Marker's filmmaking of the 1980s is prefaced in 1978 by his first foray into installation work. The two-screen Quand le siècle a pris forme passes images of the First World War and the Russian Revolution through a synthesiser, and thus presages some of the effects that his subsequent films deploy. The new computer technology opens windows onto new image worlds, which are explored in different ways in Sans Soleil, 2084, and L'Héritage de la chouette. Marker filmed Junkopia with two colleagues, Frank Simeone and John Chapman, while in San Francisco in July 1981. The film comprises a collage of images and a distinctive soundtrack with no commentary. 2084 occupies a pivotal place among Marker's films of the 1980s. Consisting mainly of footage shot on location among the foothills of Mount Fuji in 1984, Marker's AK charts the making of select scenes from Akira Kurosawa's Ran.

The turmoil in the agrarian and demographic foundations of life reached across the British archipelago. They were on display most critically in Ireland where, in 1821, the population was more than half that of England and three times greater than Scotland's, and also growing very rapidly. The emigration question was interconnected with the way in which the labour supply for the industrialisation of the British economy was achieved. The state of mobility and the transfer of labour out of rural England was becoming much clearer by mid-Victorian times. The beginnings of modern mobility were essentially rural, the origins are found in country cottages and villages, and along the very long and tortuous paths which, for a minority, led to the emigration ships. Only later did mass emigration become an overwhelmingly urban and industrial phenomenon.

In September 1976, the Sunday World reacted to new security legislation by asking 'are we trying to create a new Chile here?'. The government had just declared that 'arising out of the armed conflict now taking place in Northern Ireland, a National Emergency exists affecting the vital interests of the State'. New laws allowing for seven-day detention on 'reasonable suspicion' and permitting the Army to make arrests in certain circumstances were introduced. Between 1972 and 1980, there were 8,105 arrests under Section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act; 1,545 people were charged. The atmosphere was such that even small left-wing groups advised their members that they should 'stop talking too loud in pubs', treat all 'phones with caution' and guard internal documents carefully. Emergency legislation was even used to arrest activists protesting about censorship of feminist literature.

By the 1880s, emigration to North America was rapidly exceeding the entire rural exodus in England and Wales and 'the reserves of potential migration in the rural areas were much reduced'. By then most British emigrants were urban people. In the British case there is a crucial question about the extent of internal mobility in the home context, studied most influentially by Clark and Souden. The campsites, despite their diversity, align in the conditions favourable to migration and emigration, and therefore encourage broader explanations of the British discontinuity. In terms of the structural underpinnings of population mobility and its eventual expression in actual emigration, there are long lines of causation as well as matters of contingency in the story. In the end the rural sector expanded positively and unprecedentedly, to the demands generated by the essential needs of the expanded and industrialising population of the country.

William Shakespeare's imagination could make things from a thousand years ago appear; but he could do so only by making his stage and his actors take on the convincing appearance of a thousand-year-old reality. The dramatic imagination is celebrated as a potent force, as a power that can invoke the dead, recuperate a vanished past, reconstruct a lost history. One of the tutelary spirits of this book is Clio, muse of history, daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne: begotten by power and wisdom upon memory. The sweet song of Orpheus has powers beyond the 'grand / And louder tone' of Clio. Orpheus is classically a model for the historian, one especially apt today given our preoccupation with history as a waking of the dead. By means of his art Orpheus draws Eurydice out of the underworld.

In 'Some Characters Met With in Psychoanalytic Work', Sigmund Freud discusses some 'surprising traits of character' which he has detected in his patients. Freud's speculation on woman's childlessness evokes the third character, Rebecca West, the free-thinking woman in Ibsen's play Rosmersholm , partly complicit in the suicide of Beata, Johannes Rosmer's first wife. Freud writes a third section, 'Criminals from a Sense of Guilt', whose argument, while short, is fascinating: criminal deeds attempt to mitigate a sense of guilt. Freud continues to work with guilt in essays published in the 1920s. They include 'The Ego and the Id' and 'Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety'. Freud introduces another distinction, in referring to a differentiation within the ego by which it narcissistically looks at itself. He had considered narcissism when discussing the artist and creativity, in 'Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood', and further in 'On Narcissism, an Introduction'.

This chapter discusses Bourdieu’s ‘activism’ of the 1990s. He consolidated earlier thinking about the field of politics with a view to inserting himself within that field. He reasserted his earlier disquiet about the consecrated status of academic philosophy with a view to exemplifying the need, instead, for the exercise of thought in action. The chapter discusses Bourdieu’s publishing ventures and his involvement with the International Parliament of Writers. It considers his interventions against neo-liberalism and analyses La sociologie est un sport de combat as an attempt to represent in film a mode of intellectualist social action.

