This chapter uses JPod, Coupland's surreal tenth novel, to re-read aspects of his work and, in particular, his recurrent interest in visions of the future. It uses this absurdist science-project or anti-art manifesto as a lens through which to review his creative work and its aesthetic and ideological implications. Whatever the future of Coupland's writing, it is unlikely to be found in a retreat into the past. The twenty-first century landscape of his recent fiction is frequently troubled; it is marked by random violence, loneliness and moral ambiguity. But, the future is dynamically open. A comforting vision of the past holds no temptation for this writer of the ambiguous, dangerous, beguiling present and possible future.

For his ambitious health insurance scheme, Lloyd George had to appease two vested interests: the medical profession and the insurance industry, with its army of agents going door-to-door each week collecting pence from working-class homes. The 70,000 insurance collectors even boasted their own National Union. When Lloyd George received their delegation, he found them a formidable lobby. He gave way on government help for widows and orphans. It was upon such family fears that agents’ jobs were based. The WFL kept a keen eye on Lloyd George. It sent a well-publicized letter to the Chancellor, asking about income tax on married women and new taxes on women land-owners. He prevaricated. Meanwhile, the WFL held its historic conference at Caxton Hall, with a briefing paper ‘Suffragist Resistance to the Census’. An impressive range of suffrage organizations sent delegates, including Fawcett's NUWSS and the Women's Co-operative Guild. The Pankhursts’ WSPU, however, was preoccupied elsewhere. Disappointed again by Asquith, it sent a prestigious delegation to the Commons: the police brutality it met dubbed it ‘Black Friday’. NUWSS watched, pessimistic that WSPU militancy would spoil its careful consensus-building. Would there still be wide suffrage support for the WFL's planned census boycott?

Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness is a very different kind of domestic tragedy from Arden of Faversham or Two Lamentable Tragedies. It is not based on a historical narrative, and its only gestures towards geographical particularity are a few mentions of York and Yorkshire. There is no murder, and hence none of the accompanying tense frustrations of murder's prelude or aftermath and little of the temporal tightness with which long hours of anticipation are stretched in the other plays. Neither are the social tensions of competition between men quite the same in Heywood's play. The prologue sets up both the strictures of representation and the privations of low status, making suggestive comparison between the way material culture negotiates both types of difference. The insistence on the interrelationship of domestic spaces gives the play its strong sense of a physically coherent household, one that contains and gives significance to the events which take place within it.

In Britain and Australia, Labour governments have been experimenting with democratic renewal. This chapter examines Australian and British Labour's interest in one strand of democratic renewal, a desire to create new spaces for public engagement and consultation. A useful way of understanding the changes to both parties and their interest in democratic renewal is to view them as elements of the New Social Democracy (NSD). Basing his analysis on Anthony Giddens's work, S. White identifies the main themes of the NSD, these being 'real opportunity', 'civic responsibility' and 'community'. A central motif of the NSD is that social democrats need to rethink the role of the state. The NSD seeks to reconfigure the relationship between state and civil society in order to shore up political participation and support. Linked to the NSD debates about the changing role of the state is the challenge of the shift from 'government' to 'governance'.

This first chapter sets the scene with a brief historical introduction. It looks at the East End’s immigrant history, at the Bengalis’ Sylheti background, at the first links through lascars in British merchant ships, at the role of Bengali professionals and students, at the enlargement of the community with the arrival of families and through natural growth, at the impact of immigration legislation, and at the development of Bengali neighbourhoods. It gives an introduction to the growing importance of Islam and to the perennial problems around the shortage of housing and the competition this creates. It gives a broad outline of the types of employment Bengalis have taken up, the problems of racism, and the particular and evolving situations and constraints facing Bengali women and young people. It includes statistics from the 2011 census, and ends with a look at recent changes in the area and the impact of gentrification.

This chapter presents a socioeconomic profile of childhood disability in an Irish context. Using data from the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) survey, it considers a range of dimensions. These include an analysis of the associations between the childhood disability status of a household and a range of socioeconomic indicators relating to labour market outcomes, levels of parental education, social class, income and economic hardship. The chapter compares households with and without a child with a disability on the basis of these socioeconomic measures. The primary carer of a child with a disability is considerably less likely to participate in the labour market and considerably more likely to turn down work opportunities, when compared to a primary carer of a child without a disability. Parents of a child with a disability are less likely to be educated at third level and more likely to be in the lowest social class.

Carl Erdmann reopened investigation into the nature and origins of the phenomenon, largely ignored or assumed by the functional materialist focus on the crusaders' conquests. Walther Holtzmann took issue with Erdmann's opening distinction between holy war in general and crusading as a specific genre of religious violence. Erdmann's unorthodox career lent him a perspective that differed from the many German scholars who tilled that rich field of political, institutional and ideological conflict. Steven Runciman perpetuated the epic grand narrative, a drama of good and evil, heroism and villainy, civilisation and barbarism. Whole new national traditions of crusade scholarship have sprung up, in parts of eastern and northern Europe. Medievalists of and from Scandinavia and the Baltic, some stimulated by the end of the Cold War and issues of national identity and relations with an apparently resurgent European community, could hardly avoid studying crusading in the later middle ages.