The chapter sketches a portrait of liberal writers after 1967, mapping their sources of inspiration and ideological emphases, and their contribution to Arab political thought. The chapter also places liberal writers in a historical context and identifies continuities and differences between them and the liberals of the early twentieth century.

As a background to the arguments in the book, the introduction provides an overview of Vietnamese history and a critical account of the representation of South Vietnam that has dominated much of the historiography on the Vietnam War. In this representation, the South is portrayed as a political puppet in a war between US imperialism and the Vietnamese people, who are identified with the communist forces. This representation has not only resulted in a lack of attention to the South Vietnamese side in the scholarship, but it has also served to conceal the radical character of the political project pursued by the early South Vietnamese state. Unlike their allies, South Vietnamese leaders did not conceive of the war as an anti-communist crusade, but as a struggle against Stalinism as well as capitalism and liberal democracy. The introduction, therefore, proposes a more careful examination of this political project as a point of departure for rethinking the representation of the South Vietnamese within the historiography of the Vietnam War.

This chapter, which utilises published and unpublished memoirs of trained medical professionals and volunteer first aiders, as well as letters and articles in the nursing and national press, addresses the collective amnesia about the FANY by restoring its nursing practice during the First World War to the historical record. It begins with an examination of the wartime role of socially elite women, foregrounding the highly modern figure of the volunteer first aider, and examines the frustrations felt by trained professionals toward these ‘mock’ nurses. It then considers as another indicator of modernity the rush to colours by such women who ignored establishment opposition and made their own way out to the front, self-financed and with little medical expertise, to set up hospitals. While much of what the FANY did was safely entrenched within established norms, the modernising context of the war afforded the FANY further opportunities to push against conventional gendered expectations, and new modes of female modernity were forged in France.

The four poems of MS Cotton Nero A.x, Art. 3, are untitled in the manuscript, but titled by modern editors, in manuscript order Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The poems testify that he was cultivated, with an appreciation of the finer points of chivalric life, and also deeply religious - a cleric, no doubt, given the poet's biblical knowledge, his interest in Christian doctrine, and his understanding of sermon style. This chapter considers these poems, taking account of relevant literary and intellectual contexts where the poems signpost them, especially the Bible. Between them they see God, implicitly, in terms of the traditional opposition between his justice and his mercy, an opposition often expressed in literature by the motif of the debate of the four daughters of God, which has the personified Justice and Truth arguing for divine justice, Mercy and Peace for divine mercy.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, one of the pioneers of sociology in the USA, formulated in his The Souls of Black Folk (1903) a powerful argument on identity in modern society. He describes post-emancipation Afro-Americans as ‘born with a veil’ as they are only indirectly able to gain consciousness of themselves, namely through the eyes of the others who despise them; at the same time, though, the resulting ‘double consciousness’ of being both of and not of this society, can be turned into an advantage: the broken, indirect and precarious vision may see more and deeper. Du Bois talks about more than cognition and epistemology, though: both the African and the American strive to be ‘co-workers’ in the ‘kingdom of culture’. Overcoming ‘the color-line’ is indispensable to the creation of a better, modern, human and humane civilization.

This chapter describes some events that are well attested in the reign of Henry IV. The king's suppression of the Yorkshire risings and his successful reassertion of royal authority on the northern march are proved to be vital turning points that allowed a crisis-ridden regime to assume some appearance of permanence. A movement of protest at the disorder prevalent in the region, led by the archbishop, which sought to articulate the grievances of the citizens and clergy of York in politically acceptable terms. The chapter looks at the narrative sources for the risings and shows that an informed reading, which pays due attention to their rhetorical structure and polemical purpose, can support such an interpretation of events. It also examines how political defiance, one that united significant elements of the shire's nobility, gentry, clergy and townsmen into a single movement, became both possible and justified.

The chapter offers a description of the form and function of the cad in British popular culture and his post-war incarnation as the former ‘temporary gentleman’. The diverse approaches to Terry-Thomas and Leslie Phillips are discussed, together with their rise to stardom. With the former, Major Hitchcock of the Boulting brothers’ Private’s Progress was a one-man deconstruction of the narrative of Second World War heroism. Phillips achieved film stardom courtesy of Peter Rogers/Gerald Thomas comedies and, subsequently, the Betty Box/Ralph Thomas Doctor series. As memoires of the Second World War began to rescind, the chapter ends with a discussion of how Phillips made the conscious decision to change his screen image and how illness prevented Thomas from accepting the role of Prospero in Derek Jarman’s version of The Tempest.

