This chapter takes a look at Proust's anachronisms in Michelangelo and Shakespeare's sonnets. It first studies Michelangelo's sonnets, which follow Proust's fourth instance of anachronism. It then looks at Shakespeare's preoccupation with time, which deals with a sense of crisis. It also looks at one of Shakespeare's characters, Falstaff, a figure who will not be contained.

This chapter explores Alan Clarke's work for the ‘unmistakable individuality and authenticity’, which, as Mark Shivas (1990) argued, made him ‘a real auteur in a way that very few British directors are’. It combines a broadly chronological study of Clarke's dominant themes and approaches with an awareness of various contexts: the institutional contexts in which he worked, critical debates on television form and the methodological problems that arise when attributing authorship to a television director. Clarke gave a voice to those on the margins of society, whether empathising with victims of neglect and poverty in Horace (1972), Diane (1975) and Road (1987), or unflinchingly exploring the racism of Tim Roth's neo-Nazi Trevor in Made in Britain and the hooliganism of Gary Oldman's Bex in The Firm (1989). He portrays characters resisting the ‘discourses’ of the state, whilst avoiding imposing a discourse upon them by refusing narrative embellishment or inappropriate stylistics.

This chapter introduces the concept of anachronism, which means considering what is out of time and what resists chronology. It first takes a look at deliberate anachronism, a technique that can be found in Don Quixote, and then examines anachronism within the context of historical writing. The next section studies ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, where it explains that to work on any text of the past is anachronistic. The concepts of aphorism and contretemps are also discussed.

This chapter provides an account of the films of Anthony Asquith, and draws attention to the varied body of work with which he is associated. His works have been positioned in relation to the various directions taken by the British film during the period of his career, and he is regarded as one of the most underrated film directors in British film history. Although not ignored by scholars and critics, Asquith's work has certainly not had anything like the attention enjoyed by his most distinguished contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock, and neither has it had the consideration devoted to figures such as Michael Powell and David Lean. The selection represents a diverse career in which art cinema, middlebrow culture, and popular art are reflected, although the films chosen are not intended to indicate any particular ranking in Asquith's career as a whole.

This chapter explores autobiographical elements in Jack Rosenthal plays such as P'tang, Yang, Kipperbang, Bye, Bye Baby, Eskimo Day and Cold Enough for Snow. Rosenthal writes in a distinctive way about each play in the trilogy in his autobiography, By Jack Rosenthal, to suggest a close but not exact relation between fact and fiction. Rather than describing the context of writing the plays, as he usually does, Rosenthal actually substitutes extracts from the P'tang, Yang, Kipperbang and Bye, Bye, Baby for autobiography. In each case, Rosenthal emphasises the links between life and art: he introduces the protagonist of The Evacuees as Danny (i.e. Jack), of P'tang, Yang, Kipperbang as Alan Duckworth (i.e. me) and of Bye, Bye, Baby as Leo (Jack). This is the case even though the autobiographical and dramatic material does not always match up. The presence of a self-consciously styled protagonist who is an equivalent for Rosenthal makes certain films, such as P'tang Yang Kipperbang and Bye, Bye, Baby, autobiographically based in a more conventional way.

This chapter seeks to navigate the issue of 'power' by approaching it in terms which the Shetland woman understood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and which survive in women's contemporary understanding of their own heritage. Access to political and economic power in Shetland was dominated by men in their public roles as merchants, landlords and church elders, crofting tenants and fishermen. Shetland women engaged in a series of economic and cultural relationships which gave them a degree of power which was different from the kind of power possessed by men. Using models borrowed from feminist social anthropology it has been possible to show that the domestic space is just as much a centre of power as the public space. That power can be expressed and experienced through skill and knowledge and control of cultural resources as much as through property ownership and political influence.

