In this chapter we analyse the biases that are visible in the media attention towards certain places, especially Tadmor-Palmyra and demonstrate how narratives have been selectively manipulated to tell very particular stories about the conflicts in Syria and Iraq and their impacts on cultural heritage. Looking in depth at some of the media narratives and the imagery that accompanies them reveals that some of those narratives are driven by wider geopolitical agendas and propaganda machines. Overall, there is a general lack of care being paid to the people affected in these conflicts and, by extension, how heritage reconstruction might support those people as they work towards healing.

The June eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender is famous for its homage to Chaucer, marking Spenser’s thinking about his project of making poetry in relation to an English literary past. This chapter explores the insights ‘June’ offers into the role Chaucer played in Spenser’s poetic ambitions by examining the spatialised poetics of ‘June’ alongside Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale. Both poems stipulate a similar setting for the main character’s predicament: a locus amoenus described in terms of Paradise. In each case a despairing emotional state prevents the character from experiencing the joys of the paradisal space; each poem links this situation to a spatialised account of poetic making that locates literary failure, inspiration and achievement within its imagined geography. The chapter investigates resonances between the two poems (and A Theatre for Worldlings) and their implications for Spenser’s Chaucerian poetics. Staging a character’s isolation from the ultimately pleasant place serves to highlight problems associated with poetic inheritance and ambition and to frame the solutions both poems contemplate – including access to the Muses’ Parnassus and the fountain of Helicon. For Spenser, importing classical and Christian images of paradise into the landscape of English poetry seems to require a series of moves amounting to colonisation.

Chapter 2 outlines scholarship concerning the reaction of labour movements to European integration. The chapter commences with an examination of historic attempts by labour to respond to integration. Though political economists writing after the Maastricht Treaty emphasized processes of competition (Rhodes, 1998; Scharpf, 1999; Streeck, 1996), scholars who underline actor agency have focused upon initiatives which aim at cooperation; this literature examines European social dialogue (Falkner, 1998), unilateral efforts by unions to cooperate on a European scale (Erne, 2008) and Europeanization of social-democratic parties (Ladrech, 2000).Notwithstanding achievements of this scholarship, such work inadequately theorizes the manner in which labour competition and/or cooperation affect substantive conditions in labour markets. Research on dualization is therefore evaluated; this literature provides valuable insight into the relationship between labour behaviour and substantive change, though fails to conceptualize forces external to nation states (Emmenegger et al., 2012; Palier and Thelen, 2010). Controversies regarding labour movements and the broader trajectory of European integration are also introduced. The manner in which theories such as neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism aid understandings of labour movements is appraised, before it is asserted that the reaction of labour to the crisis provides rich material for reconsideration of prevailing approaches.

This chapter examines how neoliberalism engineers its own unique rendition of the nationalist crisis through recourse to discourses of meritocratic competition, the entrepreneurial self and individual will, alongside its exaltation of a ‘points-system’ approach to the ills of immigration. A traditional concern of the neoliberal right posits that a market-society ideal is hampered by cultures of welfare dependency and the absence of individual responsibility. This neoliberal position individualises outcomes of success and failure, muting in turn issues of structure and access. But, again, important questions arise regarding the imperative of this neoliberal frame to also racialise conceptions of failure, dependency and national crisis. This is a neoliberal denigration of the racialised outsider that operates through the categories of blackness, the Muslim and the pervasive notion of the inadequate and undesirable migrant. As regards the pathologisation of immigration, particular emphasis will be placed on the unique shaming of the Roma that has recently found a place in British commentary and visual culture.

This chapter traces the development of British plans to prevent, mitigate and cope with the mass death of civilians that was expected in any future conflict. It sets these within the political, social and cultural history of the decade; in particular the growth of an emotional culture of self-management, discussed in the previous chapter, the failure of disarmament in the early 1930s, the bombing of civilians in that decade, and the widely shared belief that any future war would be apocalyptic. It argues that as Britain moved towards another total war, the state realised that the dead would include civilians alongside the military, and that the management of these dead, and of the grief of the bereaved, would be central to public support for the war effort, and for the maintenance of morale amongst a people asked to go to war once again.

