This chapter identifies three postmortem tributes: the first for William Brooke, Lord Cobham, in Henry V; a second for Henry Carey, first Baron Hunsdon, in King John; the third for Carey and his son, George, in Hamlet Q2. In recovering these lost encomia the chapter reveals the historical figures behind some of William Shakespeare's most remarkable, memorable characters. There is evidence that Shakespeare placed the death of Sir John Falstaff immediately after Henry's discovery of the conspiracy of Richard, Earl of Cambridge. King John's most admired Shakespearean creation is dismissed as a supernumerary: 'King John with Philip Faulconbridge as hero is a play without form and void, signifying nothing. Remarkable Antiquities of the City of Exeter is a tale uncannily parallel to Shakespeare's anecdote of Lamord. In the Folio the 'dram of eale' soliloquy has vanished and Lamord has become Lamound.

This chapter is an interview about the first data studies course, a new approach to teaching critical thinking and social science approaches to data. The overall goal is to teach a critical-practical skill: how to assess data problems, consider their critical implications for stakeholders, explore the data provided (using Excel or R), perform basic analysis, liaise with data scientists for advanced analysis, and present the workflow and preliminary assessment of results to different audiences. Topics covered include: deep skills like being willing to fail; the importance of teaching with raw, real-world data; data archaeology and ethnography; exploratory data analysis; cleaning data with stakeholders in mind; continuing to clarify the question being asked.

The chapter explores the double quality of the image via the work of the contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, notably through his notions of ‘exscription’ and touch. In Nancy’s thought, signification and presence, the readable and the visible are articulated in a relation of mutual touching and withdrawal that is lateral, metonymic, and works in both directions. And if this is what W. J. T. Mitchell might term an ambivalent account of ekphrasis, it is not a relation of indifference. Rather, the signifying surface and its non-signifying other are turned towards one another in a non-appropriating embrace. If ekphrasis is a writing-out, it is only in so far as all writing exscribes. And if the image is written out in ekphrasis, the image in its turn exscribes something within it – that which is not reducible to signification. Each mode is inaccessible from within the other, but, in Nancy’s thinking of ekphrasis, they press up against each other at the surface where they meet.

Chapter 5 analyses the ways in which the taboo has had a detrimental impact on the Syrian conflict. In particular, it focuses on the how specific weapons are perceived within a conflict, where the taboo causes chemical armaments to be prioritised over others via inappropriate hierarchies of threat. The way in which the taboo has dominated understanding of Syria has seen other threats ignored – notably the vast numbers being massacred with conventional devices, but also the significant biowarfare threat that exists in the country. This means that policymakers have focused on the wrong issues in respect to Syria, a situation that precludes ever finding workable solutions to the crisis. Simply put, policymakers are not seeing the real problems. The taboo blinds them; or rather, applies a lens through which they can only see the chemical threat and none of the other issues driving this conflict.

This chapter provides context for the policy discussions which follow, situating the Conservative opposition in the economic, social, cultural and political contexts of the 1970s. Key themes that are often seen to have defined the decade are analysed and their impact on the direction of Conservative policy assessed. The chapter highlights the breakdown of the post-war consensus, economic decline, the ungovernability of Britain and a loss of morality in national life as being important. These were the ideas that helped shape the Conservatives’ sense of how the world was changing. It is clear that they did play a role in the development of policy, but this influence was not often direct. They were central to the increasingly well-formed ideas of some Thatcherites and were often there under the surface and in much of the rhetoric of the time, but they were not at the heart of the official policymaking process.

In William Shakespeare's Richard II, the tragic protagonist is noted for his addiction to narrative. Any oblique representation of Mary Stuart in Richard II is, however, far from the clear celebratory picture offered by the Jesuit martyr. Perhaps as a result of Shakespeare's own turbulent relationship with forms of Catholicism, it is deeply ambivalent. Shakespeare's play uses the feminine Isabella to represent the French dimension of Mary Stuart's identity, but it is Richard who figures her role as tragic protagonist in Scotland and England. Through a cross-gendered representation, Shakespeare's play explores the nineteen-year struggle between two queens who both had to cope with the political challenge of identifying themselves as princes rather than women. In the absence of automatic male authority to command, Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I cultivated a specialised poetics of queenship, interweaving emblems, images, verbal and non-verbal languages, as Jennifer Summit has noted.

In peacetime, when diplomatic relations are broken off between two countries, or when one is not represented in the territory of the other, they should follow some practice for representations. The normal practice is for the unrepresented one to nominate a third state acceptable to the recipient to represent its interests and protect its nationals in the recipient's territory. Each of the 1949 Conventions contains specific articles relating to the powers and functions of the Protecting Power, while Protocol I, 1977, has greatly improved the machinery for the appointment of a Protecting Power and increased its functions. Information concerning protected persons in the hands of an adverse party is transmitted to the state on whom they depend through the Protecting Power and the Central Prisoners of War or Central Information Agency. According to the Civilians Convention the Protecting Power is instrumental in protecting civilians, especially those in occupied territory.

Erotic romance, Middle Eastern in its provincial origins but European in its flavour, achieved a spectacular flourishing between 1579 and 1626 in the writings of Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare and Mary Sidney wroth. The romances of arguably the most rhetorically sophisticated and politically aware authors of the age represent the ultimate English response to lengthy, complex and rhetorically artistic Greco-Roman prose fiction. Readily available during the Renaissance was Aphthonius's Progymnasmata, the popular students' guide to the forms of artful discourse practised by rhetoricians of the Second Sophistic. Philostratus composed his series of short rhetorical exercises to provide his students with models of how to describe scenes from nature. As one of his aims is to teach the art of ecphrasis, literally 'speaking out', Philostratus incorporates scenes purporting to represent stories, paintings and sculpture.

