The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith is undoubtedly the strangest of Peter Carey's novels. It marks a return to the overt alternative world-building found in the early stories with their fantastic and fable-like scenarios, and implicit in works like Oscar and Lucinda. On the final page of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Tristan reveals, like the narrator's view of Lucinda at the end of Oscar and Lucinda, that 'although I did not know it, my unusual life was really just beginning'. As if to echo that, Carey has published yet another innovation in his fictional practice, this time into children's literature. The Big Bazoohley takes the idea of adventurous risk-taking as its main idea. The Big Bazoohley of the title refers to the notion of life's big gamble, the main chance, whose existence nine-year-old Sam has absorbed from his gambler father and which Sam succeeds in pulling off.

This third case study looks at the London club of Arsenal, a club once hailed as the all-British Arsenal. It shows two forms of xenophobia in the English press: rationalised xenophobia and casual xenophobia which reflect on the parochiality, insularity and ferocity of the British press (broadsheets and tabloids). It shows that the renovation of emblems including the change of stadium is easier in a club with a long history than at Paris Saint-Germain. It shows that the club has a long history of welcoming and for clubs of supporting foreigners (Irishmen), who can display British qualities, and that a foreign style is not antonymous with support.

In some ways, this book marks just a beginning. The British Asian authors it focuses on are all still writing, seven of them are under the age of fifty. Their presence has realised Salman Rushdie's ‘newness’: a reinvigoration of British fiction from a perspective that can be compared to neither the postcolonial writing of their parents' generation nor an earlier British literature written from a predominantly white, predominantly Christian, perspective. Such ‘newness’ takes many divergent forms, and cannot be reduced to a singular definition of the ‘British Asian text’. Rather, it offers complex interventions into issues not just of race or ethnicity, but also broader questions of gender, religion, community and – ultimately, as with all fiction – what it means to live. This beginning is marked, moreover, by the emergence of a number of new voices – all in their thirties, and all born in Britain.

Despite the equal opportunity rhetoric, the Liberal Democrats party is an institution embedded in a masculine ethos and ideology. This is illustrated by the dominance of one sex in key roles throughout the organisation, juxtaposed with a ‘gender blind’ ideological approach to equality and a poor record of selecting and electing women. The lack of women in senior and influential positions in the party, a noted masculine ethos within the party, a poor track record on electing women MPs, and a somewhat faltering approach to increasing the number of women MPs are the key findings from a gender analysis of the party. Do the ideology and organisation of the Liberal Democrats reinforce masculine norms and values? Is the party suffering from demand-side rather than supply-side problems vis-à-vis women candidates? With so few women MPs, can substantive representation of women be possible with the Liberal Democrats? Are there sufficient critical actors working to feminise the party? This concluding chapter argues that the Liberal Democrats' substantive representation of women is undermined by the lack of descriptive representation.