Americans did not initially view the Constitution’s commitments to freedom of speech and press as individual, counter-majoritarian rights, standing over and against the structural, democratic directives of the American constitution. Instead, they held an alternative theory: to have the status of a free person (a liber homo) is to live in a free state, such that one has a set of fundamental liberties secured from relationships of dependence, which in turn requires some exercise of control over one’s government so that the institutions necessary for one’s political independence (e.g. courts, legislatures, executives) do not themselves become sources of oppression. Political liberty, they argued, is rooted in an analysis of what it means to speak of being a free person, a member of a free society living in a free state. In making this argument, Americans were reaching back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European debates regarding freedom of speech and press within free states, in contrast to monarchies, but doing so in a revolutionary context and expanding public sphere. The effect of inserting this argument into the American ratification debates was to establish for Americans the premise necessary to justify continuous, organised, oppositional political speech. Where political parties and the speech of factious men were once viewed as antithetical to responsible republican self-government, the development of the idea of legitimate contestatory, fiery speech, as part and parcel of party opposition within a constitutional democracy, marked a new turn in the history of American political thought.

This chapter explores representations of impairment and disability in the ‘Literary Realism’ writings of George Eliot and Harriet Martineau and investigates a different medium of popular perceptions and representations of disability, that of popular fiction. Criticism addressing the use of disabled characters in Victorian fiction frequently acknowledges how such characters function by invoking feelings of sympathy, both within the narrative and in readers. However, Deerbrook’s Maria Young and Philip Wakem in The Mill on the Floss reverse our expectations: rather than being the subjects of observation and sympathy, they operate as model observers of the world around them. In this, they differ from the stereotypical role assigned to disabled characters in other Victorian novels and seek to follow one of the guiding principles of Literary Realism, the accurate portrayal of daily life, rather than some romanticised notion.

By the time of his death. Sidney James was an almost instantly recognisable figure yet his image as a ‘jovial cockney’ was only one aspect of his career. Within two years of his arrival in the UK from South Africa, James was cast by the Archers in The Small Back Room, establishing his career as one of British cinema’s most versatile character players. A supporting role in Ealing’s The Lavender Hill Mob resulted in his being cast in Hancock’s Half Hour and by 1959 Tony Hancock and Sidney James were regarded by many of their audience as an unofficial double act. Finally, James’s work in the Carry On films is considered with reference to his becoming regarded as a British ‘icon’.

The role of peasants as participants in markets and as distinctive players in the medieval English economy has been emphasised by a number of historians. Marxist historians writing either side of the Second World War argued for a peasant economy that was, in its development, principally influenced by lordship and which was certainly not determined in the greater part by the market or commerce. The chapter sets out the ways in which the market has often tended to be set aside in discussion of the medieval peasant. It examines the adoption of new approaches to the study of the medieval English economy. Central features of this approach are: an awareness of the potentially significant impact of peasant economic endeavour on medieval gross domestic product and a reconsideration of the role of commerce, including rural trade and peasant economic activity, in effecting and indeed driving change in the medieval English economy.

The introduction discusses various challenges facing France’s political institutions and party system on the eve of the country’s 2017 presidential election. It presents the specifically French angle of the more general phenomenon of rising mistrust in political institutions and political parties and the capacity of political leadership to restore trust. It reviews these phenomena through the prisms of institutional adaptation, political and party competition and changing public opinion. The period of observation lay in and around the 2017 French presidential and parliamentary elections. The introduction provides an overview of the challenged institutional order of the Fifth Republic, the crisis of existing political parties and the threat posed by new movements. It concludes with Macron’s election as president and the accompanying claim that France is back.

Over the last ten years or so, a culture of war has returned to prominence in English- speaking societies, and war has broken out again as a favoured topic in the criticism of early modern English drama. This chapter recalls that the discourse of early modern (if not modern) warfare almost invariably turns on a religious axis at bottom, the rhetoric of crusade on the paradoxical premise that the exercise of power over life and death is human practice but divine prerogative. The Catholic 'tyrants' and Tamburlaine's hegemony that extends to the feminine sphere in and through Zenocrate, are discussed. The chapter proposes that perhaps the most culturally prominent instance of a combined metaphysical and military narrative, the biblical encounter between the Jewish heroine Judith and the Assyrian general Holofernes, hovers in the background of Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays.