John Schlesinger's 1962 film A Kind of Loving is the subject of this chapter. It addresses the specific criticisms that have been directed towards this film. It considers the concerns over narrative interruption that Andrew Higson has raised in relation to this film. It also addresses the consternation that a particular camera movement found within the film caused Victor Perkins in ‘The British Cinema’. It is believed that this moment of the film's style destroyed the relationship between the décor and the action taking place. Writing in ‘Moments of Choice’, Perkins is keen to point out that editing and camera movements are specific decisions through which the direction of a film can alter viewpoint, character and theme. For him, quite logically, this is part of a broader strategy whereby ‘selection and sequence’ are the keys to altering this viewpoint.

This chapter explores the nature of France's grand strategic difficulties in the War of Spanish Succession. The French army expanded to a real strength of about 255,000 men during the War of Spanish Succession. The disasters that befell French arms cut both ways with respect to the renewed attempt to convince the High Council to renew the Enterprise of Scotland. For all its failure and subsequent disappointments, the politics and geopolitics of the Scots expedition offers some valuable insights into the interaction between the French state and one of its most potent clients. There were institutional dynamics that engaged with the Entreprise d'Écosse in a way as profoundly to influence its development. Chamillart became an advocate of the Entreprise d'Écosse. This profoundly changed the dynamics of the debate on matters Scots in the Conseil d'en Haut coming up to the crucial meetings to decide on France's grand strategy for 1708.

There have been two reasons for this book. One is that it tries to shed light on how the crusades, one of the prominent historic features of western Europe, have been perceived by literate and academic commentators over the centuries. The academic commentators and writers in print tended to assess the work on its own terms of intellectual and historical merit. Either way, the litmus test was the crudest form of the already crude 'clash of civilisation' theory; it was itself a heated-up version of Cold War propaganda. The debate formed a cocktail of debased Enlightenment positivism, ignorant cultural supremacism and historical illiteracy. The second reason is rawer, more demotic, but possibly more important. It is clear that the crusades, or perceptions of the crusades, now matter beyond the shades of academe.

This chapter offers empirical accounts of how citizens in Britain and Australia actually engage with the state, with a focus on continuity and change in the patterns of political support and political participation. It examines dimensions of political participation in both Britain and Australia. The chapter outlines some competing ideas of why citizens participate and how much participation is taking place. It focuses on the sociology of participation, which sheds light on who is participating. Membership of a political party is a key indicator of political participation. Party membership is notoriously difficult to measure, because political parties are usually reluctant to publicise their numbers, so estimates can only be proxy indicators. The chapter considers the overall patterns and trends in political participation and support, and the implications of these for Labour governments' attempts to find new mechanisms for citizen input and engagement.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book conceptualises punk and post-punk as 'music worlds' existing both on the local, city level and also spanning towns and cities, on a national level by drawing upon Howard Becker's concept of 'art worlds'. It suggests that punk had a mixed-class base, but was largely white in its first incarnation and also a preserve of the young. The chapter argues the fact that Liverpool, Manchester and other cities have been the point of origin and geographical centre of different music worlds both before and after punk. Competition was equal to cooperation in the process whereby the network cultivated a punk world, as it would be in the networks of Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and all other towns and cities which were to host punk and post-punk worlds.

This chapter explores Coupland's representation of three distinctive but interconnected forms of space. The first section addresses the built landscape, including those most obviously postmodern spaces described by James Howard Kunstler in The Geography of Nowhere (1993) as ‘Capitals of Unreality’. The second section explores the impact of travel on space with particular reference to the boundary genre of the road story. Many of Coupland's meandering road stories take detours into the wilderness or desert. The last section explores the novelist's engagement with these barren spaces.

From its origins as a revolutionary political movement in continental Europe, social democracy has gradually become a force integrated within the capitalist order. It will be tempting to assess the extent to which the 2008 crisis has forced the Labour Party to rethink its more recent pro-market philosophy and policies. In order to achieve this, this chapter attempts to understand the impact of the new major 'crisis of capitalism' on the British economy, the third one since the beginning of the twentieth century. It then examines how the Gordon Brown government tackled the crisis from 2008 onward. Finally, the chapter discusses the extent to which Ed Miliband, the New Labour leader, is committed to breaking away from 'There is no alternative' (TINA). In terms of policy objectives, an element of the old Labour 'ethos', which Tony Blair and Gordon Brown accepted, was endured.

This chapter investigates the processes by which civilian bodies were converted for military purposes within the first sixteen or so weeks of army life: the phase of basic training. It suggests that there were two key principles to this process. Army instructors had to achieve control over the recruit’s body in order to subject him to the authority of the regime. Thus, men were told what to eat, when to rest, what to wear and how to behave during their free time. Instructors also proceeded to transform the recruit’s body into an effective military machine by making it, fit, ordered and productive. This was achieved through a strict regime of physical exercise, field exercises, team sports and military drill. Soldier’s testimonies suggest, however, that while some men came to identify with the army’s ideals and worked hard to transform their bodies, others found ways of circumventing the army’s rules. In the safety of their barrack rooms both officers and men got drunk, dressed as women and had sex with each other. By drawing on these experiences this chapter therefore considers the dynamics of compliance, resistance and participation in modern regimes of the military through corporeal transformation.

The New Social Democracy in its variant forms in both Australia and Britain is experimenting with the ideas of participation, democracy and consultation. This chapter examines the oscillating place of participation in democratic theory and traces how social democratic thinking seeks to reconfigure citizenship. It examines competing normative claims about the rightful role of political participation and civic engagement in wider democratic (and social democratic) theory. A useful starting point for understanding the role of political participation and civic engagement has been to focus on the typologies of engagement. The central feature of these typologies is that the power is dispersed along a continuum, from minimum to maximum citizen input. L. Pratchett, in his evaluation of the new modes of civic participation, uses a framework based on D. Beetham's pioneering democratic audit work in the United Kingdom.

This chapter concerns about young modern women/flappers of the Metropolis. It concerns whether their debates and anxieties concerning their susceptibility to pursuit of sensation, pleasure and desire be sought in the West End or by Chinese men in the East End. The chapter focuses on the representation of three different 'types' of modern woman: the 'butterfly' woman of the West End, the 'lured' young woman attracted to the 'Chinaman' of the East End, and the female 'dope fiend'. Concern with the modern woman as consumer and/or seller of drugs and/or pursuer of the 'Chinaman' was played out in various sites, especially in the press, in popular culture and in the law courts. In 1914, antagonism directed at the black and Chinese men also took the form of hostility towards these men's supposedly alien status.

This chapter examines the response of the Party of European Socialists (PES) to the financial crisis and focuses on two objectives. The first was related to theories of the development of Euro-parties. The second was to explore issues relating to social democracy through an analysis of the PES. The chapter explores how the PES sought to build a common social democratic response to the financial crisis at the European level. There were three distinct phases of the PES policy response. First, the PES essentially reiterated existing policy proposals relating to financial regulation. Second, the PES began to try to develop new ideas and policies, by challenging the growing move towards austerity programmes and instead calling for ambitious investment programmes. Third, the PES began to focus particularly on the future cohesion of the single currency and of the European Union (EU), trying to find a means of encouraging European unity.