This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book shows how Jean-Jacques Beineix's films form a coherent body of work and sketches out a psychodrama formed by Beineix's feature films. It depends largely on the idea that a director's films, however heterogeneous in appearance, nevertheless have themes and styles in common which suggest the worldview of an auteur. It is likely that for the youth audiences of the cinéma du look, the notion of the auteur played little part in their appreciation of Beineix's films, as the difference in audience figures between Diva and La Lune dans le caniveau suggests. It is ironic that Beineix's films have been seen principally as part of the modernisation which the multiplex and a new type of audience might be considered to represent.

Beyond producing original works, the Chartists recontextualised an array of published drama with amateur performances and benefits at professional theatres. Robert Southey’s Wat Tyler illustrates the Chartist use of historical drama as a way to conceptualise history from below, recasting the past as a realm of strife between the people and the ruling classes rather than a march of events driven by the elite. By frequently staging plays about past revolts, Chartist drama placed the contemporary radical movement (and the Newport rising in particular) in a longer history of political conflict. Wat Tyler, which concerns the fourteenth-century Peasants’ Revolt, was first published in 1817 in a pirated version that Southey, who had subsequently become Poet Laureate and renounced his youthful radicalism, fought furiously to suppress. Despite his efforts, this Romantic text continued to circulate widely through the 1840s and was a favourite piece in the Chartist repertoire. The editor’s introduction describes six Chartist performances, which represent the only documented productions of Southey’s notorious drama in nineteenth-century Britain.

This chapter focuses on one particular device used to elicit talk about English national identity: the research interview. Speakers in England are inclined to treat national self-identification as a potentially face-threatening act, and consequently are often inclined to project an image of themselves as rational and moral individuals despite their acknowledgement of their national identity. The chapter outlines four general rules of conversational etiquette to which speakers typically oriented in the course of talk about national identity. The rules are don't state the obvious, do not make an issue of your national identity, national identity avowals should be recipient-designed, and design your national identity avowals pointed to the sensitivities of the actual or potential audience. Breakdowns in communication regularly occur in the course of academic communication, and information is often lost or distorted in translation between academic, media, political and popular realms of discourse.

The introduction charts the efforts made to reach peace in Northern Ireland from Sunningdale to the Good Friday Agreement via the Anglo-Irish Agreement. It provides an overview of the interview chapters and the dynamics that influenced attempts to end the conflict in Northern Ireland. The introduction also explains the interview approach and highlights some of the dilemmas that come into play when interviewing.

By the Anglo-Scandinavian heuristic, travelling in Scandinavia could serve as a virtual trip through time. The region was necessary, familiar, and even, at times, charming. Yet it was the past: what Britain had been and, in an increasingly evolutionary outlook on human experience, what Britain had moved far beyond. Almost like a folk museum, the Nordic region was a place where travellers could talk with people in period costumes, eat period foods, watch period handicrafts being made, buy souvenirs, and walk through a carefully preserved period landscape. The region was necessary, familiar, and even, at times, charming. Yet it was the past: what Britain had been and, in an increasingly stratified view of human experience (Evolutionary Time, according to Johannes Fabian) what Britain had moved far beyond. Clothing, religion, lifestyle, occupations, buildings, personal habits, food – all of these therefore had authentic and immediate interest as what might be called tropes of tactile historiography, potentially revealing something about moral character, whether that of the current Nordic peoples or of the Britons imagined to have evolved from them.

Familiar Letters is usually interpreted as a collaborative venture on the part of Harvey and Spenser and their joint effort to obtain preferment. This chapter shows that Harvey orchestrated the publication without Spenser’s assistance. In Familiar Letters (1580) we are told that Spenser (Immerito) gave copies of the letters to a ‘Well-Willer’ who then gave the correspondence to Harvey’s printer, Henry Bynneman. Brink is the first to point out that ‘Well-Willer’ is an English version of Benevolio, a figure in Harvey’s Letter-Book.The letters themselves are described as ‘scholarly pointes of learning’ because they focus on the science of earthquakes and prosody, not topics of general interest to courtiers or diplomats. The letters are intended to further Harvey’s career in an academic setting. Twelve years later when Harvey discusses the 1580 correspondence, he does not repeat this story, but acknowledges that the correspondence was printed to further his campaign to be University Orator at Cambridge. By references in the letters themselves, Brink shows that Spenser had already become the client of Lord Grey and that he had already received preferment. Spenser had no need to collaborate with Harvey to win preferment.