With the prestige of its role in the Resistance, the PCF might have briefly felt close to state power. But the PCA’s relationship to the state was profoundly different. For the PCA, the war’s end raised the prospect of again prioritising the anti-colonial struggle, whose marginalisation had alienated nationalists. The departure of French Communists for France facilitated the PCA’s autonomy, which increased as the PCF became increasingly concerned with Cold War politics. In 1945 the PCA wrongly blamed Algerian nationalist provocations for the Sétif massacre in which French troops and European settlers killed many thousands of Muslims. But from 1946 the PCA pursued an aggressive policy of indigenisation that significantly increased Algerian membership while European membership declined. As prospects for electoral reform proved barren, Communists and nationalists faced the same dilemma: how to fight against colonialism and for democratic rights from within an increasingly authoritarian system. The PCA pursued a multi-pronged campaign for democratic rights. This vision reflected a dual notion − freedom from repression and freedom to develop.

Henry Hitch Adams argued that the realism of domestic tragedies ‘made the moral lesson effective by illustrating, directly in terms of the experiences of the audience, the punishments for sin’. This book has been an attempt to unpick the ways in which that realism might have engaged the experiences of the plays' first audiences, through a reconstruction of attitudes towards house and household and an extended consideration of staging practices. Throughout these plays, the progression of property and family values that smoothes the disjunctures of death is pointedly interrupted. Domestic space is violated by individuals who cannot relinquish their own physical purchase on what they see around them in favour of guaranteeing a future for their families. The book has argued for the materiality of a contemporary understanding of the domestic, and for the sensory qualities of memories of the household. In domestic tragedies, objects reflect more than status.

This chapter outlines the history of Scottish Highland Games and their international spread. It presents the Highland Games of Europe and identifies the major themes which characterise them. It is certainly true that the strength competitions were common in Scotland (as elsewhere in Europe) long before the nineteenth century. In 2010 at least 130 Highland Games took place on the European mainland, the majority of them in Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and France. Many Europeans set up Highland Games without deep convictions about Scotland or their own relationship to Scottish tradition. The chapter shows how, in certain areas of Europe, the Games serve both as ersatz folklore and as an enhancement of existing custom. The commercialisation of Highland Games is an issue of some concern for many European Scots, mainly because they consider commercial mass production and Scottishness to be mutually exclusive.

Livingstone’s imperialist reputation, the hegemonic dimension of his afterlife, is the subject of the fourth chapter. Most of the texts that use Livingstone in this way can be described as ‘exemplary lives’ or idealised ‘hagiography’. While this saintly writing was predominantly a Victorian preoccupation, such practices broke the confines of the nineteenth century. Primarily, the chapter focuses on the way in which Livingstone was shaped by his biographers to meet the changing demands of empire. Expanding on John MacKenzie’s sketch of Livingstone’s legacy, I argue that he was routinely remoulded with each major shift in colonial policy. Yet Livingstone was not presented homogenously at any one chronological moment. Shifts in colonial attitude were certainly decisive, but he was used by his biographers to dialogue with their environment. While he was continually found to speak to contemporary politics, Livingstone was actually constructed according to a range of imperialisms. This chapter also explores a less prevalent dimension of Livingstone’s legacy that resisted the hegemonic colonialist representation. Certain authors worked against the grain by using him to offer a limited critique of imperialism. For several biographers, dating from the mid-twentieth century, Livingstone foreshadowed sensitive intercultural engagement and even cultural relativism.

This chapter argues that when it comes to describing and analysing Irish difference there is a limited range of theories and methods used. It suggests that greater emphasis be given to the body, emotions and the strategies in which people use Irishness to create their own identities, sense of self and cultural distinction. A coercive view of social action would see Irish cultural difference as a myth, a form of symbolic domination that creates an illusion of collective responsibility and papers over social and economic inequalities. Instead of seeing the Irish as indigenously different, it might be better to focus on how Irish people construct their sense of difference through combining global cultural elements with local and national elements of culture. Irish cultural difference has always been created and maintained through mixing and matching the local with the global.

