This chapter highlights the factors shaping the trajectory of Indian agriculture since Independence, which has undergone notable transformations. The introduction of high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice ushered in a Green Revolution that propelled India from chronic food insecurity to a situation where food surpluses are the norm. This shift has been marked by increased reliance on markets for inputs, mechanization, a growing commercial orientation for output and the growth of poultry and livestock, often supported by government subsidies and increasingly driven by private investment. These changes have occurred even as traditional institutions, such as interlinked transactions and relational contracts with traders, persist. Indian agriculture has defied global patterns of farm consolidation and is dominated by smallholdings that support a disproportionate number of people. The Indian state faces the formidable challenge of negotiating a trilemma of ensuring the economic viability, environmental sustainability and social sustainability of this large sector.

Ireland’s two bloodiest centuries began with Henry VIII’s break with Rome and culminated in the brutal and unforgiving conquest of the entire island. Now, Anglo-Normans became ‘Old English’, faithful to Rome making common cause with the Gaelic-Irish. The ‘New English’ and later, Scottish, settled Leix, Offaly and Munster in the sixteenth century, Ulster and (under Cromwell) everywhere, in the seventeenth. Resistance was strong and sometimes, as in the Nine Years War, 1594–1603, and the Catholic Confederacy of the 1640s during England’s Civil War, almost successful. Ireland was later the sideshow of a larger European conflict, when several nationalities fought in the Williamite wars of the 1690s.

There were some Irish conversions to the Church of Ireland (i.e. the official Protestant church), but the continental-trained clergy of the Catholic Reformation defied persecution to keep Catholicism the majority religion. Protestants were a majority only in the north-east. However, the majority ownership of land in the country as a whole moved from Catholic to Protestant.

The shiring of Ireland was completed, transport and communication was improved, cities grew, trade remained lively. Irish remained the majority language, and a flowering of Irish-language scholarship preserved old texts and created new ones.

The importance of time and memory is something which has always existed in Agnes Varda's work, but which has come to the fore much more visibly in her films from the 1970s onwards. This chapter deals with the ways in which both personal and social past act on the protagonists of Varda's worlds, the ways in which she evokes them and the significance she finally lends them. Ulysse is the first of Varda's films to take the theme of memory and passing time and to use it as the centre of an exploration of the work of image-making. With the advent of the 1990s, it seems that memory has returned to Varda's work and become its guiding principle and theme. The determination to turn an even potentially devastating process of grieving into life-affirming creation is perhaps what Varda means when she claims to have a 'bad relationship with memory'.

By the time the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) was founded in 1884, Ireland also had two dedicated sporting newspapers, which were in large measure imitations of their English counterparts. The state of the Irish sporting world in the early 1880s had inspired Michael Cusack and Maurice Davin to establish the GAA. An exchange of letters between Cusack and Davin in the summer of 1884 led to a general plan to hold a meeting in Tipperary on 1 November 1884 to establish an Irish athletics association. The GAA's rules for hurling were published in Cusack's column in United Ireland on 10 February 1885 and were later reprinted by the newspaper in pamphlet form in early May at the cost of 6d. In 1890s a new generation of GAA journalists began to write on the games. Cusack's life had fallen into something of a tailspin in the 1890s.

Chapter 1 establishes the foundational concepts of neuroimaging by exploring the complex relationship between brain structure and mental function. It traces the historical progression from ancient surgical approaches to modern noninvasive techniques, contextualizing how technological innovations have transformed our understanding of neural processes. The chapter examines the multiscale nature of brain investigation, from single-neuron recordings to population-level measurements, and evaluates the critical tradeoffs between spatial and temporal resolution across imaging modalities. Key neurophysiological principles underlying these technologies are introduced, including neuronal action potentials, hemodynamic responses, and the chemical processes that support neural activity. The text challenges common neuromyths while addressing fundamental questions about functional organization, from modular specialization to distributed network processing. By comparing the relative strengths and limitations of major neuroimaging tools (fMRI, EEG, MEG, PET, and TMS), the chapter provides an analytical framework for understanding how these methodologies collectively advance our ability to correlate brain activity with cognitive and behavioral processes, setting the stage for more detailed exploration in subsequent chapters.

The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw popular culture become more sober and disciplined, partly through a tightening of police surveillance and regulation, and partly through changes in the aspirations and outlook of the working classes themselves. A revolt by newly enfranchised skilled workers against the cautious leadership of the Conservative party led to the removal in 1872 of the Party Processions Act that had earlier restricted parades. The Orange Order was now able to make its Twelfth of July parades a recognised part of civic ritual. Catholic nationalists faced more restrictions, but were not wholly excluded from public space.

