This chapter illustrates that with the film Topsy-Turvy. Mike Leigh emerged from the closet, firmly declaring his long-standing delight in the comic operas of librettist William Schwenck Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan. The emergence was a spectacular one given both the film's unusually lavish production values and the highly positive reaction to it. In America Topsy-Turvy was named the Year's Best Picture by both the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. It also marked a breakthrough for Leigh in that it was the first film he made that had no television money in it at all, in any shape or form. This film had been Leigh's most purely pleasurable film since Life Is Sweet, it is a scrupulous, vibrant celebration of the theatre, of theatre folk in general, and of these two men of the theatre and their associates in particular.

This chapter brings Life Design to life through the stories of Nina, John, and Ingrid – three individuals at different life stages who used Life Design to navigate uncertainty and shape meaningful futures. Nina, an overwhelmed student, moved from confusion to clarity by experimenting with small actions. John, a mid-career professional, shifted from binary thinking to joyful exploration, blending structure with creativity. Ingrid, a seasoned leader, transformed the question “Is this it?” into a vibrant new chapter of self-expression and community-building. These stories show how Life Design builds confidence, unlocks energy, and supports real change – not through dramatic leaps, but through small, intentional steps. Whether you’re early in your career, mid-transition, or reflecting on your next chapter, Life Design empowers you to explore, experiment, and evolve. The tools that follow are grounded in lived experience – and ready to help you shape your own story.

The next chapter shows that while substantial philosophical differences did emerge on the Left in this period, they in fact centred on the extent to which egalitarians should aim to foster a new spirit of fellowship and social solidarity. It could be said that the revisionists neglected the importance of community and therefore ‘attacked socialist ideology at its heart’. This chapter argues that this reformulated criticism does indeed provide a useful diagnosis of the basic ideological difference between certain revisionists and other socialists in this period.

At the turn of the 1990s, domestic and external changes would make a decisive impact on Swedish identity and neutrality. Carl Bildt's non-socialist coalition broke the hegemonic position of the Social Democratic Party, instigating a new approach to the Swedish Model, Europe, and neutrality. Bildt wanted to steer Sweden away from the past towards a European identity where neutrality had no place. An equally powerful challenge came from the external realm, where the collapse of bipolarity appeared to make neutrality obsolete. The meaning of security expanded beyond traditional definitions that focused on the state. The 1990s was a significant period for neutrality per se as many neutral states struggled to understand their place in the new post-Cold War world. For Bildt, neutrality was no longer an appropriate way to describe Swedish security policy.

This chapter deals with Mike Leigh's film, High Hopes. Mike's need to create a stronger bond with his mother, after his father's death, informs one of the key character relationships in High Hopes. The caricatured characters in High Hopes were the ones who were inelastic, locked into behaviour patterns designed to keep up the images they have of themselves and which they wish to project to the world. Thus, the film had a marked emphasis of dramatic ‘realism’, using a comic strategy. This chapter throws light on each of the characters in the film, who make important decisions and undergo significant events, but do not experience artificial transformations or have their lives miraculously changed. The film ends on a warm, quietly optimistic note, suggesting high hopes for the future through a newly discovered continuity between the generations.

This introductory chapter discusses the National Missile Defence (NMD) Act of 1999, which established in law the policies of sending a missile defence system as soon as it was technologically possible; addresses the questions of identity and how one should make sense of the NMD; and introduces international relations. It then looks at the link between national identity and foreign policy, before the chapter ends with an outline of the following chapters.

Life Design is more than a personal tool – it’s a catalyst for scaling change across individuals, organizations, and society. This chapter explores how Life Design empowers people of all ages to navigate transitions with creativity and confidence – from children and students to midcareer professionals, athletes, and retirees. At the organizational level, Life Design supports onboarding, leadership, DEI, and well-being, fostering human potential across the employee lifecycle. At the societal level, it provides a human-centered response to demographic shifts, the future of work, and mental health crises, with applications from the UN to the WEF. Life Design legitimizes adult prototyping, boosts psychological capital (hope, efficacy, resilience, optimism), and enables meaningful transitions through action-oriented reflection and design methods. Whether you’re shaping your next chapter or transforming an institution, this chapter shows how Life Design can scale with you – enabling personal agency and collective impact in a world of complexity and change.

