Explores the role of chance and contingency in ensuring that high-profile London sympathisers with the cause of radical change did not join the Cato Street Conspiracy

This chapter focuses on Izaak Walton and his discovery of a biographical technique that anticipates literary biography, through his uncommon educational background, his experience of the Civil War and his interest in the concept of a ‘private’ life. The chapter examines how in his different versions of the Life of Donne, written over the course of thirty-five years, Walton grew increasingly interested in Donne’s works (especially his poetic works) and attempted to use them in his Life to recover the poet’s own voice or ventriloquise it through paraphrases. Over the course of his revisions to the Life of Donne, Walton developed a new model for writing a Life, which, unlike the vita activa model, was suitable for writing the life of a poet and culminated in Walton’s Life of Herbert, the first life of an English poet as a poet. The chapter argues that Walton’s biographical technique was substantially shaped by his use of literary quotation, which differs from the aphoristic style of quotation more commonly used by his contemporaries. It also proposes that Walton’s innovative approach played an important role in the success of his Lives and proved highly influential for the development of literary biography.

Georges Méliès is universally acknowledged to be an early film Pioneer. However, his work has often been dismissed as simplistic, both narratively and technically. For a long time, Méliès's work was cited as the foremost example of 'primitive mode of representation'; films made before around 1906 were characterized by four traits. These are 'autarky and unicity of each frame', or framing that is self-contained and unchanged throughout the scene; 'the noncentered quality of the image', or the use of the edges of the frame as well as the centre; 'consistent medium long-shot camera distance'; and the 'nonclosure' of the narrative. This introduction presents the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book's primary aim is to give an idea of the complexity and the modernity of his work. It also aims to dispel a number of myths about Méliès's contribution to film history.

Given their common roots, the evolution from Sequence to Free Cinema, from Karel Reisz's career as a critic to that of amateur film-maker, seems both logical and, with the 20-20 power of hindsight, smoothly preordained. Reisz's Momma Don't Allow is a prime example of the 'story documentary' form, in order to set up a series of binary juxtapositions, all the better to contrast but also deconstruct class stereotypes. Although We Are the Lambeth Boys represents a major step forward artistically and technically, particularly in its use of faster Ilford film stock and synchronized sound, its incorporation of several of Gavin Lambert's dialectical suggestions and the use of an overly didactic commentary created some serious aesthetic shortcomings. Reisz and Lindsay Anderson became directly involved in developing New Left strategy with March to Aldermaston, which focuses on halts in the march to the atomic weapons factory in Berkshire.

This chapter deals with Jean Renoir's late films after his return to France in 1951, after an absence of more than ten years. The later films are more consistent in tone than the disparate body of work that had gone before. The later films generally see the world and its failings with mocking irony, preferring a dispassionate moral vision to a tragic or political one. The first three (Le Carosse d'or, French Cancan, Eléna et les hommes), are all historically set costume dramas and form a natural group. The next two (Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe) are contemporary fantasies and were shot in the same innovative way. Le Caporal épinglé moves away from cultural definitions of nation and back towards a more 'political' Frenchness, centred on the need to fight for freedom.

This chapter focuses upon Gordon Brown's engagement with the conversation about England and Englishness. It evaluates Brown's legacy as Chancellor and Prime Minister for the conversation about the politics of Englishness. Brown's statecraft and political rhetoric need to be understood as part of a wider strategy that led to the negation of England as a political community. Brown chose to present his vision within the framework of a 'British Way' of politics and statecraft. From the very outset, any prospect of the advancement of the principles of decentralisation, democratic autonomy or active citizenship in England was dashed by New Labour's nationalisation of the control of policy-making and resource allocation in England. The impact of Brown's 'constrained discretion', in combination with Tony Blair's 'earned autonomy' was to negate any possibility of the extension of democratic citizenship made possible by the implementation of devolution elsewhere in the United Kingdom.

