The Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) made contact with a firm in Prague called Omnipol. The PIRA and Irish National Liberation Army's (INLA) continental campaign against British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) and British diplomatic personnel and interests would not go down well in West German public opinion. Until 1978, the PIRA operated exclusively in Ireland and in Great Britain but that year it attacked BAOR in West Germany, HA-XXII (department in charge of terrorism) explained. Many Arab terrorists were able to use the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a rest base or a transit country without any interference from the Stasi or the East German authorities. According to Jens Gieseke, between 1970 and 1989 almost 1,900 people from fifteen different states were trained although their numbers were reduced in the 1980s, possibly because of financial considerations.

This chapter argues that the course of the propaganda 'war on terror' fuelled a domestic rethink of the propaganda apparatus in Britain and the US. This resulted in far-reaching changes to combat the vaguely defined and globally dispersed enemy. Echoing the traditional narratives in propaganda, some British officers seemed to perceive the US as having weaker traditional boundaries and stressed the purity of UK Psychological Operations (PSYOP) activities. The British military, particularly in recent years, has evolved from its effects-based approach, toward coordinated Information Operations (IO) where PSYOP and Media Operations unite behind a holistic effort to achieve clearly defined objectives. The chapter shows how government agencies adapted to the demands of a fluid media environment. Cross-government integration is perhaps a logical consequence of the increasing scale of the propaganda operation; it appeared to provide a more responsive solution honed to departmental requirements.

This chapter presents accounts of several interviews conducted with Julio Medem, who is regarded as the most important and original Spanish filmmaker. Medem was born in San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain and showed an interest in movies since childhood, when he would take his father's Super 8 camera and shoot at night, avoiding everybody's attention. He enjoys a reputation in Basque, Spanish, European and even World cinema for the colourful eroticism, subjective camerawork, elaborate plotting, structural equations, straight-faced absurdity and obsessions with symmetry, duality and chance that characterise the films he has written and directed. The interviews suggest that claims on Medem's auteurism combine appreciation of his subjectivity with an indulgence of his solipsism and a justification of authorial punctuation in the service of emotion, reflection and melancholy, but often separate him from the traditions, legacy, clichés and contemporary context of Spanish, and especially Basque, cinema.

This chapter looks at the evolution of the pro-Soviet Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) opposition of the 1960s and 1970s and the debilitating effect of the inconsistent narrative of 'anti-revisionism'. It then considers the disastrous impact that the Stalinised version of 'Leninism' had on the pro-Chinese CPGB oppositionists of the 1960s. The year 1977, like 1945, was another year of rebellion for a significant section of the CPGB's left opposition. The group emerged in 1961-1962 and initial activities appeared to have been based around interventions in internal CPGB meetings and schools, composing articles for the party press and visiting contacts around the country. There then followed an extremely fractious history of splits (both from the CPGB parent body and among the 'anti-revisionist' factions). The Action Centre for Marxist-Leninist Unity was fairly sanguine about the splits that had taken place in the Committee to Defeat Revisionism for Communist Unity.

This chapter provides some of the insights and understandings about Irish difference. The notion of cultural difference is not just an Irish story, but a story of nations and ethnic groups all over the world. The story of modernity revolves around people coming to see and understand themselves as belonging to nations. When it comes to national difference, the Irish may then be the same as the French, Dutch, Spanish, Italians and every other nation but we make mountains out of a molehill when it comes to cultural difference. Although there were other European nations that made Catholicism a keystone of national difference, there were many factors that made the Irish project different. The legacies of the colonial strategies were imprinted on Irish minds, bodies and souls for generations, particularly in relation to the way the Irish related to sex and alcohol.

The legacy of the Enlightenment had established the crusades as a reference point for cultural commentary as much on contemporary as on medieval society. Remarkably, the patterns of analysis of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century have scarcely gone away: empathy; disapproval; relevance; the role of religion; materialist reductionism. François-René Chateaubriand and Napoleon Bonaparte initiated two of the most influential nineteenth-century developments in nineteenth-century crusade studies. They are the interest in the crusades as a Christian-cultural mission and a precursor of new direct western European political engagement with the Muslim world and the Near East. For Joseph-François Michaud, the crusades offered a familiar, but apparently apolitical and safely distant subject with which to capture a lucrative audience while promoting his far from neutral ideas about western religion, culture, civilisation and France. Michaud's themes of nationalism and colonialism redefined popular as well as academic debate on the crusades.

This chapter reviews the socioeconomic determinants of mental stress in Ireland. A number of possible indicators of mental stress are covered such as the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) score and also suicide and subjective well-being (SWB). The chapter examines the relationship between social and economic conditions and mental stress for the more modern era and distinguishes between two types of study: cross-section and time-series. Cross-section studies are based on individual-level data and examine the degree to which one observes an association between the incidence of mental stress and individual-level socioeconomic factors. Some examples of individual-level socioeconomic factors are age, gender, principal economic status (PES), education and income. Time-series studies look at aggregate historical data for factors such as suicide or hospital admissions. It also examine the degree to which we observe over time an association between these measures and macroeconomic aggregates such as GDP growth, unemployment, inflation and so on.