Chapter 3 is concerned with the problems involved in reconciling a poet’s life-narrative with the vita activa model and examines the potential causes for the ‘gap’ between Sir Philip Sidney’s public life and his works, which continues to pose a challenge for modern biographers. It considers the two ‘waves’ of responses to Sidney’s death: the elegies published in the immediate aftermath of his death and funeral, which seek to establish him as an exemplary soldier and courtier, and the first portrayals of Sidney as an exemplary poet figure (often referred to as ‘Astrophil’ or ‘Philisides’), following the printing of his works during the 1590s. For the most part, these two categories of life-narrative provided for Sidney remained distinct from each other, and there were few attempts to read his works biographically, beyond an ‘identification’ of Stella as Penelope Rich. Nevertheless, there is one remarkable exception: Edmund Spenser’s ‘Astrophel’, which should be read not as an unsuccessful belated elegy for Sidney but as a response to his rebirth in print and an innovative attempt to bridge the gap between the dead knight and the poet ‘borne in Arcady’.

Describes how the experience of Irish trials associated with the United Irishmen influenced the theory and practice of later English political trials. The author pays particular attention to the use of different categories of witnesses against the Irish revolutionaries, and how much the British state in general, and Lord Castleregh in particular, learned from these notorious show trials.

This chapter investigates whether France played a role in the emergence of the responsibility to protect and whether the international concept impacted it in any way. It explains that even though Chirac’s various executives continued to promote the importance of human protection, and in particular the idea that because of its history, values and rank, France had a special role to play, France did not take part in the emergence of R2P. The chapter argues that France was excluded from the discussions on R2P after the international community deemed its conception and practice of human protection to be controversial and outdated. It then analyses France’s ongoing commitment to human protection despite its exclusion from the negotiating table. During the lead-up to the Iraq war, France showed that it was willing to to defend its conception of human protection and that its voice still mattered. Additionally, Chirac’s various executives remained committed to intervene militarily for humanitarian purposes and thus continued to contribute to shaping the way the international community practised human protection.

Whilst scholars have often attended to the sonnet’s accretive nature, this chapter hopes to address the parallel – and largely unwritten – history of the sonnet as a stand-alone form in sixteenth-century English poetry, a form that flourishes in unsequenced contexts. Elizabethan commentators and practitioners alike routinely theorise the sonnet as, in the first instance, a circumscribed form, privileging the sonnet’s self-containment and recognising the skilful artifice required of the sonneteer in negotiating compact form – a conception very much in keeping with the way the sonnet was understood on the Continent. Used as dedicatory or commendatory poems, stand-alone sonnets do not just articulate frustrated desire, or pledge service, or seek patronage, or secure fame: they co-opt formal self-enclosure in the service of celebrating native eloquence and accommodating foreignness, implicitly or explicitly commenting on the literary authority, cultural status and vernacular identity of the works in which they are found, especially when they serve as a paratext or preface to a volume. In the confluence of horticultural and political registers that is often found in their rhetoric, with entwined motifs of enclosure, vernacular cultivation and national self-definition, those sonnets announce and enact a process of cultural transference and belonging.

This chapter examines Lindsay Anderson's diaries, private writings documenting his reflections on his own personality, his colleagues, friends, family and his sexuality. His journals echo his lamentations over the absence of love in his life and the impossibility of finding it. They also recorded details of his travels with the Army and his visit to Vienna.

Functional differentiation is introduced as a defining characteristic of modern society and one that is rarely discussed by critical theorists. The result is that there are glaring sociological and explanatory deficits in that literature. Systems theory is very useful for understanding sociological realities such as functional differentiation. However, systems-theoretical orthodoxy often assumes that social systems have to be coded in reductively binary terms such as legal/illegal. Orthodox approaches often suggest that social-systemic coding happens in a-historical and automatic ways. This book therefore adopts a significantly modified version of systems theory. The book also draws on other sources, such as Gramsci and constitutional theory. The version of critical theory that emerges on this basis is clearly distinct from first- and second-generation Frankfurt School critical theory. It is also markedly distinct from a number of other theoretical currents that see themselves as offering critical theories of society following in the steps of the Frankfurt School.

