The Quakers, or the Religious Society of Friends, are generally known today as an inclusive and tolerant movement, broadly Christian, committed to working for peace and consensus, socially activist, politically radical and culturally liberal, although, at the time of their inception in the 1650s, their reputation was less benign. This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to explore early Quaker discourse, comprising not only Friends' words but also their deeds. Their written testimonies, warnings and exhortations are examined, but so too are accounts of the ways that they inhabited and moved through the social and material world. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter describes the impact of Conservative governments' domestic and imperial policies on an increasingly vociferous extreme right, showing how the Conservative Party both alienated and attracted the extreme right while maintaining opposition to any groups or individuals that possessed fascist antecedents or characteristics. There was little detectable change in the Conservative Party's relationship with the extreme right under Harold Macmillan's leadership. The Conservative Party had played a part in the marginalisation by opposing the League of Empire Loyalists and investigating the Elizabethan Party. The New Daily's article concluded by stating that it believed Central Office was interested in the ‘Hastings Experiment’, and promised to forward its full results to the Party Chairman. The Monday Club's damage limitation had immediate consequences. The Freedom Group and the Monday Club operated along the Conservative Party's nebulous right-wing border, but were now more firmly within it.

This chapter analyses the processes of institutionalisation and institutional reform in Catalonia and Scotland in order to identify and explain the capacity of regional politicians to act collectively in pursuit of their collective self-interest. It examines whether politicians have attempted to reform their institutions according to their own professional self-interest and how successful they have been in these attempts. The institutional analysis reveals that the collective action of regional politicians as a class for itself is related back to the institutional structure enabling and restricting their behaviour and to the established career patterns and to the internal structure of the political class in itself that are conditioning its territorial and functional cohesion.

Chapter 2 briefly examines some influential accounts of global or cosmopolitan citizenship (Nussbaum, Linklater, and Dobson). Like nation-statist approaches, theories of global citizenship construe citizenship as a zone of privilege, differing only in seeking to extend such membership and its goods beyond the state; also, cosmopolitan accounts typically lack attention to the international institutions and mechanisms needed if global citizens’ intentions are to be realized in the form of decisions made, implemented, and enforced. Moreover, we need clearer understandings of the distinctions, and connections, between morality, ethics, and politics than are supplied in this literature. In preparing the development of a response to these challenges the analytical categories of ‘identity’, ‘status’, and ‘role’, are discussed, and it is argued that we should disaggregate social identities (roles and statuses) from political identities (roles and statuses). Then, we can begin to see citizenship as an institutional role needed for the fulfilment of universal moral duties, and no longer as the token of status or indicator of social membership to which privileges properly attach.

The Tribunal process has provided the intangible outcome of providing crucial insights into how power operated in Ireland. This chapter demonstrates that an improper relationship existed between the receipt of political donations and discretionary political decisions which at best can be described as being in breach of the most rudimentary conflict of interest considerations. It provides empirical evidence which illustrates how pervasive corruption was within every layer of political action and how those who donated to leading members of the government also benefited from favourable political decisions. It also illustrates how the definition of corruption developed from a narrow interpretation of legal statutes to an emergent awareness of the ethical dimensions of improper political behaviour and what factors facilitated this transition. The chapter examines McCracken, Moriarty and Flood / Mahon Tribunals of Inquiry with particular reference to the relationship between payments to politicians by businessmen and the decision-making process.

This book provides an alternative interpretation of the popular League of Nations movement in Britain. It argues that the League inspired a rich and participatory culture of political protest, popular education and civic ritual which took root in British society between the wars. The book also addresses why the story of the League movement forms an integral part of the larger history of the democratisation of Britain's political culture between the wars. The League of Nations Union's (LNU) individual membership covered all parts of the United Kingdom but was disproportionately concentrated in England. This book also argues that the creation of the League of Nations inspired a lively popular movement in Britain whose influence was widely felt after 1919, from Westminster village to village hall. Finally, an overview of the chapters included in this book is given.

This chapter explores the representations of gender in relation to four films: Le Bel Indifférent, La Naissance du jour, L'Evénement and Lady Oscar. It provides an overview of Jacques Demy's heroes and heroines more generally. Simone de Beauvoir offered a polemical insight into the situation of women in romantic relationships that can be applied to Demy's adaptation of Cocteau's Le Bel Indifférent. La Naissance du jour initially appears anomalous in relation to Demy's other films. Colette can be placed towards either end of a scale encompassing Demy's female characters. Genevieve in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg fails to affirm any meaningful subjectivity beyond her externally imposed status as pretty daughter, girlfriend, wife and mother. By maintaining Marco's external virility, Demy not only maximises the comic potential of his film, but also shows how sexism and homophobia are perpetuated and trivialised in everyday discourse.

In September 1967, Dr Heinz Kroch, the German-Jewish refugee from Berlin who thirty years earlier had founded the Lankro Chemical Company in Eccles, was presented by the Mayor of Eccles with a casket and scroll to honour his admission to the Roll of Freemen of the Borough. The whole episode may perhaps be seen as a continuance of those ritual exchanges, engineered on both sides, which, from the mid-nineteenth century, sought to define the relationship between Manchester Jewry and the civic authorities of the locality. In 1967 Eccles, a time and a place troubled by newer waves of immigration, the corporation and the refugee were effectively laying claim to a heritage of reciprocity. For its humanity, the town had been rewarded by the contributions of the stranger; by his contributions, the stranger had confirmed his right to be British; a Jewish German had become an Eccles cake.

This chapter discusses the role of single woman in the family property distribution and formal–informal powers available to elite woman. Single women were absent from family genealogies that focus on marriage and the transmission of land from one generation to the next. However, as daughters, single women can be found in family settlements. The single woman's experience of property can also be traced through various deeds and property-related documents such as tax receipts, as well as personal correspondence and last wills and testaments. Such documents reveal a more complex life than images of lonely spinsterhood suggest, as single women are revealed as active, independent women who controlled their own property, generated extra income through loans and lived independent lives outside the family estate with connections to wide networks of friends and extended family.

This chapter returns to wider questions raised in the Introduction concerning the materials and methods feminist historiography might continue to develop and pursue. The desire to move beyond the perceived limitations of mere recovery of women's work has already resulted in new ways of telling a wider story: here, a detailed look at the work of two actresses, a case study in which the connections between theatre women might usefully be considered. If we are to change the way that theatre women are included in today's stories, we must attend to how they have been marginalised in the stories of the past.

Urban legends, those apocryphal stories told in university dormitories and around campfires about hook-handed psycho-killers and boyfriends discovered hanging above the parked cars, are a form of oral literature. This chapter explores the adaptive processes these largely formless narratives have undergone to be made into mainstream cinematic horror narratives. It expands on Paul Smith's typology by considering some of the structural issues of the urban legend film, that is, films based primarily or largely on orally circulated belief narratives. The chapter defines some of the more textual dimensions to the urban legend horror film in an effort to expand on what Smith began. It identifies four main narrative strategies that filmmakers avail themselves to within Smith's 'complete plot' category: extended, resultant, structuring and fusion narratives. The chapter summarises two multi-strand narratives: fusion narratives and anthologies.