This chapter illustrates how Mike Leigh returned to more recognisable territory for his film, All or Nothing. The opening shot of All or Nothing almost looked like a parody of his style and mood—except that no parody could so succinctly convey the humanity and sense of mortality that pervade both, the opening, and the film as a whole. The film proved to be Leigh's most resonant assertion yet that human emotions and experiences are too intricate to be expressed through traditionally constructed dialogue and narratives; that real lives are too messy, too complicated to be squeezed into conventional dramatic parameters. This chapter also draws attention to the fact that the film made this emphatic assertion precisely by means of a meticulously constructed narrative, involving characters who so clearly reflect the tragedies and triumphs of everyday life, testified to a writer and director at something like the height of his powers.

An important feature of the ensuing debate about the nature of socialism was a renewed engagement with the ideal of equality. This chapter begins by examining the well-known debate in this period about the status of public ownership within socialist thought. It argues that this was primarily a debate about the mechanism that could best realise an egalitarian society rather than a disagreement over the meaning of ‘equality’ itself; there was in fact only minimal disagreement within the Left in this period about the meaning of such distributive principles. In contrast to some widespread perceptions of revisionist ideology, the chapter concludes that they were committed to an egalitarian, non-meritocratic view of justice.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the role of national identity on Irish foreign policy. It explains that each narrative outlined Irish foreign policy history in a different way and discusses how a particular narrative came to dominate the public debate and thereby successfully to marginalise other competing perspectives. The findings of this study reveal that Irish foreign policy has indeed been a reflection of Irish identity, just as contrasting visions of that very identity have contributed to the shape of Irish foreign policy.

This chapter analyses the central rhetorical divergences exposed by case studies which seriously hamper cooperation between Russia and the EU. The divergences appear to mirror deep policy controversies that are tied to existential issues and consequently to the two parties' identities. Given the difficulties in eradicating their basic differences, the chapter suggests that pragmatism is the most plausible way for Russia and the EU to advance their integration in the sphere of security. Increased cooperation on as many issues and levels as possible might boost a kind of neo-functionalism, which might, in the long run, contribute to further rapprochement in the sphere of security.

The wider Catholic community's experience of the Real in Northern Ireland is evident in the literature. In Them and Us?: Attitudinal Variation Among Churchgoers in Belfast, the writers note that over two-thirds of church-goers who support Sinn Fein have had someone close to them killed or injured in the conflict. These statistics provide us with some indication of the experience of pain of the republicans. The authors also remark that ‘Among churchgoers, Catholics are three times more likely to have been intimidated and twice as likely to have had their homes bombed as Protestants’. Interviews with former members of the Irish Republican Army make it clear that they had all suffered as a result of their being caught up in conflict. There is tragedy, fear, moral confusion, pain and fragmentation at the heart of the interviewees' self-interpretations. A number of the interviewees try to make sense of hurt and pain by blaming others for what they experience as negative. Against this backdrop, victimhood is what offers the interviewees wholeness.

This chapter traces the history of medical charity and the emergence of hospital contributory schemes in Great Britain. The idea of a British hospital system funded by its users is one which began to emerge only in the late nineteenth century. There were two main channels for popular contribution. These were the organised collections of the Hospital Saturday and Hospital Sunday funds and the local subscriptions taken in the work-place, firm and community. This chapter considers the funding crisis which followed War World 1 and describes the evolution of mass contribution into a financial mainstay of the hospital system.

This chapter introduces ideation methods, the second phase of Life Design, where creativity meets clarity. Moving beyond self-reflection, you’ll learn how to generate bold, surprising, and actionable ideas for your life. The Core Method, Core of Creativity, helps balance divergent and convergent thinking to unlock insight and momentum. From wild ideas to grounded next steps, you’ll warm up your creative muscles, generate possibilities, and choose prototypes to test. Two optional methods deepen the process: Opportunity Bingo turns your interests, strengths, and values into fresh combinations, while Future Scenarios stretches your imagination across multiple life paths to surface new options and insights. Whether you ideate alone or with others, the tools in this chapter help you move from stuck to sparked – making creativity a habit and possibility a practice.

Undermining the dual-polity ethos of the nineteenth century opened the door to an insidious encroachment of central controls, and manipulation of local government services and structure by central government. During the 1930s, a general mood of modernisation and streamlining attached to economies of scale pervaded radical thinking in relation to service provision. The major utilities – gas, electricity and water – along with transport such as the rail services, were viewed as national rather than local concerns that needed to be supplied under central rather than local guidance. Modernisers during World War II began preparing for a major restructuring of service provision and the organisation to supply those services. This chapter focuses on World War II and social democracy in Britain, along with the impact of the war on local government, local government reform, the government under Clement Attlee, the nationalisation of industries, the national health service, housing and town planning, and financing of local government.

In the post-war years, Swedish social democracy developed into a hegemonic political force, and with it, neutrality took on a more defined meaning. Determined to ensure that neutrality would not be subject to the criticism it faced after the war, a ‘credible neutrality’ policy was crafted, centred around non-alliance, self-defence and consensus. Active internationalism characterised Sweden's foreign and security policy, and Sweden's ‘good offices’ as a neutral state cohered with domestic institutions such as the welfare state and the Swedish Model.