This chapter contains examples of attempts at criticism inspired by Sigmund Freud. The first uses Freud to consider a poem by William Blake, the second to interpret a familiar Sherlock Holmes short story. Freud compares Oedipus with Hamlet, and with Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, for the significance of parricide; but, in Blake, aggression toward the parents seems equalled by a perception of the parents' aggression. Freud discusses the ambivalence of people's feelings about themselves and each other, liking to hate and hating to like, having unconscious emotions ('affects'), and in doing so, follows Blake. The coincidence of dates between Holmes and Freud and the similarity of their methods are significant: detective and psychoanalyst both work by looking for clues, traces of the past.

Chapter 2 applies the strategic interpretation outlined previously to US foreign policy on Syria, explicitly understood as a reference to Obama’s redline. It demonstrates that this is not the hardline ultimatum it was made out to be; but is in fact a calculated construct that expresses Obama’s own preferences concerning US involvement in the crisis. Specifically, it analyses Obama’s real intentions in setting the redline to reveal that these have been misinterpreted. More specifically, that pre-existing ideas surrounding the chemical weapons taboo have caused Obama’s statement to be misconstrued as a be-all-and-end-all of US foreign policy on Syria. It examines the wider policy context at the time to demonstrate that this interpretation was diametrically opposed to Obama’s professed position and that the redline actually comprises a much softer and moderate allusion to the taboo.

In 1919, Afghanistan won its independence from British suzerainty. In each subsequent year, the state celebrated the event by staging military parades and organising cultural programmes – and sporting competitions. This chapter considers the independence games from the perspective of British diplomats in Afghanistan who also took part in the contests. In particular, the chapter studies the reports written by British diplomats on the games and explores how notions of fair play and athleticism were projected on the independent state of Afghanistan. The chapter asks if these reports are indicative of larger political and/or colonial ambitions. Complicating conventional assumptions on the primacy of the political in diplomatic relations, this chapter suggests that the physical encounter constituted a central feature in British–Afghan relations.

This chapter discusses the foundation and transformation of medical societies in the Southern Netherlands from the late eighteenth century to 1840. It explores, how the model of eighteenth-century learned societies, like other institutions of the Ancien Régime such as universities, was refashioned into a new, uniquely medical institution. Central to this refashioning was the transformation of societies’ focus on usefulness to the general public ‒ an ideal that was typical of late eighteenth-century learned culture ‒ into a more concrete promotion of science among a newly conceived professional community of physicians. The chapter analyzes shifts in societies’ membership, mission and social role against the background of shifting political regimes (respectively the Austrian, French, Dutch and Belgian authorities), which paralleled successive stages of medical reform.

Chapter 2 investigates how translators reconstructed the parable of the Prodigal Son in light of sacramental penance. In the centuries following the Fourth Lateran Council, the parable clashed with church doctrine insofar as the Gospel story features forgiveness of sin before confession and without restitution for the son’s misdeeds. Consequently, when translating the Prodigal Son into devotional works like The South English Ministry and Passion, The Mirour of Mans Saluacioune, and Book to a Mother, authors incorporated confession and sometimes even satisfaction into their retellings. Based on this integration of contemporary doctrine, retellings may appear to subordinate a scriptural story to institutional teachings and ecclesiastical power. But the chapter shows that the parables emphasise divine agency and the power of the individual penitent far more than the role of a priest. It especially focuses on the retelling in Book to a Mother – a potentially Lollard form of living that includes the most extensive integration of sacramental teachings into the parable. Although the retelling affirms the contemporary sacrament, it suggests that by translating the parable’s events into acts of penance, lay men and women may become biblical exemplars who preach the gospel more authoritatively than many priests.

It is usually assumed that the maidens in Chaucer’s Sir Thopas who ‘mourn’ for him ‘when hem were bet to slepe’ are a parodic misunderstanding of the habit of romance knights of mourning for their ladies. This chapter argues that the maiden in love who passes sleepless nights lamenting is characteristic of a significant proportion of the metrical romances that Chaucer is imitating; it is the number of the maidens, the moralistic attitude to their sleep and the suppression of their agency that constitute the joke.

Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie can be considered the pinnacle of his career so far. But not only is La Cérémonie a masterful film in its own right, it can also be seen as a compendium of some of the motifs that characterise Chabrol's work as a whole. Above and beyond individual cases, the fait divers as a form can be usefully compared to Chabrol's cinema in general. The film thus functions both as a thriller and, in a political sense, as an illustration of the class war which Chabrol continues to observe in French society. The representation of Sophie, Violette and Julie as variations on the femme fatale is partly dependent on Chabrol's use of the expressionist mise en scène associated with film noir. Ambivalence characterises Chabrol's male characters, for example the noble avenger-cowardly liar Charles in Que la bête meure or the white knight-greedy manipulator Wolf in Masques.