Every day, millions of Americans face barriers accessing prescription drugs because of delays and denials driven by prior authorization. Though this practice seeks to guard against runaway health care costs and unnecessary treatments, it can keep out of reach quite necessary drugs for common conditions such as diabetes and depression. Prescription drugs are a particularly important setting in which to examine this insurance practice not only because approximately two-thirds of American adults take prescription drugs, but also because this setting is astonishingly complex, placing heavy informational burdens on patients as well as on their physicians. This complexity is driven in part by each health insurer managing its own formulary, such that there is uncertainty about coverage whenever one changes insurers, with physicians often feeling as though they are prescribing in a black box. Drawing on interviews with patients and physicians, this chapter shows that discretion-laden medical necessity guidelines, coupled with formulary variation across insurers, can lead to treatment interruptions that exact a health and economic price for patients, especially those with fewer resources.

This chapter establishes that progressives of the early twentieth century based their ideas about social justice on a strong principle of economic reciprocity, and a firm conviction that market rewards took no account of the social character of economic production. The British Left saw economic prosperity as the product of the collective efforts of the whole community rather than as the result of the heroic dynamism of isolated wealth-creators. Although progressives therefore thought that it was fair to make income conditional on some form of social contribution, they did not believe that income should be proportionate to the market value of that contribution.

Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Art is a venture that offers readers easy access to the most up-to-date research across the whole range of Islamic art. Building on the long and distinguished tradition of Edinburgh University Press in publishing books on the Islamic world, it is a forum for studies that, while closely focused, also open wide horizons. Books in the series, for example, concentrate in an accessible way, and in accessible, clear, plain English, on the art of a single century, dynasty or geographical area; on the meaning of works of art; on a given medium in a restricted time frame; or on analyses of key works in their wider contexts. A balance is maintained as far as possible between successive titles, so that various parts of the Islamic world and various media and approaches are represented.

Books in the series are academic monographs of intellectual distinction that mark a significant advance in the field. While they are naturally aimed at an advanced and graduate academic audience, a complementary target readership is the worldwide community of specialists in Islamic art – professionals who work in universities, research institutes, auction houses and museums – as well as that elusive character, the interested general reader.

This chapter begins by considering what a narrative's form, or structure, can tell us about its function. We have previously encountered several so-called ‘international tales’ and the present chapter will continue discussing these to present the reader with further examples and interpretations. For instance, at the beginning of Robertson's ‘Traveller-Judge’ narrative discussed in the previous chapter, he remarks that he thinks that his story might ‘come under some of the international tales […] because you find that these Traveller tales are international tales’ (TAD 38131). Considering the ATU classifications described above, Robertson's narrative does not appear to conform to the characteristics of any one tale-type. At the same time, Robertson's awareness of international tale-types is not surprising; strong tradition-bearers often combine, and reimagine, well-known international and local tales. Many Travellers’ stories come to represent a melange of international tale-types that are modified to reflect local conditions. These narrative melanges are palpable demonstrations of the distinctiveness of Traveller storytelling that has been alluded to throughout this book. In the context of the combination of tale-types and motifs, Traveller storytelling can be viewed as a distinctive mode of orality where the narrators create narrative ecotypes (cf. von Sydow 1934: 349).

The reader will recall from the previous chapter that a narrative ecotype is a version of an international tale-type that has adapted to a certain socio-cultural context. This adaptation amounts to combining and manipulating various plots and motifs that can be shown to appear in other discrete socio-cultural contexts. It is not the purpose here to ask how or why these plots and motifs appear in discrete contexts, but to examine how the Travellers’ stories become embedded with nuanced meanings that reflect their unique culture and lived experiences.

This chapter looks more systematically at debates about the distribution of income and wealth. It is divided into three sections, each addressing a concept that was fundamental to progressive thinking about this issue: equality, need, and incentive. It shows that the majority of progressives favoured the principles of need and, reluctantly, incentive, leading them to endorse a distributive pattern that was loosely, although not precisely, egalitarian. The final section of the chapter outlines the policies that followed from these theoretical commitments.

Britain has sought to integrate environmental concerns into policy decision-making at all levels. To this end, the first environment white paper introduced two institutions which would ‘ensure that … environmental issues are fully weighed in decisions’. One was the Cabinet Committee for the Environment, later replaced by the Ministerial Committee on the Environment. The other was the introduction of a ‘green minister’ in each government department. In the first white paper on sustainable development, published in 1994, the government confirmed its commitment to policy integration. How and to what extent was this government aspiration achieved over the problem of global warming? This chapter focuses on British policy integration on global warming by first providing an overview on energy policy and global warming, competitive prices versus energy efficiency, renewable energy, and coal protection. It then discusses transport policy and global warming, measures to improve fuel efficiency, and research and development on low-emission vehicles.