic Journal intriguingly offers “What Have You Done For Me Lately?” Yianis Sarafidis of Yale asks: How should a rational agent (politician/employee/advertiser) release information in order to manipulate memory imperfections in a forgetful assessor (voter/boss/purchaser)?

After some calculations of ferocious complexity, he advises: “Bunch together your successes. Spread apart your failures.” Thus the National Rifle Association is in trouble if gunmen stage too many murderous rampages all at once. And, as he doesn’t add, I need to write a string of brilliant columns before demanding a pay rise.

The Bank of Hell is not one that says “Your call is important to us”. It operates in Vietnam, where the ritual belief is that all births are based on a bank loan from the nether world. Life then proceeds in accordance to the loan, according to Heonik Kwon in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. “The more modest someone’s life situations are and parsimonious he is with worldly pleasures then, theoretically, the longer he can enjoy his loan.”

The Vietnamese also go in for money-burning. At new and full moons, they offer notes as a sacrifice to the gods. In Kwon’s article “The Dollarisation of Vietnamese Ghost Money”, he explains that US notes are increasingly offered in this ritual. The “do la” is increasingly important to the Vietnamese elite, who may be anxious to maintain the social hierarchy in heaven. Worldly cynics might think it has something to do with the dollar’s current value.

In Ceramic Review, Claudia Clare finds a new angle on transatlantic tensions. “There is a restraint detectable in European ceramics that is not found in North American ceramics. Europeans seem to fear American kitsch, while Americans are suspicious of European restraint.” Analyse and discuss.

The Journal of Transport History has “City Lights: Regulated Streets and the Evolution of Traffic Lights in the Netherlands 1920-1940”. The first experimental lights comprised a four-lamp system spelling out the word STOP. Different cities had different systems until today’s familiar colours emerged. The League of Nations tried to standardise these globally but characteristically failed – and different countries still use amber differently.

The Philosophical Quarterly turns to what appears to be an ancient conundrum: “Mary knows all there is to know about physics, chemistry and neurophysiology. But she has never experienced colour. So does she learn something genuinely new when she experiences colour for the first time?” If so, says Barbara Montero, the theory of physicalism, also known as materialism, (which holds that everything is physical) is false.

She concludes: “It is at least possible that there are genuinely new physical facts about consciousness which Mary cannot know in an achromatic environment even if she has perfect powers of deduction.”

I am no philosopher, but I wouldn’t want to meet Mary at the traffic lights.

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