Geoffrey Hill's poems have often presented a series of scenes, livid tableaux, ‘spectacles’: the Jews in Europe, the Battle of Towton, the endurances of some poets, Boethius in his cell, the nailer's darg, real and fancied martyrdoms like those of his Sebastians. Hill feels that we are bound by that perpetual paradox of love renewing ‘the battle it was born to lose’. But it is a battle that must be waged for the alternative is death. This is what Harold Bloom calls Hill's ‘desperate humanism’. In Tenebrae, it appears with least equivocation in the poem ‘Christmas Trees’ in praise of the German pastor and opponent of Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeff.

This chapter explores an extended version of democracy, focusing on governance. It explains that this vision of democracy built on both the strengths and weaknesses of elections to create something more comprehensive that would better meet the challenges of an increasing portfolio of demands. This chapter analyses the state of democracy and the trajectory of democratisation in the 1990s and identifies a range of drivers which contributed to the development of this new, governance-focussed democracy agenda. It shows that as democracy was no longer confined to the constraints of a minimal definition, it assumed a greater degree of substance, thereby moving further to the right of the democratic continuum.

The period of Herbert Henry Asquith's administration saw the continuance of a prewar laissez-faire attitude towards agriculture, reflecting the political temperament of government, optimism that the war would be of short duration and uncertainty as to how formal direction might be imposed upon an extremely individualistic industry. The official attitude towards dilution of the agricultural workforce was influenced by the Army's short-term needs and by fluctuating domestic circumstances. Non-military substitution presented distinct problems for agriculture. Northamptonshire's agricultural Advisory Committee summoned several ostensibly qualifying workers and told them that they would be exempt from military service for the present. Fundamental political and military developments brought mixed prospects for agriculture. The ‘plough policy’ and associated initiatives increased the tilled acreage in England by some 20 per cent in the two years to 1918. Agriculture can be regarded as one of the unequivocal success stories of the Home Front.

This chapter discusses paternity as the theme in the film Le Garçu, which was the last film of Maurice Pialat. Le Garçu is not an inappropriate conclusion to Pialat's lifework in film. It brings his career full circle, reconnecting with the autobiographical and documentary inspiration of his first films and focusing more directly on what had always been the central concern of his cinema: the family. Le Garçu represents an important shift in the paradigm of becoming a father, as the character Gérard is both a son and a father. This film can be said to be Pialat's cinematic universe. The various iterations of the father–son relationship unify the composition, becoming the thematic equivalent of a pictorial motif. The story of le garçu and his own father then becomes crucial to Pialat's portrayal of paternity.

This chapter studies the term ‘earth’ and its attendant associations. It determines that there is a myriad of entries for this short word, which indicates that it offers many opportunities for the kind of allusive and elusive poetry one can find in lyrics. This chapter is concerned mostly with the readings of medieval English lyrics and their use of the term ‘earth’.

There are many themes in The Triumph of Love. This chapter's reading of the poem is dominated by Hill's effort to grapple with, to honour and in some sense to do justice by, all these unlived and unliveable lives—‘the brute mass and detail of the world’. There is no ‘wondrous story’ readily available in The Triumph of Love. Indeed the word ‘love’ rarely appears, and then in a heavily defended context as though its utterance is hard-won. It might not seem surprising that The Triumph of Love includes a more evidently autobiographical mode than any of his previous work, save perhaps for Mercian Hymns. This appears primarily in childhood recollection, coinciding with the war and immediately postwar years.

This chapter explores the extent of Scottish and Irish involvement in the pastoral geographies that were the mainstay of the Australian economy until the gold rushes of the 1850s and which remained of considerable importance thereafter. It compares the legislative framework that provided the basis for this pastoral exploitation with contemporary Scottish and Irish land legislation. The triumph of pastoralism in south-east Australia appeared complete by the 1840s. The major Irish Land Acts of 1870, 1881, 1885 and 1903, undermined the economic basis of the landlord class. The Banner maintained its qualified support for Charles Gavin Duffy's Land Act in the face of mounting press criticism of the Act's failure to prevent squatters from consolidating their existing runs in the areas opened for selection, or speculators from amassing lands there. In Ireland and Scotland, similar legislation invoked differing claims to ethnic authenticity and political legitimacy.