Algeria’s close geographic proximity to war-torn Europe meant that war-time conditions debilitated the tiny PCA, which was illegal from September 1939 until July 1943. As the war unfolded, and especially under the Vichy regime, the public political space that had opened up during the Popular Front period contracted. The PCA’s policy on independence changed substantially over the war years. From September 1939 until June 1941, the Comintern saw the war as the product of inter-imperialist rivalry. The PCA called for independence as a means of weakening French imperialism. But from June 1941, and especially after Algiers became the capital of Free France, French Communists succeeded once more in promoting their agenda within the diminished PCA, prioritising the anti-fascist struggle over independence. The PCF’s key role in the anti-fascist struggle meant that it emerged strengthened from the war. By contrast, the PCA’s back-pedalling on independence and its vitriol against organisations that rejected its priorities led Algerian nationalists to view it with suspicion and mistrust.

Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) has provided a platform for the preservation and articulation of ethnic Irishness within and beyond the island. This chapter considers the uniqueness of Gaelic games set against the broad outline of patterns of participation in sport across the world more generally. It focuses on the distinctive commitment to an amateur ethos as reflected in the importance of community, or what Hilary Tovey and Perry Share have termed the 'urge to community'. The chapter argues that the GAA is the dominant marker of Irish cultural identity. The GAA was founded in 1884 with the objective of promoting interest in Irish sporting and athletic pastimes. Irish participation in sport might be distinctive in terms of the literal and figurative distinctiveness of Gaelic games. But, as a nation, Ireland is located more or less within the typical European parameters of participation in sport and physical activity.

Chapter 8 looks to the future and discusses possible trajectories for the development of older people’s interest organisations and the potential area of focus they may adopt in the coming decades. It critically explores how older people’s interest organisation define their constituency, generational politics and ageing as a cross-generational issue, ageing in a globalised world and how the politics of old age and the notion of collective identities in later life may evolve in the coming decades.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Catholic thinkers were preoccupied with the threats that secular, liberal and socialist ideals presented to religiosity. English Catholics like Robert Hugh Benson and Hillaire Belloc viewed the survival of Catholicism in post-Reformation Ireland as a historical miracle. For more than half a century, Catholic sociology articulated influential visions of Ireland's future. In the absence of a realistic socialist threat, the main focus of Catholic sociology was to understand and combat any kind of voice of social change that might foster secularism. The initial intellectual project of Catholic sociology was to combat the influence of socialism. Sociology for both Fr Edward Cahill and Jeremiah Newman was the science of reproducing Catholic Ireland from one generation to the next. Both emphasised the role of law in enforcing Catholic public morality and thereby enforcing social norms that were in accordance with Catholic ideals.

Leon Trotsky became known in Britain after the Bolshevik Revolution in association with Lenin, as he did across the globe. Trotsky was a rich source of ideas and imagery for George Orwell, but he never accepted Trotsky's explanation of Stalinism or his defence of Leninism. Orwell's major posthumous influence was support for the most fervent anti-Communism because of his depiction of monstrous evil in Nineteen Eighty-Four; some Tribune socialists became adherents of a rival, more optimistic, analysis of Stalinism with roots in Trotskyism. Within a few years of one another, three of the Trotskyist entrist groups emerged from the Labour Party competing for attention as the Socialist Labour League, the International Socialists and the International Marxist Group. The perception that the Soviet Union in 1960 as dynamic and growing on the basis of the centrally planned, state-owned economy was not confined to elements of the left in Britain.

Chapter Two explores the impact of Herbartianism on British educational culture, interrogating why Herbartian theorists prioritised the teaching of history through reading books. It is organised into five sections. The first introduces both Herbartian theories and key educationists, arguing that too little is known about the significance of this pedagogical system and its highly influential advocates. The second section discusses the state of child psychology in late-Victorian Britain and perceived need to gear schooling towards moral and civic values. The third examines how Herbartians thought history should best be taught in order to draw out moral lessons and thus contribute to citizenship education, especially through the teaching of chronology and empathy. The fourth section develops this analysis, demonstrating how Herbartians used history to provide a series of lessons in what they dubbed ‘race recapitulation theory’. The chapter finishes with some comments on how these pedagogical developments influenced later educational psychologists.

Despite his involvement with Graham Greene and his tailoring aspects of his fiction to suit British tastes, R. K. Narayan did not travel outside India until the second half of his life. Then, after receiving a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship that took him to the United States in 1956, he paid a number of visits to American universities, among them the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Texas at Austin. Notable among these was a period as Visiting Professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City in the spring of 1969, a visit that he wrote about without identifying his hosts in one of his best-known essays, the title piece of his collection, Reluctant Guru (1974). This chapter focuses on Narayan's middle-period novels, including The Guide (1958), The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961), The Vendor of Sweets (1967) and The Painter of Signs (1976).

This chapter traces many of the deepest difficulties that Europe and Ireland face in escaping the crisis to the difficult interactions between the worlds of capitalism within Europe. Ireland's recovery from the economic crisis will bring it face to face again with the question of where it will be located within the worlds of capitalism. Ireland's place within capitalism is defined by its relations with the centres of the global economy. Ireland's place within capitalism is also defined by the broader and deeper structures of its political economy and, in particular, the social contract in the society as a whole. The chapter shows that there are significant differences in the underlying social contracts across the various worlds of capitalism in Europe. In order to protect liberal values in the broadest sense in Europe, European economies and societies will need to rediscover their own distinctive 'non-liberal' policies, institutions and social contracts.