More than a decade on from the Belfast agreement, the sectarian 'force field' of antagonism in Northern Ireland remained as strong as ever. The Belfast agreement restricts north-south collaboration to twelve specified policy domains in an annexe, though the main body of the text speaks of 'at least' six implementation bodies and six areas of policy cooperation. To make the 'external' arrangements work, 'internal' governance of Northern Ireland must place a premium on dialogue and deliberation across sectarian boundaries. This can best be done through a requirement to reach cross-communal majorities on executive formation and dissolution. To implement the constitutional changes, new legislation would be required substantially amending the Northern Ireland Act 1998, passed at Westminster to implement the agreement, and the Northern Ireland Act 2006, which paved the way for renewed devolution.

The chapters in this section go beyond the riddles’ words to explore the ideas that theoretically-inflected approaches can reveal in them. This approach is not new; the study of early medieval riddles has already benefitted from gender and sexuality studies, among other interdisciplinary approaches. The chapters here use the riddles to test ideas about humour, sentience, monstrosity, ecofeminism, hyper-objects, and conceptual blending.

This introductory chapter lays down the theoretical framework for the foregoing analyses, taking many cues from legal studies, US Supreme Court cases and Foucauldian theory. In the world of the Western, the procedural focus of American law gets in the way of justice. The genre embraces justice by gun violence rather than by trial, and has therefore often been read as ‘anti-law.’ From the early dime-novel fascination with such outlaws and renegades as Billy the Kid and Jesse James, through depictions of lynching in Owen Wister’s 1902 novel, The Virginian, and the film The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), to the guns-blazing heroics of films such as Rio Bravo (1959), High Noon (1952), and Shane (1953), through the darker critiques of The Gunfighter (1950), The Wild Bunch (1969), and Unforgiven (1992), to the postmodern pastiche of Django Unchained (2012), the Western has nourished a vision of social organization and a means for delivering justice that operates outside the official parameters of American law, relying on a gunslinging hero to uphold order. This chapter argues, in fact, that this opposition is progressively undone in the genre’s formulaic shootouts. The cherished antipathy between ‘the law’ and the Western’s ‘law of the gun’ is, in short, unfounded.

Chapter 7 highlights the unique features of Ireland’s biodiversity profile and emphasises the importance of its conservation. The discussion explores Ireland’s experience of implementing the birds and habitats directives which form the cornerstone of EU nature policy and its international commitments. Central to their implementation is the creation of a European-wide network of sites for habitats and species called Natura 2000. The chapter illustrates that in Ireland many of these habitats do not reach a favourable status when measured against international and legal obligations to protect biodiversity. Central to explanations of Ireland’s biodiversity conservation approaches is that all stages of implementation of the birds and habitats directives have been subject to high adaptational pressures and conflict between the National Parks and Wildlife Services and stakeholders whose private property can be subject to this legislation. The discussion pays particular attention to the efforts to ban turf cutting on raised boglands in special areas of conservation and the conflict this has sparked.

The conclusion takes stock of the variety of scientific practices and performances that animated the meetings of nineteenth-century medical societies. It identifies a process of growing autonomy of the medical sciences as a connecting thread. It also highlights how societies met a need for deliberation and debate among physicians, and acted as spaces where scientific standards could be set and imposed. This need for a broader basis did not disappear with the advent of professionalized science, the book concludes, but was articulated in new ways in the twentieth century.

This chapter deploys a critical security studies approach to 'unpack' environmental security in the Asia-Pacific. A critical approach resists a disciplinary neo-liberalism as the paradigm for achieving 'freedom' or overcoming environmental harm. As Axel Honneth suggests, harm is implicated in the problems of recognition. Environmental harm arises in part through the costs to life and health associated with environmental degradation and unsustainable development. Environmental degradation and resource decline, and the important matter of how to overcome them, have become crucial challenges for the Asia-Pacific. The chapter claims that 'emancipatory change constitutes the primary purpose' of critical security studies. A human security approach provides a broader window on the relationship between environmental decline and insecurity. The human security dimension of environmental degradation is acknowledged in the Asia-Pacific, in official policy discourse and in what might be called the 'commentary' and research community.

