This chapter contextualises the release of the Democratic Security Policy (DSP) in Colombia, and also describes how the options peace or security were articulated as exclusive and definitive. The end of the peace talks between the government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias-Ejército del Pueblo in February 2002 signalled the foreclosed possibility of a peaceful transformation of the armed conflict. The crisis of the end of peace turned into an opportunity to assert state identity, heightened by hot electorate debates during the presidential campaign of 2002, in which the main decision for the voters was peace or in/security. Peace was to be postponed for the day in which in/security brings freedom. The electoral victory of Alvaro Uribe in May 2002 changed the discursive articulation of the Colombian subjectivity. The precedents for releasing the DSP presented the historical and social circumstances that legitimised the in/security discourse in Colombia.

This chapter covers the Great Patriotic War and its aftermath, up to the end of the Stalin era. It also addresses Ogonek and Rabotnitsa and the wartime journal Leningrad. Moscow and Leningrad had become rivals even before the war. Ogonek and Rabotnitsa paid less attention to the agonies of Leningrad and its citizens than might be expected. Rabotnitsa did take up the theme of female heroism in Leningrad, reproducing the transcript of a Leningrad radio broadcast in which the female narrator talked of housewives manning barricades and running factories and sacrificing themselves and their families, sometimes quite literally, to the war effort. Ogonek also printed a few articles on the Leningrad siege, one of which described the devastation wreaked by a Nazi shell on ‘a densely populated communal apartment’. For Soviet Jews, communal living was particularly unpleasant in the post-war years.

This chapter considers ignorance in Romanticism. It examines William Wordsworth's text in the sixth book of The Prelude, and the subsequent declaration of ignorance in response to the so-called ‘Simplon Pass’ episode, where he records an instance of geographical bafflement. The chapter then examines the concept of the Romantic sublime and the characterisation of Romanticism, concluding that ignorance is central to the Romantic conception of the sublime and is an important aspect of Romantic poetics.

This chapter explores the ways Donne's poems use language performatively. It analyses the Promethean dimension of Donne's poems, showing that his poems imply that what is at stake is similar to the real world, while the metaphors create new ways of seeing the same world. The chapter also studies how Donne's poems create the world, the truth and the self. Concepts such as role-play, theatricality and protean performance are also discussed.

This chapter explores the work of Philip Roth, who is considered as one of America's top modern novelists, in order to focus on the question of authorial ignorance, suggesting that it is basically a part of the force of literature that modern writers engage with whenever they describe themselves as not knowing or ignorant. It supposes that authorial ignorance is a crucial yet often overlooked concern within modern literary practice. The chapter also looks at the ways Roth is consistently concerned with the question of the nature of authorship and its ethical relation with ignorance.

This chapter examines the activities of opposition anti-Market pressure groups. It charts the affairs of organisations defined as ‘single-issue groups’ which included Keep Britain Out (KBO) and the Forward Britain Movement (FBM). It also considers youth and women's groups, Protestant conspiracy theorists, Commonwealth lobbies and associations on the far right, such as the League of Empire Loyalists (LEL) and True Tories. This chapter suggests that what truly united the pressure groups were banal assumptions about the sanctity of national freedom and a common perception that Britain's independence and international status were increasingly vulnerable.

The purpose of this chapter is to subject Lawrence Langer's argument to scrutiny, and to ask how History as a discipline has approached the individual victims of the Holocaust and the rich historical material that is provided by their testimonies. The chapter begins by charting the use of survivor testimony in history-writing, at the same time as attempting to summarise the history of that testimony. It relates the development of concern for 'memory' in historical studies since the late 1970s, and the consequent explosion of interest in Holocaust survivors and their stories. The issue of sexual violence reveals the complex relationship between present and past in Holocaust History, and the historiography of women and the Holocaust is somewhat undermined by that complexity too. Perhaps the most fruitful use of Holocaust testimony in historiography has been the investigation of women's specific Holocaust experiences.