This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book highlights the perceived and actual importance of the metropole to colonial governance before 1845, and examines changes in the influence of metropolitan and colonial impulses and concerns. It draws on evidence from across the British Empire, three sites, Britain, the Cape Colony and New South Wales, are of particular importance. The book examines the operations of colonial rule in the settler colonies before self-government, an examination which entails the close consideration of both metropolitan and colonial spheres, and a focus on the imperial networks which connected them. It focuses on governors, considering the particularly awkward place they occupied as mediators between the metropolitan government and their colonial subjects. The book also examines the much larger pool of colonial officials who struggled to gain security and execute their duties far from home.

This chapter explores Maurice Pialat's work on the theme of family. In the broadest sense, all of Pialat's films are about family, whether this involves the interactions of parents and children or the couple whose problematic relationship will preclude their becoming a family and having a child or the solitary figure who will never find a place in a family, even the larger family of a community of faith and whose isolation will be a source of much suffering. A whole constellation of issues emerges from Pialat's preoccupation with the family: issues of community and national identity, generational conflict and its historical counterpart: tradition versus change, work and money, sexuality and sexual politics, and paternity.

Doris Lessing's late twentieth-century fiction has often provoked and discomfited. Some readers of The Fifth Child (1988), its sequel Ben, in the World (2000) and Lessing's 1999 novel Mara and Dann were disturbed by her appropriation of racially marked stereotypes of the animal, the primitive and the atavistic. Such imagery has controversial implications in relation to ideas about ‘race’ and nation. Moreover, Lessing deploys what might be termed the ‘minor’ genres of urban gothic, picaresque and disaster narrative in her late twentieth-century work in unfamiliar and disturbing ways. In analysing Lessing's late twentieth-century ‘fabular’ fictions in relation to ideas about genre and ‘race’, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's discussion of ‘minor’ literature proves instructive. Deleuze and Guattari define minor literature as exhibiting three main characteristics: ‘the deterritorialisation of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation’. Thus, minor literature has a partial relation to nationality both linguistically and generically. Lessing's resistance to territoriality is the overriding concern of her 1987 collection of four short essays, Prisons we Choose to Live Inside.

Throughout their decades in exile, Chagossian groups have focused on their campaigns for compensation and the right to return to Chagos, while other interest groups have worked against the resettlement of the Chagos Archipelago. According to the terms of the 1966 Exchange of Notes, the UK Government made Diego Garcia available for US defence purposes for an initial period of fifty years, renewable for a further twenty years. Given the military significance of the US base on Diego Garcia, it seems likely that both governments will seek to renew the lease in 2016. Meanwhile, the UK Government has allocated considerable resources towards preventing Chagossians from returning to Chagos, directly through immigration legislation relating to the British Indian Ocean Territory, and indirectly through the creation of a Marine Protected Area in Chagos.

Through an assessment of the role of kinship, neighbourhood and class in women’s experiences, and making use of the interviews specially conducted for the book, this chapter examines national debates about the place of mother in the family and wider community in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. It considers the concepts of motherhood and family which were in vogue in the post-war decades as revealed in contemporary texts, such as social surveys and community studies, and government reports. The chapter examines the rise and fall of the nuclear family; the changing relative importance of family and friends; how women formed their social networks; and to whom they turned for advice and support. The roles of locality, ethnicity and religion in influencing attitudes and experience are also considered.

This chapter discusses satire of Jack Rosenthal's Ready When You Are, Mr McGill in 1976 and 2005. Rosenthal wrote two versions of his television play Ready When You Are, Mr McGill, which were broadcast respectively by Granada on 11 January 1976, and by ITV Sky on 26 December 2005, after Rosenthal's death. The earlier play was one of a seven-part Granada anthology called Red Letter Day, originated by Rosenthal himself, in which the common theme was an outstanding occasion in someone's life. The first episode, Ready When You Are, Mr McGill, gained such accolades as the television critic Richard Last's description of it as a clear contender for the funniest television play of 1976. The 1976 version was a satirical metafiction, exposing the workings of television drama. By contrast, the 2005 version has extra layers of self-consciousness, and the satire targets much more specific elements of television in the new millennium, particularly the control exerted over broadcasting by producers and television networks.

This chapter notes that the IFSL is obviously closely associated with neoliberal ideology. It is a membership organisation for financial service providers—the focus here is on its leadership and secretariat. IFSL is strongly committed to trade liberalisation and valorises an open global economy. The second section of this chapter looks at IFSL's understanding of development, trade rules and multilateralism. The third section looks directly at the concept of globalisation and asks what can be inferred from IFSL's use of the term in relation to various issues and policies, focusing in particular on spatial connotations. The discussion considers the implications of the financial crisis upon IFSL's discourse throughout.

Environmental activists have utilised diverse tactics in the attempt to assert their influence upon the decision-making process and society. This chapter begins with an examination of the use online tactics for environmental activism and the reticence to engage in such use. It considers the use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) as a substitute for the mainstream media on which people have relied, and hence for the production of digital alternative media (DAM). Concurrent to the use of any tactics, environmentalists usually consider the ways in which they will publicise their actions prior to and after the event. CMC has been used to extend existing tactics into the realm of cyberspace and in developing new forms of action. The chapter concludes by exploring whether these changes in online tactics and alternative media production enable environmental activists to be more effective in achieving their aims and targeting their adversaries.

This chapter looks into the problems faced by Anthony Asquith during the 1930s. He joined Gainsborough Pictures, merged with the Gaumont-British, which, during the decade recruited an impressive array of stars, directors and technicians. However, things did not quite work out for the director, and Asquith effectively got lost in the array. He spent around two years at Gaumont-British and directed just one film: The Lucky Number (1933). Asquith's other work during this period was confined to working for or with other directors, and he failed to make a mark in the smaller London Films, run by the flamboyant Hungarian-born Korda, and also with Max Schach. The one clear feature of his professional life at this time was his appointment as President of the ACT, the film technicians' union. Towards the end of the decade, Pygmalion (1938) and French Without Tears (1939) reestablished Asquith as a leading film maker and were effective in defining the ‘middlebrow’ Asquith, the accomplished adapter of mainstream theatre for the screen, perhaps the dominant strand in his eventual directorial image.