By virtue of being Claude Chabrol's fiftieth film, Rien ne va plus is an important auteurist landmark. Rien ne vaplus does include self-conscious, auteunst references to Chabrol's earlier films, such as Juste avant la nuit, Les Noces rouges and Betty. Various interviews and reviews have quoted Chabrol's assertion that Rien ne vaplus is his first autobiographical film. Common with the James Bond series and Chabrol's mid-1960s work such as the two Tigres and La Route de Connthe, Rien ne va plus features exotic locations, elaborate scenes of pursuit and interrogation, outlandish thugs and an eccentric crime lord. Like the archetypal Bond film, it begins in a casino and ends in a remote, romantic hide-away. Above all, the film refers back to Chabrol's 1965 spy spoof, Marie-Chantal contre Docteur Kha. Like Chabrol, Victor is a professional, a craftsman, who steers away from grandiose projects and prides himself on his pragmatism.

According to the dictates of neoclassicism, history was meant to be a narrative rather than a descriptive form. By substituting an iconic portrait of a particular person or scene for a general account of the historical process, history painters transformed their human subjects into metonyms, reiterating in visual terms the connection between great men and great events. The panegyric that marked the commencement of the painter poem's popularity in England as a historiographical form was Edmund Waller's Instructions to a Painter. The months following the poem's initial appearance accordingly witnessed a flurry of satiric and panegyric responses, many of them taking up the advice-to-a-painter form. Among the most prominent of the resultant poems were three satires by Andrew Marvell: The Second Advice to a Painter, The Third Advice to a Painter, and Last Instructions to a Painter.

The Irish court was produced through sympathetic engagements between men, where performances – including of bodies, clothing, emotions, speech-making, humour, banter, wit, storytelling and more – enabled truth to be communicated. Performances in court built character for observers, they enabled truth to be assessed, and they placed men at the heart of the legal system and the production of justice. Importantly, as these performances were played out not only in the courtroom but in the press, they became implicated in larger productions of national identity. This chapter draws together the key arguments made across this volume, arguing for gender as a creative force in the production of legal, social and national power relationships.

Claude Chabrol's films break down the dubious critical barrier between art cinema and popular cinema. Chabrol sees no shame in considering himself a craftsman and takes pride in bringing his films in on or under budget. Rejecting the avant-garde and the experimental, Chabrol chooses to work within the confines of established genres. Chabrol has in fact filmed farce, melodrama, fantasy, war films, spy films and glossy literary adaptations. Although Chabrol wrote some of his most famous films alone, he collaborated with his friend Paul Gégauff on many screenplays over the first twenty years of his career. Perhaps the most productive influence within Chabrol's crew, Gégauff was also the most destructive personality. Une partie de plaisir dramatises, and hence exorcises, the power of Gégauff's personality. To Chabrol, he became a close friend and a fascinating model of cynicism and amorality.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book argues that the prevalence of the orphan figure can be explained by the central role which the family played at the Victorian era. In stressing the importance of family, home and blood relations, it offers a window on to a number of discourses on the importance of the family in circulation during the Victorian era. The book considers various literary examples, and discusses a conceptual model to understand orphanhood. The book also argues that the orphan plays a pharmaceutical function in Victorian culture: the orphan embodies a surplus excess to be expelled to the colonies. It finally looks at the exiling of difference, in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and the return of the exiled orphan from the colonies to the heart of empire, London, in Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

According to the International Olympic Committee and FIFA, the independence of sport is one of the most sacrosanct principles. Proclaimed in the Olympic and FIFA Charters, the ‘autonomy’ of sport has to be protected and preserved. Yet, in light of the financial dimension of sport alone, its separation from politics is in reality a myth. In the social stakes, sport has become a classic field of intervention for politics. In this light sport may be seen as an ideal way to sanction or punish a state that is considered unacceptable. The sports boycott then becomes a diplomatic tool to be wielded alongside other political tools. The chapter presents a conceptual understanding of boycotts and their place in global diplomacy, as well as familiar examples from the Cold War and more recently.

This chapter investigates the intensification of data practices that has occurred over the last decades in the environmental sciences. Moving away from a critical focus on the commodification of the environment, the chapter examines how a recent international databasing initiative in Global Earth Observations can be understood through the critical analytic of the archive. However, a focus only on the archival logics of such infrastructural data practices risks losing sight of other important elements of emergent data-driven scientific landscapes. One such element is data collection. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with a large-scale Earth Systems project in the Brazilian Amazon, in comparison with a historical analysis of British colonial collections in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the chapter argues that paying attention to data collection as a process of both appropriation and transformation is crucial for understanding the relations that constitute contemporary scientific knowledge production.