This chapter considers the theme of responsibility to others on the basis of a critique of mutual recognition. It contests the belief that democracy is antithetical to colonialism and suggests that plurality is severely circumscribed by the ontological structure and the economic processes endemic to political participation. This chapter shows that the cognitive processes of mutual recognition serve to reinforce and perpetuate political structures predicated on private ownership, thereby radically curtailing the range of possible manifestations of alterity. It also explains that while democracy is embraced as the ground of plurality, it ties plurality to the level of identity, thereby obscuring the ontological sameness on which such plurality is predicated.

This chapter notes Odoevsky's story The Witness as an important source for certain events in the autobiographical confession of the Elder Zosima in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. it also considers Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed. These three works contribute to a considerably wider ensuing discussion of the ‘confessional’ motif in modern fiction, going back to the Gothic period and extending into the present century.

Humphrey Jennings' films Fires Were Started and The Silent Village involve a different variety of experimentation in the form of dramatisation and re-enactment. Such practices were ingrained within the British documentary movement, though a heightened degree of dramatisation, especially in Fires Were Started, raised issues of authenticity. This chapter discusses the strategies Jennings adopted in his films Fires Were Started and The Silent Village. Critics argue that Jennings has gone all arty in Fires Were Started by including snippets of Raleigh and Shakespeare within a speech by one of the characters. What the arty criticism of Jennings' inclusion of poetry ignores is that a person quoting poetry or literature may in itself be authentic. For Jennings, whose understanding of national character and personal experience were informed by the words of Milton, Shakespeare, Blake and other prominent poets and writers, the literary extracts were natural components of everyday life.

John Redwood has been one of the most consistent advocates of the economic liberal, variant of Conservatism for many years. This chapter discusses the development of the economic liberal ideas and Redwood's place within that intellectual development. The more interesting theme to emerge from a discussion of Redwood's contribution to British 'Conservatism' is the emergence of Euroscepticism in the Party. The chapter examines the context for debates in the Conservative Party over European integration before placing Redwood's own views on Europe within this context. The issue of European integration is a difficult one for the Conservative Party since it cuts across domestic and international aspects of policy. In the 1980s Redwood was concerned by the integrationist logic of the Single European Act (1986) but did openly support the creation of a single market.

This chapter considers William Blundell's activities in relation to his family and friends in connection with his claim of passive victimhood. It suggests that far from being a victim, Blundell created a series of defence mechanisms that protected him from the full force of the penal laws. He maintained kinship and social networks that provided him with both personal security and protection for his estate and he used the freedom that these strategies afforded him to protect other Catholics in his networks.

This chapter examines the various forms of communal housing which existed in Soviet cities in the 1920s, looking both at how they were portrayed in the literature and how they were actually experienced. It specifically addresses house communes, hostels and barracks. The house commune, or dom-kommuna, would be the ultimate in communal living, and according to its supporters it would one day be the only form of housing in the Soviet Union. A commitment to women's equality was supposedly a universal feature. Rabotnitsa still portrayed the communal kitchen as a female domain despite its insistence that the house commune was the path to women's liberation. Hostels and barracks were hardly a model of communal life. Barracks were universally acknowledged to be a temporary phenomenon, which would be replaced as soon as possible with new forms of housing.

This chapter discusses the passionate connections between Donne's divine and worldly poetry. It shows that while Donne's erotic poems are more indebted to religious metaphor, his nineteen ‘Holy Sonnets’ rely more on erotic imagery. The chapter then analyses and compares Donne's religiously erotic poems with his erotically religious poetry. It determines that Donne's erotic poetry views love as a form of (artful) performance and engages in some form of histrionics of love making, also showing that role-play and theatricality are two main features of Donne's devotional and erotic writings.

This chapter explores the impact of compulsory electoral participation on those political outcomes viewed as most significant, as well as those that can most intuitively be expected to result directly from the institution. It examines three such impacts: the impact of compulsory electoral participation on rates of female participation; the distribution of partisan support (the balance between small and large parties, moderate and extremist parties, and left-right forces); and the fairness of policy outputs, understood in terms of redistributive policy and quality of governance.

This chapter discusses the problem of racism in Barbados and the role played by it in nation-building. Race was the external marker of status and the internal regulator of attitudes of inferiority and superiority where white people dominated the legislative chambers and courtrooms and owned most of the land and the major businesses. Leisure spaces were segregated, access to secondary education was limited and certain shops, banks and residential people were out of bounds to black people. Racist attitudes were also institutionalised within the Colonial Civil Service and the Colonial Office and all the lineage of racism could be traced directly to slavery. For some, suffrage, democracy and self-government provided a way to create a nation out of this racially ruptured society which was finally achieved by the time of independence when the political, legal and judicial executive became pre-dominantly black.

This chapter offers an introduction and reconsideration of regional broadcasting in Britain. As part of this effort, it examines an important, but overlooked, aspect of broadcasting history and regional broadcasting during the Second World War. For, although the BBC suspended its regional networks during the war, regional programmes continued to be made and broadcasted on the home service and forces programme, which is a completely ignored part of the broadcasting history. Another example of English disregard for the Scots, Welsh and Irish, wartime regional broadcasting saw the BBC, for the first time, project a truly multi-national image of Britain as regional productions had to be carried by the one of the two national networks.

This introductory chapter briefly sets out the purpose of the book, which is to counter myths about the British left and fascism in the inter-war years. It then considers why, when the British left is considered in relation to fascism and anti-fascism, its main organisations, namely the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress, have suffered a grievous neglect. The chapter suggests that a re-examination of the British left and fascism may contribute something to the ongoing debates within the historiography of fascism, and perhaps may aid us in the recovery of some essentials which are in danger of being overlooked in today's ‘fascism studies’.

This chapter investigates the musical story through Odoevsky's fictional ‘biography’ of Johann Sebastian Bach, and preceding works, particularly in the writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann. It aims to examine an early prose work by Boris Pasternak, his Suboctave Story (written in 1916–17, but first published only in 1977). Pasternak's never quite completed novella, this chapter argues, may be dependent to a considerable extent on Odoevsky's depiction of the young Bach and his creation of musical atmosphere.