Frenetic music, ‘rare’ records, and the timeless euphoria of sweaty dance floors and northern soul events have brought together young women and men from across the UK for over five decades. The 1970s golden era of the scene is remembered by ageing attendees as a time of unity through music and the rejection of all distractions: nights dedicated to the music. For those who recount this time, sexuality had no place on the dance floor, sexual orientation was irrelevant to a musical community which welcomed all new devotees, evoking a utopian epoch of tolerance and equality. This, too, is a story replicated in academic attempts to document and analyse the historic northern soul scene, a valuable ‘inside’ of meaningful action placed in stark opposition to the contemporaneous mainstream’“out’. Extending previous work , this chapter considers this positioning of the British northern soul scene as part of the wider processes of historicising, an authenticating and mythologising narrative which works to facilitate the power dynamics of an ongoing and multigenerational scene. It explores how men and women remember their gendered and sexualised subjectivities on the 1970s northern soul scene, and reflects upon what and who is lost through the silencing of sexual experience

This chapter asks what historians can do in the global crises of the Anthropocene and the sixth extinction. It rethinks the presentism of our human–animal relationships and argues that at least one way forward is to take the multispecies entanglements of the past seriously. Thus it adopts the lens of the relationship between baboons and humans. In examining how this relationship changed over millennia, it tries to reconstruct a ‘more-than-human history’ as ‘useable past’, using the Armitage and Guldi approach. Environmental histories of southern Africa have neglected the longue durée and local/vernacular ecological knowledge, so this chapter tries to suggest possible new approaches drawing on cognate disciplines like ethnoprimatology, palaeontology, palaeoecology, archaeology and the study of rock art, hitherto largely overlooked by historians. In using these new sources it does two things: it offers a sample card of possibilities for other environmental histories of human–animal relations, especially over long time periods, and it argues that history can be useful in conservation efforts in the Anthropocene. In presenting a synthesis of human sociocultural history and baboon ethology/ecology, it builds a conceptual bridge between conservation biologists and environmental historians, crossing disciplinary boundaries. It argues that this kind of analysis of the past should be included in understanding human–wildlife conflict. The chapter makes the case that historians can be particularly useful by drawing on various disciplines and synthesising them critically to produce a narrative that explains change over time, while being deeply embedded in the specificities of the idiographic context.

This chapter focuses on the aftermath of the Westminster General Election of 8 June 2017, the hung parliament that resulted and the ‘confidence-and-supply’ deal negotiated between the Conservative Party government and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) on 26 June 2017. The General Election was called by the new Prime Minister Theresa May to help mandate her leadership and provide the parliamentary arithmetic to help steer Brexit through the political and legislative process. It was also called because the overwhelming message from the opinion polls was that the Conservative Party would win a landslide victory against the embattled leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. The result left Theresa May clinging to office with a minority government. The subsequent confidence-and-supply agreement with the DUP kept her in power but changed the dynamics of Brexit significantly, both in terms of how the negotiations proceeded within GB, but also in terms of Northern Ireland politics. The chapter examines how the General Election and the Conservative Party deal with the DUP had a corrosive impact on political relationships in Northern Ireland and on the appetite of the main parties to restore devolved institutions to Northern Ireland that could operate effectively.

Chapter 3 offers a detailed study of the plays of Ben Jonson, who shows an interest in sound in the abstract as well as in the form of practical stage effects. His use of sound is shown to be contradictory, torn between classical precedent and popular demand, between the power of silence and the difficulty of controlling noise on the early modern stage. His paratextual material dwells on the listening audience; his poetry expresses an awareness of Aristotle’s and Horace’s sonic theories. Aware of his conscious use of sonic theory in the abstract, Chapter 3 nevertheless focuses on Jonson’s interest in the bodily production of sound. It follows work on the embodied voice as a sonic effect by both Bruce Smith and Gina Bloom, who separately consider the implications of ‘sounding through’, one possible etymology of the term ‘persona’ from the Latin per-sonare. For Smith, a human being is ‘through-sounding’, defined by the act of hearing the vibrations of external sounds; for Bloom, the term is more firmly associated with the masks of Latin and Greek drama that ‘helped amplify the actor’s voice via a resonating chamber in its forehead’. For Jonson, the body of an actor (the dramatic persona) and the body of an instrument are interchangeable means through which he can produce sound.

