History of World Literature by Milivoj Solar is a comprehensive chronological overview of the basic facts about the literary phenomena of global significance. Relying on the spiritual-historical method of writing literary his-tory, Goethe’s view of world literature as a set of aesthetically valuable liter-ary works that reflect the unity in the diversity of languages and cultures of the world, and the hermeneutic approach to understanding the relationship between the parts and the whole, Professor Solar wrote the history of literature as a story that offers an insight into the history of ideas and the continuity of the development of literary forms at the same time. Thanks to the abundance of clearly arranged relevant facts and short interpretive portraits of individual works, Solar’s History transcends the author’s intention to write a guide for students and becomes, for lucid readers, a starting point for further literary research.

Background: Human B cells respond to Toll-like receptor (TLR) 9 stimulation by cytokine production. Results: A rare, novel TLR9 allele fails to activate NF-κB in HEK293 cells. Heterozygous carrier B cells show defective IL-6 and IL-10 production. Conclusion: Heterozygosity for this TLR9 allele modifies CpG oligonucleotide responsiveness. Significance: This is the first analysis of human TLR9 variants in primary cells. Toll-like receptors (TLR) are employed by the innate immune system to detect microbial pathogens based on conserved microbial pathogen molecules. For example, TLR9 is a receptor for CpG-containing microbial DNA, and its activation results in the production of cytokines and type I interferons from human B cells and plasmacytoid dendritic cells, respectively. Both are required for mounting an efficient antibacterial or antiviral immune response. These effects are mimicked by synthetic CpG oligodeoxynucleotides (ODN). Although several hyporesponsive TLR9 variants have been reported, their functional relevance in human primary cells has not been addressed. Here we report a novel TLR9 allele, R892W, which is hyporesponsive to CpG ODN and acts as a dominant-negative in a cellular model system. The R892W variant is characterized by increased MyD88 binding and defective co-localization with CpG ODN. Whereas primary plasmacytoid dendritic cells isolated from a heterozygous R892W carrier responded normally to CpG by interferon-α production, carrier B cells showed impaired IL-6 and IL-10 production. This suggests that heterozygous carriage of a hyporesponsive TLR9 allele is not associated with complete loss of TLR9 function but that TLR9 signals elicited in different cell types are regulated differently in human primary cells.