The introduction provides a comprehensive outline of the conceptual and core chapters, and an explanation as to how they substantiate the arguments made in this book. The arguments deployed are developed by a theoretical framework which clarifies the key concepts. The conceptual chapters on political elites and sovereignty are followed by a series of chronologically based chapters which provide supporting evidence for the main conclusion. The introduction includes a brief synopsis of the chapters, offering a description of what each chapter specifically focuses on. This includes the particular aspects of each chapter to be discussed and an explanation of how the issues raised will be examined and addressed. In addition, the introduction explains the role of the trajectories that are instrumental in assisting the substantiation of the books’ central argument.

In the process of resurrecting the dead, William Shakespeare's theatre obviously has a direct role to play in reconstituting and rehabilitating the transformative interaction of culture and memory. This chapter interrogates the ethical and political implications of this hermeneutic encounter in relation to tragedy and history. In Richard II, determining moments of death stage numerous and indeterminate figures of and from which to choose 'otherness', a form of testimony which incorporates an endlessly inventive 'oppositional historical consciousness' and which also constitutes its own form of counter-history. As such the 'poetry' as well as the performance of grief often conveys an autobiographical intensity which is at once uncommon and 'singular' and yet also somehow typical or exemplary. In Richard II the lyrical excess of native language is certainly linked insistently to a more haunting sense of inheritance and testimony.

The crucial House of Commons vote on the principle of EEC membership and the subsequent severe ructions in the Labour Party, as a result of sixty-nine Labour MPs defying the whip to vote with the Conservatives, are analysed in this chapter. The 1970 general election is also of particular significance insofar as the successful Conservative leader Edward Heath was determined to take Britain into the EEC in spite of public opposition and a manifesto which promised only to negotiate on membership. The debates on Europe during this particular period were fought in the midst of a power struggle within the two major parties. The chapter examines the individual motives of Heath, and the extent of the Conservative government’s determination to ensure EEC membership.

Chapter 1 considers the mechanisms of breaks and continuities in the history of photocollage with regard to gender, genre and locations of display. Collage is commonly celebrated as a twentieth-century art form invented by Dada artists in the 1910s. Yet there was already a vibrant culture of making photocollages in Victorian Britain. From an art historical perspective this can be interpreted as an expression of typical modernist amnesia. The default stance of the early twentieth century’s avant-garde was to be radically, ground-breakingly new and different from any historical precursors. However, there is, when turning to the illustrated press, also a trajectory of continuity and withholding of traditions in the history of photocollage. This chapter has two parts. The first includes a critical investigation of the writings on the history of photocollage between the 1970s and 2010s, focusing on the arguments and rationales of forgetting and retrieving those nineteenth-century forerunners. It includes examples of amnesia and recognition and revaluation. The second is a close study of a number of images that appear in Victorian albums produced between 1870 and 1900 and their contemporary counterparts in the visual culture of illustrated journals and books.

This chapter considers the fall of the angels in Old English saints’ lives, wherein holy men and women articulate the narrative as though it were a charm, a verbal defence mechanism offering spatial, geographical, and bodily protections. Just as Anglo-Saxon charms master something threatening by defining and reciting its name, properties, and origins, so too in Elene and Juliana do Cynewulf’s saintly protagonists Judas Cyriacus and Juliana master their demonic tempters by identifying them and recounting their originary sin. While in these poems the origin narrative is itself apotropaic, in Andreas the fall of the angels narrative is linked to the protective power of the baptismal seal (or sphragis) that safeguards Christians against the devil. Similarly, Guthlac A relates how Guthlac disarms his demonic tormentors by recounting the story of their fall and by expressing his faithful expectation that he will be one of their replacements in heaven.

From its very origins lollardy had been associated with the subversion of the natural order of the commonwealth. This chapter evaluates the successes and failures of this rehabilitation effort and its legacy in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To put the drive towards the rehabilitation of the lollards’ reputation in context, the first section of this chapter briefly explains how Anabaptism threatened to undermine the relationship between the emerging evangelical movement and the government. Two subversive theological beliefs ascribed to the lollards, communitarianism and pacifism, came dangerously close to Anabaptist ideas, forcing evangelicals to mollify their tenor in print. The chapter next details the sixteenth-century project of evangelical historians to correct what they saw as a smear job by corrupt medieval chroniclers, and also explains that this effort was only effective to an extent in the seventeenth century, as confessional allegiances drove interpretation. The last section in the chapter sees the evangelicals move from a defensive position to go on the offensive. Through their connections to the lollards, the Protestants claimed a direct association with Christ, blamed the Roman church for disorder within the realm, and critiqued ungodly monarchs.

This chapter focuses on the biographical, political andliterary aspects of the Epitaphium Arsenii. Itintroduces the author, Paschasius Radbertus, who wasa monk of Corbie and later its abbot, and hissubject, Abbot Wala of Corbie (d. 836), who wasCharlemagne’s controversial cousin. It explains thedifferent political context in which the two booksof this work originated. Whereas the first book wasprobably composed while the Emperor Louis the Piouswas still alive, the second followed only in themid-850s, when Louis’ son Charles the Bald ruled theWest-Frankish kingdom. The changed perspective ofthe second book and the author’s polemical stancestand in contrast to the more reticent first book,which makes this such an interesting text.Furthermore, this introduction also explicates thisfuneral oration for Wala as a literary work, andcomments on the author’s Latin and his use ofclassical and patristic sources.