The book begins with discussion of two written pleas from the small town of Saint-Gaudens [Haute-Garonne]: one from the town’s active citizens and the other from its General Council. Composed in March of 1790, the documents defended local religious institutions threatened by impending legislation in the National Assembly. The two pleas do well to capture the book’s comprehensive argument, which is that the French Revolution’s religious politics from 1789 to 1793 frayed the social fabric of small towns to such an extent that it unravelled their democratic character. To explain why a town like Saint-Gaudens was so concerned about its small and fragile religious institutions, the Introduction points out the many ways in which these establishments empowered small towns and thus constituted their common good. Emphasis is given to how these institutions produced social capital, a concept central to the scholarly work of Robert Putnam. The democratic nature of the social capital produced by religious institutions was among the reasons that small towns were poised to play a pivotal revolutionary role; they were the quintessential nexus between an urban elite that led the Revolution and the majority of citizens living in rural areas who suddenly became sovereign in principle. A brief explanation of the historiography of the Revolution’s religious politics in small towns is given, followed by an indication of how the book’s evidence may revise current scholarly understanding of the subject. The introduction ends with a brief roadmap for the book’s six chapters and conclusion.

This chapter argues that texts deploy particular strategies that function to complicate the processes of borrowing. The early modern genealogies of texts problematised issues of what we now regard as ‘plagiarism’, and this chapter seeks to expose the specifically literary investments that critics have made in their attempts to trace specific textual links between the plays and antecedent literary texts.

Chapter 5 focuses on the key issue of the future of the Irish border and why this proved to be such a difficult issue for the UK in its Brexit negotiations with the EU. It demonstrates how Brexit complicates the issue of political self-determination in Ireland and raises the issue of how the Common Travel Area (CTA) between the UK and Ireland will be maintained outside of the customs union. This chapter explores how the border issue was defined during the Brexit negotiations, how it divided the main political parties and their wider electorates, and the degree to which this presented new political incentives to the main political parties – specifically Sinn Fein and the DUP. The rise of the border as a political issue after the Brexit referendum forced people to confront what the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) had managed to de-escalate. In blunt terms: which side of the binary line did people live on – the British part of Ireland or the Irish part of Ireland? In this sense Brexit re-weaponised the partition of Ireland and the ‘constitutional question’ which had been skilfully parked by the terms of the GFA since 1998.

As a founding NATO member, and acutely aware of its vulnerability to invasion, Norway has remained highly supportive of a close security relationship with the US bilaterally and through the NATO alliance. At the same time, Norway has sought to reassure Russia that it would not base NATO forces on its territory, including US nuclear weapons. This meant that Norway abstained from most aspects of nuclear weapons cooperation in the NATO alliance. While Washington was prepared to accommodate Norway’s policy preferences regarding the non-stationing of NATO forces, Oslo approved the construction of facilities on Norwegian territory capable of supporting US and NATO nuclear operations against Russia.

South Africa is the site of a professionalised market for human oocytes in the context of assisted reproductive technology and, as such, is part of the rapidly growing transnational fertility industry. This chapter explores the biopolitical dimension of the South African market for ‘donor eggs’ by putting it into the larger frame of ‘technologically assisted’, global politics of reproduction. Based on an analysis of a rich corpus of ethnographic data, the chapter argues that Foucauldian biopolitics are reshaped as they operate on different levels within this specific economy of egg donation – linking genetics, biocitizenship, and geopolitics. In doing so, the chapter highlights new forms of eugenics that are emerging in the global business around fertility-related services, eugenics that come in the positive frame of choice. It stresses the importance of paying attention to both continuities and changes regarding eugenics as the reproduction of existing hierarchies – even more so against the background of a postcolonial history of racialised population control and reproductive injustices.

The traditional way of conceiving source study is to think of it as an elephants’ graveyard. This conclusion proposes that in what was considered a ‘graveyard’ there is a very live ‘elephant’ that enacts dynamically with what it encounters. The textual resources that Shakespeare deploys are not inert or skeletal; they are dynamic, and that dynamism is repeated in the ways in which subsequent generations of writers have appropriated, deployed, plagiarised Shakespearean texts and made of them literary artefacts.

The conclusion draws together several correspondences and divergences between The Palyce of Honour and The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo. Textual hybridisation and transfiguration are noted as key themes; concepts of authenticity, veracity, and eloquence in poetic expression are also discussed in their various contexts in the two texts. This brief collation is presented as locus for further applications of the narrative grotesque in medieval texts. The literary complaint and animal allegories, specifically avian, are both touched on as possible venues for this strategy to be used.

This chapter focuses on the practical problems associated with clinical negligence and the processes involved in bringing a claim. Amid rising claims and a spectre of a malpractice crisis, we consider the challenges faced by patients bringing a claim and ask whether lawsuits against doctors are damaging medicine.