This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book investigates the ways in which the crusades have been observed by historians from 1090. Especial emphasis is placed on the academic after-life of the crusades from the sixteenth to twenty-first centuries. The book attempts to describe the history of the different opinions, how they have been adopted and their historical contexts. Few events of European history have captured the sentiments of contemporaries and the imaginations of later observers more vividly than the series of Christian wars now known as the crusades. Traditions, ideology and institutions grew up thickly around these wars. The debate in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries revolved around essentially materialist interpretations, the crusades as wars of conquest, motors of economic expansion and expressions of colonialism.

Higher education has splintered into disciplinary enclaves in which the goal often becomes one of doing research to address disciplinary concerns and little else. On topics such as sustainability, there is an urgent need to become interdisciplinary, engaged and solutions focused. Maine’s Sustainability Centre (SSI) offers an exemplar for addressing complex environmental problems. This chapter presents a model for universities as they address a range of issues that interlink social and environmental concerns.

This chapter reflects more broadly on Labour's agenda for democratic renewal. It compares the case studies, focusing on the principles of representativeness and responsiveness. Responsiveness is derived from the concept of popular control, while representativeness derives from the notion of political equality. A key theme which connects all of the case studies is the inherent difficulty in institutionalising forms of consultation and community engagement, and then sustaining dialogue with civil society. The chapter examines the emergence of the 'Big Society' agenda and its links with Labour's approach to democratic renewal. The Big Society being the flagship policy agenda of David Cameron's Conservative Coalition government in the UK, by which localism and civic engagement are to be reinvigorated. While governments of all hues have shown an interest in finding new mechanisms to enhance the citizen 'voice', in Australia and Britain this has largely been an agenda driven by Labour.

The vast terrain, limited infrastructure, rigidly-divided urban working class and overwhelmingly rural population made the diffusion of socialist ideas extremely difficult. When the PCF’s Algerian region was launched in 1920, its European membership felt that revolution in France was a prerequisite for a socialist Algeria that would remain part of France. Under pressure from the Comintern, which saw anti-colonial and national liberation struggles as means of weakening imperialism, Communists in Algeria eventually adopted a policy in support of Algerian independence. However, their call for independence and their anti-colonial opposition to the Rif War precipitated the wrath of the French state, which subjected them to heavy repression, with prison sentences of up to two years. Together with purges resulting from the Comintern’s New Line, the Algerian communist movement was decimated by 1930.

The third chapter examines Livingstone’s Victorian commemoration by focusing on the ways he was constructed in 1874, the year his corpse was returned to British soil. When Livingstone passed away in Chitambo’s village after a debilitating illness, his attendants buried his innards and preserved his body before transporting it to the East African coast. From there, his remains were shipped to Britain where he was granted a national funeral in Westminster Abbey. The circumstances of Livingstone’s death took on sensational proportions in the contemporary press. He was venerated in a profusion of obituaries, eulogies, and elegiac poetry. Focusing solely on the year of Livingstone’s interment, and literary genres that deal with death, present an opportunity to explore a wealth of previously unexamined writing that helped lay the foundation of his legacy. This memorialisation casts insight into the period’s cult of the hero and its culture of death and mourning. Moreover, by examining the differing ways that Livingstone was produced in diverse social spaces, his name is revealed to be the subject of dispute. While Livingstone was a hero of Victorian culture, he is better thought of as a hero with multiple meanings for a plurality of Victorian cultures.

This chapter introduces cases of the New Social Democracy (NSD) in action. It describes the Australian roots of the NSD and reinforces the renewed links between the British and Australian Labour parties. The chapter then focuses on four cases of Labour governments directly influenced by the NSD, beginning with the 'chemically pure' case of New Labour (1997-2010). It also addresses two key areas neglected in the growing literature on New Labour. They are the links between its external programme for democratic renewal and the internal reforms that sought to embed the party more widely with civil society. The chapter charts the preoccupations and activities of three Australian Labor governments: the Victorian Labor government headed by Steve Bracks, the South Australian Labor government headed by Mike Rann, and the federal Rudd government.

This chapter provides a detailed reading of John Schlesinger's 1963 film Billy Liar. It aims to demonstrate that a British film such as this sustains the kind of detailed aesthetic discussion that is usually reserved for films from other modes of cinema. Towards the end of Billy Liar, Billy Fisher, the liar of the title, having previously arranged to go to London with his friend Liz, is faced with the possibility that he might finally have to go. The time for talking has now finished and Billy needs to act but it becomes increasingly clear that he cannot go through with his plan. The spaces and places of Billy Liar are vital and a fully integrated component in this film's specific examination of the sometimes contradictory and often problematic relationship between one man and the world in which he lives.

The first chapter establishes the methodological framework for the book’s investigation of Livingstone’s legacies by developing a theory of metabiographical analysis. This recent approach, devised by Nicolaas Rupke, insists on the political embeddedness of biographical practice; it argues that the ideological predisposition of the biographer inevitably impinges on the construction of the subject. While different authors, across time and space, deal with the same biographical material, they interpret it in different ways. Biography does not simply record a life, but rather lends it shape: as a literary genre, it translates the complexity of a life into a coherent life story. Metabiography, or a biography of biographies, is occupied with the differences in the way that such a story is told over a lengthy period. Instead of pursuing the biographee’s authentic identity, metabiography interrogates the underlying preoccupations of differing representations. This chapter develops the theory by exploring its relationship to reception studies and the postmodern challenge to historical enquiry. A metabiographical approach suggests that in life-writing the biographee is not only reread but reconstructed. Metabiography weds theories of reading and writing; it is a theory of both hermeneutics and narrative, interpretation and inscription.

In the Republic of Ireland, the 'moment' of the 'social problem' labelled 'anti-social behaviour' arrived when Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) were included in the Criminal Justice Act (2006). This chapter addresses four complex and connected questions. First, in relation to the 'policy transfer' dimension, how helpful are the contributions of D. P. Dolowitz, P. Bourdieu and L. Wacqaunt in helping us understand the introduction of ASBOs? Second, what has been the impact of 'made in America' approaches to crime and 'disorder', such as 'zero tolerance policing' (ZTP) and fixing 'broken windows', on Irish and other European approaches? Third, what are the ways by which primary political definers of 'anti-social behaviour', in Ireland, have sought to construct this particular 'social problem'? Finally, what is the link between the Irish interest in combating 'anti-social behaviour' and pervasive transformations in responding to crime and 'disorder' within the European Union?.