This Sporting Life is the first feature film of Lindsay Anderson. Anderson had been impressed by David Storey's novel This Sporting Life and wanted to direct the film himself. This chapter considers the claims to authorship and production of This Sporting Life. Storey adapted his own deeply personal novel and the resultant film script was the first collaboration between Storey and Anderson.

More than any of the films of the cinéma du look, La Lune dans le caniveau exemplifies the characteristics Bassan enumerates: a mise en scène which privileges exuberance, light, movement, especially the curves and curls of the camera, and an emphasis on sensation. This chapter explores the language and the way it generates a particular type of nostalgia unanchored in the real, unlike, say, heritage cinema. It locates the film's visual style and its narrative concerns in a genre which reviewers have on the whole not mentioned in relation to La Lune dans le caniveau. The chapter explains why the main interest of the film beyond its re-articulation of melodrama is the way in which Depardieu-as-star is reconfigured in the film, his iconicity questioned: he is de-iconised and re-iconised by the film in a gesture towards an impossible authenticity.

This chapter is the first modern edition of a fragment from an early modern printed verse miscellany, complete with notes and an introduction discussing the text, presumed authors, printing details, the context of printed verse miscellanies and the miscellany’s reception. Published as an octavo in 1603, The Muses Garland is part of the English interest in printed poetic miscellanies ushered in by Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), and a successor to such late Elizabethan verse collections as The Phoenix Nest, Englands Helicon or A Poetical Rhapsody, miscellanies often addressed to and composed of pieces by courtiers and aristocrats that describe poetry as a medium that dignifies poets. Possibly compiled by Munday, Davison or Breton, or, perhaps even more tentatively, Markham, Pricket or Barnfield, the miscellany includes two poems by Spenser, and ascribes the authorship of two poems to ‘S.P.S.’ (possibly two previously unknown poems by Sir Philip Sidney). The political and poetic prestige of The Muses Garland also derives from its emphasis on the figure of the Earl of Essex, partaking in a trend of making him speak posthumously in the years after his death.

Lev Kuleshov (and Hitchcock) recognised what for them was the essence of cinema: the presence of desire and its evocation in the image. Kuleshov's montage experiments demonstrated the fictive nature not of the image but, in any succession of them, the joins. Kuleshov particularly designed film experiments that divorced the fragment from a real continuous space beyond it (off -screen). He insisted instead on the artifice (the fiction) of the join between shot-fragments. In American films, which inspired Kuleshov, things were different. In these films, an actor and a bowl of soup or a revolver were in the same real space and time as they would be in the theatre. In American film practices, the joins between shots were motivated by the narrative, that is, the succession of shots was dictated by a logic of events and of character which the film at once constructed and followed.

The release of Assassins in France in 1997 was to prove a defining moment in Mathieu Kassovitz's directorial career. The film's intensely polemical stance, its more experimental approach, combined with a wholly negative worldview and graphic depiction of violence, effected, for the first time, a conscious distancing by Kassovitz from his popular audience. The degree of negative and often highly personal criticism directed at Assassins, following on from the tense and pressured conditions under which the film had been completed in time for the Cannes festival, led Kassovitz to the verge of depression and nervous exhaustion. The version of Les Rivières pourpres adapted for the screen by Kassovitz and Grangé focuses squarely on the parallel investigations of two police detectives. The policier has, moreover, always formed the natural point of interface between French and American cinema.

Flora Gomes's four feature films - Mortu nega; Udju azul di Yonta; Po di sangui; and Nha fala - trace, in chronological sequence, different aspects of the last 30 years of Guinea-Bissau's history, from the height of the anticolonial struggle to the present day. This chapter focuses on the relationship between the ideas and texts of Amilcar Cabral and Gomes. It offers another revisiting of the overworked, and in certain respects unworkable, pairing of tradition and modernity, but another of the lessons of Cabral, particularly at the end, is that certain repetitions are essential, indeed, inescapable. In the search for authenticity, the image of the 'return to the source' is fundamental, and it is this image which the chapter examines: in relation to film studies, via the work of Manthia Diawara; in relation to political struggle, via Cabral; and in relation to both, via the films of Gomes.