In Marcel Proust's seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time [À la recherche du temps perdu], the first-person narrator repeatedly affirms that we do not see things objectively but perceive the world through a subjective filter. In this narrative, leading toward the narrator becoming a writer, portrait photographs come to play an intriguing role. Insofar as photographs are pictures produced outside the narrator's consciousness, bearing a trace of “reality,” he must come to terms with their meaning and status, and they perform a singular attraction on him. Especially, portrait photographs of the women he dreams about feeds his desires, as they seem to promise access, contact, and love. As the narrative unfolds, this love of photographs gives insight into the sentimental education of the narrator.

Proust wrote The Search at a time when photographs were already spread widely, and the novel is rich in insight about the early days of technical images. The first volume was published in 1913, whereas the story of the whole series spans from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of the First World War. Just as Benjamin two decades later, Proust could thus look back at the rise of portrait photography and describe the spread of the medium as well as the various responses to it over time. Born in 1871, Proust witnessed the “industrialization” of photography firsthand and saw how private people started to purchase portrait photographs and learned to pose. He also saw how photographs travelled from the private to the public sphere, first with the popularity of celebrity cards and postcards and later with the emergence of the illustrated press. But Proust tells a story that Benjamin did not tell: depicting everyday responses to photographs, he shows what it was like to live with the new regime of technical images.

In 1900, local government in Britain appeared to have a clear purpose within the Constitution, along with resources and prestige much greater than had been the case fifty years previously. The Acts of 1888, 1894 and 1899 for England and Wales, and parallel legislation for Scotland, provided a platform to vest responsibility for delivering a wide range of public services in multi-purpose local authorities. The new liberal values that influenced reform-minded politicians of all parties, and the fears of Conservatives and Liberals over the growth of what they saw as a potentially socialist party in their midst, ensured that central government could not trust local authorities to pursue the policies which were now expected of them. This chapter discusses the growth and decline of local government in Britain. It examines social reform, liberal values and the role of local government, as well as the Local Government Board and the Ministry of Health, housing and town planning, the emergence of the Labour Party and poplarism.

The 1972 Local Government Act and its Scottish counterpart were the culmination of continuous pressures throughout the twentieth century for change in terms both of the size of local authorities and of their inclusivity and professionalism. Social and economic trends such as improved transport, the creation of national mass media and competitiveness among political parties began to eclipse local as opposed to centralised management of services and economic development, and arguably decreased the relevance of local government as an institution central to each individual's well-being. The emergence of the Labour Party to become, by the 1920s, the major opposition to the Conservatives had profound effects on the composition of urban local governments. The arrival of working-class Labour councillors in large numbers destroyed the town halls as gentlemen's clubs and, for many local patricians, the whole character and value of local political activism. In nineteenth-century Britain, even after the formation of the county councils' local notables, there were many elite leaders who dominated their local councils and at the same time defended their position in Parliament.

The 11 September 2001 case serves to illuminate important dividing lines and convergences among the European actors. For many, it signified a paradigm shift after which international interaction abandoned its dominant focus on state-to-state relations. A new, diffuse and not even united actor—international terrorism—had interrupted the ordinary mechanisms of international relations. This chapter discusses the dramatic events that led to major transformations in the machinery of the international system. It examines the actors' framing of 11 September 2001, from the terrorist attacks to the official end of the US campaign in Afghanistan on 5 December 2001, when an agreement on the future of Afghanistan was signed in Rome.

This chapter examines Canadian English from a nationwide point of view, complementing the regional views of the following chapters in this part. It begins with a brief statement of the current demolinguistic status of Canadian English, then reviews the history of English-speaking settlement that led to its establishment, growth and geographic diffusion. This review supports a discussion of the relation between settlement history and the most important linguistic features of modern Canadian English, especially its phonetic and phonological characteristics. A particular focus is on the relative contributions of eighteenth-century American Loyalist settlement and early nineteenth-century British immigration, as well as the later diffusion of those features to Western Canada. Examples of regional variation in vocabulary and pronunciation are then briefly presented, before the chapter concludes with a selective review of previous research on Canadian English.

This chapter outlines some of the characteristics of the ‘postmodern condition’ as defined by Jean-François Lyotard. The cultural condition of postmodernity, which emerges with late capitalism, has led to a dislocation of our accepted political reality. Instead of the universal discourses and ‘metanarratives’ of the past, which were founded on the rational certainties of the Enlightenment, there is a severing of the social bond and a general sense of fragmentation in the fields of knowledge, culture, and social relations. This chapter examines the two main responses to the decline of the metanarrative: the ‘foundationalist’ approach, exemplified by Jürgen Habermas, and the anti-foundationalist or broadly termed ‘poststructuralist’ strategy, which seeks to question these foundations. It also examines nihilism, poststructuralism, universality and the role it plays in radical politics.