The sixth chapter examines the ways in which Livingstone has been represented in creative literature. While this has hitherto been almost universally ignored, such fictional portrayals constitute a significant dimension of his reputation. It is notable, however, that fictional Livingstones only began to flourish in the later part of the twentieth century. The weakening of realism and the postmodern challenge to ‘objective’ representation offered new possibilities for the portrayal of historical characters. More important, however, were the political and intellectual shifts inaugurated by decolonisation. Under postcolonialism, this cherished icon of empire was radically rewritten. Examining work by Lennart Hagerfors, Marlene NourbeSe Philip and David Pownall, the chapter explores the ways that Livingstone was employed to debunk the Western myth of ‘discovery’, to ‘laugh back’ at the imperial centre, and to comment on both the linguistic legacy of imperialism and the complex relationship between Christianity and colonialism. Yet while postcolonialism spawned some of the most creative re-evaluations, an alternative image of Livingstone emerged from the context of South African apartheid. For Nadine Gordimer and Alan Paton, a radical and a liberal, Livingstone symbolised – in varying degrees – the breakdown of division and positive racial interaction.

Social democracy is apparently wavering between a continuous adjustment to the constraints of neo-liberal globalisation and the search for an improbable continent-wide 'green high-tech Keynesianism'. This chapter explains the reasons for this situation, focusing on the relationship of social democracy have forged with the capitalist economy and the European institutions. It looks at the defeat this political family of parties had to contend with as a result of the exhaustion of the social democratic/Keynesian project. The chapter also explains how social democracy made two 'Faustian pacts', thereby strengthening the neo-liberal paradigm established in the late 1970s: the conversion to the European integration process and the enthusiasm for the knowledge-based economy. It argues that the Faustian pacts that have been forged continue to make it difficult for the social democratic family to offer a comprehensive and coherent alternative to the ailing neo-liberal paradigm.

The Introduction introduces the Irish District Court as an institution of incomprehensible, organised chaos, where formality and commonality collide. It promises to demystify the language and procedure of the court, and to focus on the changes wrought by immigration and the limited English proficient defendant. It introduces the mutual confusion created by language barriers and interpreters, and offers a brief historical look at language and interpreting in Irish courts. Finally, it provides an overview of what each of the chapters in the book will deal with.

This chapter examines Jack Clayton's 1959 Room at the Top and concentrates on the film's opening sequences in order to achieve two related objectives. It explores in detail the ideas of the arrivals and new beginnings that these sequences bring to attention. It also demonstrates how these two ideas also allow us to overcome the way in which existing considerations of this film have tended to place unnecessary limits upon the interest and importance of Room at the Top's miseen-scène. Room at the Top offers far more than just a linear examination of one man's desire to get ahead. The film offers the opportunity for a more circular discussion of the many (potentially) conflicting concerns that new spaces and their accompanying experiences must inevitably generate. The film articulates its principal thematic concerns through a series of introductions. In Room at the Top, matters of (personal) mobility co-exist with the problem of social paralysis.

The Census Committee civil servants polished the questions that would be asked of households, to give the information that welfare reformers needed. The census would now ask for each married woman: how many children born alive to the current marriage, how many still living and how many had died. The census schedule would be completed and signed by ‘the Head of Family’, usually the husband. So women, till then merely deprived of a vote, were now deprived of a voice: their husband held the pen to record their experienced of childbirth and child deaths. Insult was thus added to injury. Although unaware of the devil in the census detail, the WFL was alert to the coming census. In summer 1910 it planned a census conference, inviting the many suffrage organizations. Meanwhile, in July Asquith's cabinet shelved the Conciliation Bill ~ where it joined the cobwebs among previous such suffrage bills. ‘So another hope is killed’, lamented Henry Nevinson sadly in his diary. Was this one more reason to boycott the coming census?