Thorold Dickinson's evocation of the Russian atmosphere and, in particular, his use of suspenseful soundtrack to suggest ghostly visitation undoubtedly had an influence on Jack Clayton's style in both The Bespoke Overcoat and The Innocents. After volunteering for the Royal Air Force in 1940 and being recruited as a flight mechanic, Clayton was assigned to the RAF Film Unit in the capacity of cameraman, editor and director and eventually became a commanding officer. He directed one film during that time, Naples is a Battlefield for the Ministry of Information. The turning point in Clayton's career came in the 1950s, when the brothers John and James Woolf, who owned Romulus Films, were looking for a good production manager and associate producer for their new film, Moulin Rouge, to be directed by John Huston.

The chapter follows the ruling princes of India, the maharajas, rajas, ranas and others, from the partition of British India and the establishment of the successor nations of India and Pakistan in August 1947. It tracks Deputy Prime Minister Sardar Patel’s integration of the princely states into India, and the problems posed by the former princely state of Kashmir. In 1971, Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party won a landslide victory in general elections in India. The size of her majority enabled her to abolish the princes’ regal privileges and slash their privy purses. The ex-rulers attempted to cope with their difficult financial situation by, among other measures, converting assets such as their palaces into luxury hotels, or by promoting new industries in their former territories. Other ex-princes entered public life from different directions and some stood for election to parliament – with varied success. The chapter concludes with a look at popular attitudes to the ex-princes using their depiction on a logo developed by Air India for its posters and calendars. Its maharaja was presented as having a likeable and humorous persona – and witty.

The British retreat and eventual withdrawal from Southeast Asia brought enormous challenges to the monarchy in Brunei. While neighbouring monarchies continued to play a symbolic role and accommodated political change, the monarchy in Brunei expanded its political power and influence and thwarted domestic political reform. Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin, who ascended the throne in 1950, and continued to play a dominant political role after his abdication in 1967, carefully refashioned the monarchy, accumulating more powers and strengthening royal institutions during a time of intense political change in the region. The monarchy also faced local resistance internally in the form of a domestic rebellion in 1962. With the wealth from oil revenue, the monarchy was able to reduce social discontent by providing a good standard of living. Oil wealth also gave Sultan Omar Ali the means to reshape the monarchy in an attempt to win support from the local population and enhance his legitimacy.

Early modern discussions of British ethnographic history turn on a recurring set of references to Asia, migration, tribal unity, ancestral peoples, pagan practices, genealogies, violence, language, Christianity, mythology, and the Norman Conquest. Produced across the centuries I consider and circulated by writers who often had no direct influence on or even knowledge of one another, these tropes enable memories of a past that supports a specific socio-political present. They offer ways to think about the Nordic regions, Britain, and the historiographic connections among them that sustained national identity by means of historical division. At issue in such cultural memories is the establishment of some kind of continuity between past and present, which depends on distinctions between the two historical moments. Emerging from many early modern discussions of England’s political history was the belief that the Nordic and English peoples were of the same race and that as such they were categorically distinct from other races, especially from the French and sometimes even from the German ones. Evidence for this unity could be found in population movements and the attendant historical interactions, religious practices, and social characteristics.

Karel Reisz's Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment can perhaps be viewed as an appropriate formal hybrid. Under the comedic veneer lies a serious study of an individual's descent into madness and a broader metaphor for the intrinsic failures of both the Old and New Left's ideological response to the burgeoning counter-culture. In the film, Reisz portrays the shifting role of gender relations and the ideological import of fantasy and art as both poison and cure for the film's own ambivalent political position. An accurate reading of Morgan is that Reisz rescues the audience from mass confusion by setting up a revealing discrepancy between his protagonist Morgan - who is a failure as an artist but obsessed with gorillas - and the film Morgan, which exploits its role as serious art to set up a defamiliarizing commentary on Morgan's creative impotence, which is rooted in self-pitying solipsism.