This chapter is concerned with the 1920s, the time of the New Economic Policy (NEP). It deals with the return to private housing, the establishment of an official norm of living space, and the policies of ‘compression’ and ‘self-compression’. The ‘housing revolution’ of War Communism came to an end with the NEP. Overcrowding inevitably led to tensions between neighbours, some of which were serious enough for the authorities to intervene. Many of the disputes took place between women. Drunkenness and violence on the part of men featured prominently in disputes. The close proximity of neighbours might provide women and children with some protection against violent partners or parents. The ways in which the housing shortage impacted on relationships between men and women was a particularly popular subject for fiction writers. The child's perspective on communal living also made an appearance in magazine fiction.

From the beginning of the century, the absolute right of all British subjects to take up residence in Gibraltar had been removed. Gibraltar for Gibraltarians signalled a distinctive and civilian identity. Moreover, the economic dependence of civilians on British garrison expenditure, although for a very long time not absolute, had been further reduced, in part as a result of government-led initiatives to diversify the economy, in part by the ambitions of civilian entrepreneurs and in part with the beginning of the rundown in the British military presence – though the step towards greater economic self-reliance had been complicated, latterly and considerably, by problems with Spain. This chapter focuses on government and politics in Gibraltar from 1915 to 1940, first looking at governors and law during 1915–1969 and then turning to the City Council and Executive Council to 1940. It also discusses the colonial government and housing between 1921 and 1940, before concluding with the politics of taxation during 1914–1939.

Historical debates about Jewish responses to Nazism are witness to a distinct blurring of the boundaries between document and history, between witness and historian. This chapter begins by charting the emergence of the material, literally its discovery and publication in the post-war world. It argues that such primary material at times took the place of histories of Jewish behaviour. The chapter discusses the historiography of the Jewish Councils, which emerged in part as a response to the Raul Hilberg/Hannah Arendt thesis. It analyses the response to Hilberg's suggestion that resistance was neither widespread nor historically significant. A limited social history of camp society did emerge, following on from the psychological history that dominated in the later 1940s Gustavo Corni's Hitler's Ghettos, which attempted a wholesale social history of ghetto society, is perhaps the only one in English and was only published in 2002.

This chapter examines the effect of globalisation discourse in Greece on the reproduction of the Greek public discourse and the politico-economic system. It suggests that the year 1996 can be considered to signify a turning point and a new significant shift in Greek public discourse because of the death of Andreas Papandreou which symbolically brought to an end the period of charismatic leaders in Greek politics. This chapter describes the changing public discourse in Greece interacted with the emerging globalisation discourse and how the hegemonic discourse was implicated in the public discourse formation.

Barbados was one of the poorest of the British West Indian colonies with deplorable public health and high rates of infant, malnutrition and child mortality. The wages were also the lowest in the region which reflected the stinginess of the sugar plantation owners, who also tied plantation labourers to the plantation by linking employment with land rental. There was no assistance or public relief for the unemployed and thus the combined effect of low wages and no unemployment benefits often resulted in subsidising kin in times of hardship, an additional expense that aggravated their own impoverished conditions. The central tool for the British to combat the poverty in Barbados was the Colonial Development and Welfare Fund which was set up by the Colonial Office and was answerable to the British Treasury. However, the Colonial Office and the respective governors were reluctant to challenge the grip of planters over the economy and hardly drew up any alternative forms of economic development or organising and increasing agricultural production.

The evacuation from May 1940 of much of the civilian population from Gibraltar, and especially some of their uncomfortable experiences in Britain and Northern Ireland, did embitter the exiles and those still resident in Gibraltar, and did provoke demands for political change. The apparently tardy steps being taken by the British authorities to organise repatriation seemed to expose the limited political influence that Gibraltar civilians had over their own lives. The Association for the Advancement of Civil Rights (AACR), established in December 1942, became Gibraltar's first organised political party, dominating Gibraltar's electoral politics until the 1980s. It found in Lieutenant-General Sir Noel Mason-Macfarlane (May 1942–February 1944) an outspoken advocate of constitutional and administrative change. This chapter explores big government and self-government in Gibraltar from 1940 to 1969, first focusing on Mason-Macfarlane's proposed reforms of the constitution of the City Council, and then turning to the colonial government and post-war housing, Gibraltar's welfare state, government finance and the politics of taxation, constitutional change and the Legislative Council of 1950, and self-government and the Gibraltar constitution of 1969.

This chapter discusses three of Donne's sermons, which are considered as his pulpit performances. The first sermon is on the conversion of St. Paul, and the second and third are earlier sermons on the Psalms and the Epistles. The chapter shows that one of the typical features of Donne's sermons is the view of the relationship between God and the self, describes the sermon as a theatrical re-enactment of the Biblical word and studies the differences between sacrament and sermon. It also considers the question of what the primary interest of sermons is and what consequently has to be translated, concluding with a section on the theatrical structures that are inherent to Donne's sermons.

This chapter looks briefly at some of the ‘pathways’ within, and to, a fairly recent prizewinning novel, published in 1995 and written by a Russian, Andreï Makine, who writes only in French and has been resident in France since 1987. A curiously bi-cultural novel, of a pseudo-autobiographical nature, Le Testament français contains at least traces of the pathways explored in the present study. It also includes, of course, striking features of its own, such as waves which stem from war literature, or from what people might designate the fiction of sadomasochism. Post-war provincial Soviet life doubles, and alternates, with the Paris of la belle époque and an aspiration to revel in and revive a fin de siècle style of French prose. In diverse ways, France links with Russia, as does Siberia with Cherbourg.