The numerous representations of hairy women in early modern historical, literary and iconographic texts in Spain reveal the popularity of the theme, as well as its significance for the understanding of how gender identity, sex assignment and sexuality were configured during that time. Most often, the representation of hirsutism involved a visual spectacle, which in turn required a narrative to interpret the transgression of cultural norms regarding gender and sex categories. Historically, women with excessive facial and body hair have been presented as monsters, anomalies and human prodigies. Visual imagery of bearded women during the early modern period was also frequently reproduced as examples of androgynes and hermaphrodites, who were believed to possess both male and female primary and secondary sex characteristics. In his 1601 treatise, Libro de fisionomía natural (Book of Nature Physiology), Jerónimo Cortés includes lasciviousness in his account of masculine women. Undoubtedly, one of the best examples of how hirsutism can evoke a multiple of responses is found in Miguel de Cervantes's best-selling seventeenth-century classic, Don Quixote.

This chapter addresses the first thirty years of Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy's life, and new evidence of both her familial context and her ‘conversion’ to feminism at the age of seventeen. Wolstenholme Elmy's ‘private’ mind is more difficult to assess than the reformer's zeal which prompted her public labours. Her experience of double orphanhood was unique among the leading members of the mid-Victorian feminist movement. Elizabeth's feminism was constructed through what she would later term as ‘the stress of storm and strife’. The bitter family quarrels surrounding Elizabeth's yearning for higher education occurred at precisely the same time as she acknowledged the ‘iniquitous English law of sex slavery’ that enforced the loss of personal identity of every wife in the land. For her, the challenge to ‘sex slavery’ was the taproot on which all other causes were grafted.

Barnes's love-triangle novels Talking It Over (1991) and Love, etc (2001) delineate three undistinguished interlinked lives, once more adhering to a fictional preoccupation with the ordinary over, for example, journalism's almost exclusive focus on the extraordinary. Stuart, Gillian and Oliver are the principal narrators and take turns to tell aspects of the story from their own point of view. In the first novel, Stuart and Gillian marry and the unfolding story follows the loquacious and erudite Oliver's growing obsession with Gillian, who eventually leaves Stuart for his best friend. The sequel throws this process into reverse as the practical and dogmatic Stuart tries to win Gillian back; it concludes with Gillian still married to Oliver, but pregnant by Stuart. An open ending underscores Barnes's own resistance to conclusions, certainties and categorizations that distort the particularities of life and art in the search for grand narratives.

1. Impact of transnational business activities on the lives of people living under occupation – While often remaining under the radar, private business activities have always played a significant role in the context of armed conflicts. It is no secret that belligerent parties heavily depend on corporations’ collaboration to carry out their military objectives, for example, by producing or supplying military equipment or raw materials. Vice versa, corporations have also often economically profited from the unsure, chaotic conditions that typify situations of armed conflict. This reality is no different for situations of (illegal) occupation. For instance, in its 2013 report, the independent international factfinding mission to investigate the implications of the Israeli settlements on the human rights of the Palestinian people demonstrated that “business enterprises have, directly and indirectly, enabled, facilitated and profited from the construction and growth of [illegal Israeli] settlements” in the OPT, which play a crucial role in Israel's strategy of prolonged occupation and annexation of the Palestinian territory.

One of the few unsurprising steps that Julian Barnes has taken in his literary career concerns the subject of his first novel. His first novel Metroland (1980) is a rich three-part analysis of emotional growing pains in the suburbs. It focuses on one suburban schoolboy's artistic temperament alongside his significant life-experiences, from adolescence through to young adulthood and parenthood. The story is told by the protagonist Christopher Lloyd, looking back on periods of his life, borrowing some of the texture and geography of Barnes's own youth.

New Labour's was an era of the language of idealism in foreign policy, beginning with Robin Cook's ‘ethical element’, and continuing through Tony Blair's ‘humanitarian wars’. It is at best questionable how far British subjectivity under New Labour was enhanced by war. Blair's wars—among them interventions in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq—had a mixed record in terms of creating the ‘Dunkirk Spirit’ effect that Chris Brown suggests is the essence of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's ‘cleansing feature of war’. Blair's approach to Africa, however, grounded in utopian and cosmopolitan ideas and highly idealised, in a different way offered a grand, heroic identity for Britain. This book provides an account of how New Labour's interest in Africa grew between 1997 and 2007. To understand Britain's approach to Africa, it considers two international relations (IR) debates. The first is the traditional utopianism/realism debate which held sway through most of the twentieth century. The second is contemporary IR theory on cosmopolitanism and communitarianism.

Doris Lessing's key novels of the period 1945–1960 examine the years leading up to World War II and the early to middle years of the war itself. The umbrella title of the five-volume novel sequence is Children of Violence, which is indicative not only of Lessing's preoccupation with the war, but also of her wider analysis of its connection with the violence of the colonial encounter. Her novels in this period mark the tentative emergence of more plural, fluid notions about race and gender and the interconnections between them. A narrative voice that might almost be characterised as nostalgic for those aspects of the war which created an impulse for decolonisation is important in the novels of this period. The critical or creative nostalgia of the fiction can be instructively compared with the narrative perspective in Lessing's 1957 essay, Going Home, which details her first return to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) after an absence of eight years. Going Home situates ‘home’ as a wandering site of nostalgia, exile and alienation.

This chapter covers the majority of the work experiences of Shetland women. An understanding of women's work patterns and experiences is central to any analysis of women's lives in Shetland and the gender relations contingent upon this. Women's words from Shetland speak to us of economic autonomy in a culture where the discourses of separate spheres and of domesticity had little purchase. The dominant and idealised image of the Shetland woman has become synonymous with the female farmer and crofter. Knitting was a life-line for Shetland households. The female crofter and knitter have an iconic and symbolic status in Shetland, but the female herring gutter is a more ambiguous character. The espousal of a system of gender equality within the fishing-crofting household is contrasted with what is sometimes portrayed as a Scottish and even British subordination of women in the home and the workplace.