This chapter proposes to return the female characters to the centre of history's stage, to reopen the closet to which they were seemingly confined in Henry V. In King John, in addition to the stage presence of the warlike Queen Eleanor, whilst the men are failing to protect their country and save 'mother England' from foreign occupation, brave English women are taking matters into their own hands. Constance's verbal performance in King John is reminiscent of the female roles in Richard III, for here women's tongues are likewise sharp and active. The impact of images of women conveyed via the language of the plays should not be underestimated. It has been argued that William Shakespeare's audiences possessed a highly tuned 'image consciousness' inherited from their medieval ancestors, so that spectators at the drama could readily construct offstage pictures in the mind's eye.

Devolution was one of the defining issues in British politics during the late 1970s. It was a fundamental concern for the Conservative Party. The party had a uniquely strong tradition of support for the principle of the United Kingdom, but by the mid-1970s it had accepted the need for some kind of devolution as a means of avoiding other more radical changes. Official policy was therefore to support a directly elected assembly in Scotland. Though this commitment remained it was less concrete by 1979 than it had been at the beginning of the period. Support for such an institution became more circumstantial and qualified. Philosophical arguments in support of devolution appear to have been employed less often. The focus was more on the negative consequences of Labour’s specific proposals. However, devolution was not rejected outright. That eighteen years of Conservative government in which nothing was done about devolution followed, was not as inevitable in the preceding years as it might later appear.

In May 1987, using some of the money inherited from his father, Jarman had bought a small fisherman's cottage by the sea at Dungeness, the bleak and windswept shingle bank which projects into the English Channel. Prospect Cottage and its garden became his retreat from the pressures of living under permanent media scrutiny as one of the few well-known people prepared to admit to being HIV positive. The Garden is not only about his new garden in Dungeness. It gathers up into itself all the lost gardens of his childhood: his grandmother's garden in Northwood. It could be argued that Jarman's use of two young men as a composite 'Christ' is an attempt to overcome the limitations of the archetype, restoring the missing sexual component and emphasising relationship as the goal of human completeness rather than anything located purely within the individual.

Jarman's first feature-length film was remarkable in many ways and in at least three respects was virtually unique at the time for a commercially distributed picture. Patrik Steede, a close friend of Jarman, was a complex and slightly sinister personality whose sadomasochistic imagination had been nourished by an incident in his childhood when his mother had 'chained him to a meat hook and whipped him with a riding crop.' The decision to make the film in Latin was often defended by Jarman as a form of realism which helped him to bypass the problem of stilted and unconvincing dialogue which often plagued the traditional historical film. Jarman's remarks about his own films are always interesting but they can sometimes be seriously misleading. Jarman later lamented that undue attention to the overtly sexual aspects of his film prevented audiences from responding to the inner psychological drama being enacted.

This is the longest section in the book and comprises seventeen poems, many of which use satire not only to delight a sympathetic readership but also as a way of demonstrating defiance and voicing outrage at the actions of the authorities both during and after Peterloo. The introduction explores how writers in the Romantic period, from the full range of the cultural spectrum, used satire as a form of cultural defiance and challenge to authority at a time when any form of opposition was deemed seditious. Another theme evident is that of chivalry, a contentious issue during the eighteenth century with its revival by conservatives such as Edmund Burke fuelling a radical counter-revival focussed on a new age of political chivalry. As a consequence, the language and symbolism of chivalry was adopted by both conservatives and radicals in support of their cause. The Manchester Yeomanry Cavalry is the target of many of thesatirical poems in this section, alongside the detested politicans, Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth and the Manchester Magistrate, Reverend Ethelstone. It includes poems written by the radical writers, Robert Shorter and Allen Davenport.