Chapter 1 provides an account of Fanon’s critical indebtedness to Sartrean existential phenomenology. It also engages with his critique of negritude. The aim of this chapter is to inscribe Black Orpheus (as well as Anti-Semite and Jew) in the philosophical discourse of Being and Nothingness, two correlative works which elaborate a phenomenology of perception, race and embodied selves. These works were cornerstones for the negritude movement and had an impact on Fanon. While Sartre considers negritude as a source of poetry, Fanon accuses him of damming up its poetic source by abstracting the being-of-the-black. Fanon acknowledges the importance of Sartre’s intervention in Black Orpheus but criticizes it for intellectualizing the experience of the black.

The Stars Look Down was one of three films on coal mining themes made, at the end of a troubled decade, in Britain and Hollywood. Reed's characteristic fondness for low angle shots intensifies the atmosphere of doom from which none of the characters ever ultimately finds relief. Night Train to Munich and The Lady Vanishes are comedy thrillers; both concern the outbreak of the Second World War. The most striking difference between the two films lies in the shift of emphasis in relations between the couple, so that the male, not the female, becomes the driving force. Like Night Train, and Reed's next film, Girl in the News, Kipps was scripted by Gilliat, although the film did not meet with his ultimate approval. Reed, though, is no Godard. He avoids the directness of political discourse. The film's focus is more personal than political.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyse bioprecarity in terms of two dimensions of Foucault’s biopolitics, categorization and subjectivization (Foucault, 1977, 1982, 2002, 2008). With examples of the precarious lives of trans people, especially those of colour, I engage with the conceptual arguments of Foucault, Judith Butler (1997, 2009) and Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) regarding the relation between categorical framing and bioprecarity. The chapter explores how subjects as bodily selves are bound into population control and therefore normalized and regulated (Spade, 2011), how norms and regulations create bioprecarious situations for these bodily selves (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013), the role of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) in creating such precarious positions and, finally, how such bioprecarity might be avoided (Lorey, 2010; Shotwell, 2016; Weheliye, 2014).

Chapter 4 analyses how clinical psychologists preface (potential) care through negotiations of referrals and acts of assessment prior to any kind of therapy. I regard these as key ‘uncertainty moments’ in which practitioners must decide whether to see a patient for therapy. This decision-making process depends on far more than an ‘objective’ evaluation of the patient in front of them. Resolution of uncertainty entails the reciprocal configuration of at least three kinds of ontologies: the ontology of a potential patient, the ontology of the service in which they work, and the ontology of their profession. These are not necessarily stable; rather, they can be remade over time and in relation to particular service users (demonstrating how visions and adjudications of therapeutic need are highly contextualised). Such ‘prefacing practices’ contribute to the denial of access for some patients, although even exclusions might themselves sometimes be accounted for by professionals as forms of care.

This chapter gives an overview of the development of closet tragedy in early modern England and its place in relation to the tragic genre. Rather than dramatising incidents, closet drama emphasises the reactions of the characters and the form often features lengthy rhetorical speeches abounding in devices such as apostrophe and stichomythia, along with a chorus. Although the form has often been dismissed as a rather inept protest movement against the perceived aesthetic lapses of the popular theatre, this chapter shows that the extent of this schism between the two forms has been exaggerated and that closet drama was fertile ground for generic experiments. Fulke Greville’s Mustapha, the first in a projected trilogy of political dramas, departs from the prevailing tradition in closet drama for dramatising episodes from ancient Roman history, focusing instead upon a sequence of events from the recent history of the Ottoman Empire, involving the sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, and thus sharing common ground with the so-called Turk plays which were enjoying considerable popularity in the commercial theatres. Greville’s play raises questions about the nature of tragic heroism and explores the opportunities and limitations of tragedy as a locus for political comment and generic experiments.

For a long time, Greek sanctuaries were studied from a positivist perspective, that is, in terms of their spatial evolution and the typologies of their architecture and artefacts. At the sanctuary of Dodona, this perspective has also been applied to a great variety of structures and objects. The present paper offers new ways of looking at one of the most intriguing classes of objects found at the sanctuary, the lamellae on which were written the questions for and answers from the oracle. Consistent with the growing interest in the materiality of writing, we discuss the physical properties of the lamellae and the contexts in which they were used with respect to their adoption at the sanctuary during the Archaic period. We argue that the ease with which lead tablets can be inscribed, folded, and transported made this material more suitable for the context of the sanctuary than ostraca, another inexpensive medium often used for writing in ancient Greece.