This chapter foregrounds the concept of pauper agency. Using the largest corpus of letters by or about the poor ever assembled, it argues that sickness was the core business of the Old Poor Law by the early nineteenth century. Rather than paupers being simply subject to the whim and treatment of the parish, the chapter argues that they had considerable agency. Despite problems of moral hazard and the idea that sickness could be faked, paupers and officials agreed that ill health and its treatment was an area of acceptable contestation.

It is important to start by looking at the very first films that were made, because that's where the story of film editing begins. In many ways it is surprising, given that filmmakers were constructing films of actualities from a variety of viewpoints from quite early on that 'constructed' films remained as one-shot entities for as long as they did. Georges Méliès pioneered the development of trick films. In France, he was also experimenting with multishot films. Méliès's first was L'Affaire Dreyfus made in 1899. Like Attack on a China Mission it was an imagined reconstruction of an actual event, but unlike James Williamson's film it consisted of a series of twelve separate one-shot films detailing separate events of the Dreyfus affair which, when showed together, lasted an unprecedented fifteen minutes.

This chapter chronicles and reflects on the experiences of working ethnographically within, alongside and in collaboration with a large-scale interdisciplinary experiment in computational social science. It does so by recounting, from the ethnographer’s point of view, a number of ‘collaborative moments’ at the awkward intersection of computational data science and ethnographic fieldwork, as partners in the same research project. Here, the anthropologist finds herself in a position at right angles to both the population under study and the other scientists studying them; a chronic condition of oscillating between practising ethnography in a (partly) computational social science framework and doing an ethnography of the very scientific data practices and infrastructures involved. We consider this in/of oscillation not as a point of disciplinary comparison but rather as involving ‘transversal’ collaborations that instantiate forms of non-coherent, intermittent and yet productively mutual co-shaping among partially connected knowledge practices and practitioners. Such a rethinking is crucial, we argue, for understanding new social data ‘complementarities’ and their epistemological, ethical and political ramifications.

Historians writing in the Restoration and early eighteenth century inherited a number of conflicting theories about the patterns and purposes of history, two of which specifically identified historical change as proceeding according to a consistent overall pattern. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries produced many accounts of the past in allegorical form, but John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel is often cited as the original and best, example of the genre. His dissolution of the poem's defining metaphor truncates the work's narrative arc, rendering it, like Andrew Marvell's satires, 'partial' in formal as well as ideological terms. While few writers could have failed to see the political diplomacy in the poem's suspended plotline, Samuel Johnson was by no means the only reader to criticize Dryden's unabashed abandonment of his poem's symbolic narrative.

Under David Cameron’s leadership from 2005 the Conservative Party embarked upon a campaign to rebrand the Party in the minds of voters. In the arena of international policy, a commitment to meet development spending targets and to maintain a separate Department for International Development marked significant shifts in Conservative approaches. Despite this, there is little analysis of the role of international development in rebranding, repositioning and redefining the Party. Even less attention has been paid to the particular role that Africa plays in these processes, in sharp contrast to extensive research on Africa’s role in relation to the self-identification and projected images of Labour Governments and leaders. This chapter begins to fill this gap. It analyses party documents, speeches by members of Cameron’s inner circle, and commentaries by Conservative media and the wider UK press to explore how Africa has featured in a narrative of change in relation to Conservative Party identity. In doing so it considers the role of Africa in defining a new Conservative identity as projected at three levels: within the Party, to potential voters and on an international stage.

Claude Chabrol has excellent new-wave credentials and is in some ways a representative figure for this innovative movement in French cinema. For the small budget of 32 million old francs, he was able to shoot Le Beau Serge over nine weeks in the winter of 1957/8 and to film it in what was essentially his home village. To make his first film, Chabrol returned to the scene of his wartime childhood, the village of Sardent in central France. The reason for this was mainly financial: he had intended to shoot Les Cousins first, but that story was set in Paris and would have been twice as expensive to film. The reception of Les Cousins was, however, in one way problematic, and was a sign of things to come for Chabrol.

European erotic romance offered Amyot the opportunity to teach his stylised Greco-Roman language and rhetoric, and, through it, Christian ethics, morality, and personal and political governance. It became the tool of nationalists. More theoretical politicisation of the genre occurred, initially by monarchomachist Protestant publishers and translators of Heliodorus, then by adapters such as Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare and Mary Sidney wroth. Sidney's Defence of Poetry contains a parallel argument that clearly differentiates between an ideal factual history and a fictional allegory. If European erotic romance could contain semi-biographical personae, it was on the understanding that they should be heavily idealised to conform to the model characters created by the ancient sophists. Translators' and publishers' dedications by Protestant monarchomachists connected erotic romance with characters exhibiting political, cultural and intellectual superiority.

The Scottish Highlands and Islands were furthest from London, remote from the trade routes and commerce of the nation, the last region to experience a battle of great military forces. The Highlands present a clear-cut case of emigration as extrusion, of a poor population propelled outwards by force majeure. The Highland story was punctuated by recurring and dramatic episodes of exodus by emigration, but most of the intermittent and sporadic outflow was within Scotland. Even in wartime, emigration from the Highlands continued, usually associated with landlord policies to rationalise their estates, as in the early Clearances in Sutherland in 1806-1807. Famine was a conclusive symptom of land hunger and low productivity, vulnerability and a misshapen community, in the 1840s emigration accelerated, urged on by landlord assistance, pressure and coercion, and the availability of philanthropic, landlord and colonial assisted passages.

Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano places the committed drinker, in the form of ex-Consul Geoffrey Firmin, in the Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’ festival, so that the main character encounters ‘hell’ in physical and spiritual dimensions. The novel is technically innovative in its aim to register the subjective experience of the Existential drinker: Geoffrey Firmin’s world is constructed through a highly individualised, expressionistic symbolism, a mid-century representation of the modern, alienated self, abandoned and suffering despair in a Godless world – the latter made evident by the novel’s attention to the rise of totalitarianism, which forms the backdrop to the events here on a day close to the onset of the Second World War. There is discussion of the novel’s difficulty and form, and a comparison of some aspects of the novel with Kafka’s The Trial, and how these relate to representation of the Existential drinker.