Chapter one engages with the modification and legibility of the body, focussing on the face, and introduces the special role of the nose in early modern culture. It examines surgical and prosthetic responses to facial injuries as a test to the limits of body work in early modern Britain. The chapter draws on sociological critiques of passing and capital to examine these anxieties, and their effects on the nose. Popular texts show a distinct concern for individuals’ abilities to pass as members of socially superior groups by disguising their bodies in significant ways. Women bore the brunt of these accusations, as satirists derided them as commercialised bodies, indistinguishable from their beautifying commodities. Fashionable men were mocked by contemporaries for effeminately modifying their bodies in similar ways, but the reconstruction of the nose was instead tied to a mask of healthy masculinity. The chapter therefore examines representations of male body work in contemporary texts, alongside the real-world manipulation of body evidence by men such as Henry Bennet, First Earl of Arlington. This facilitates investigation into the relationship between corporal self-fashioning and masculinity in the early modern period, and its place within transhistorical considerations of masculinity and plastic surgery.

Spenser’s choice of Chaucer as his master was a matter less of anxiety of influence than of deliberate and self-promoting emulation. Both his debts and his creative encounters are apparent especially in his responses to Chaucer’s exploration of different kinds of love and sexuality, from the cosmic to the lustful, signalled most evidently in Britomart’s quotation from the Franklin’s Tale. Spenser further extends such an exploration to the allegorical relationships between his figures for virtue and vice.

Thomas Speght was the first Chaucer editor to present readers with a ‘medieval’ Chaucer firmly situated in the past. By providing a substantial apparatus of supplementary materials aiming to facilitate access to Chaucer’s works, Speght was implicitly highlighting Chaucer’s datedness. At the same time, Speght also used his ‘additions’ to present Chaucer as a true English classic and national poet still worthy of being read, and to insist that Chaucer’s works continued to be relevant to his sixteenth-century readers. This chapter traces the evolution of the front and back matter of Speght’s editions (of 1598 and 1602) and analyses how they serve Speght’s double agenda to present Chaucer as a poet both ancient and ‘modern’. In particular, it examines how Speght pursued his double strategy by stressing links between Chaucer and Edmund Spenser and by fashioning a ‘friendship’ between the two major English poets of the past and present.

Chapter 6 carries forward some of Mitchell’s and Epstein’s ideas of networks. The approach extends the network studies method to social mobility, looking at how elites emerge, participate in interlocking directorates, generate convivial subjectivities and sustain long-term friendships. Raised on that basis are further arguments about the importance of elite friendship for the constituting of openness and public trust in postcolonial states. An account is given of a public occasion, the funeral of a prominent cosmopolitan among Botswana’s national elite, Richard Mannathoko, to reveal the actual practice observed among elites. Very broadly, the ethnography seeks through a particular case to illuminate the changeable force that public cosmopolitanism has in civic culture in postcolonial Africa. In part, the agenda is set in opposition to a toxic version of Afro-pessimism that finds Africa doomed by the kleptomania of elites, ungovernable because of the self-seeking of Big Men, and inevitably victimized by liberators who reveal themselves to be tyrants. Against that, the facts show that Botswana does have its share of wider postcolonial conflicts and predicaments, but concern for the public good is forceful. Good governance continues to be advanced through the deliberately developed and well-sustained political structures and practices of a strong state.

This chapter shows how a shared hostility to Christianity united white atheists and scientific racists in the nineteenth century. Crucial to this was the heretical doctrine of polygenesis, the idea that the various races of humanity had multiple origins instead of one single origin, as in the Christian doctrine of monogenesis. Polygenesis was a heretical theory that had both racial and theological implications. This theory gained scientific support by the middle of the nineteenth century among racial scientists, who argued that the races were innately different and could be ranked hierarchically. Atheists and freethinkers embraced polygenesis since it seemed to be the most accurate scientific explanation for the diversity of races, in contrast to the theory of monogenesis. More importantly, the theory seemed to deal a fatal blow to the creation account in Genesis and, with it, the entire foundation of Christianity. For this reason, many atheists often aligned themselves with irreligious scientific racists who posited vast differences between the various races.