In 1568, William Allen capitalised on the sizeable English Catholic diaspora following the Elizabethan 'purges' at Oxford and Cambridge to found Douai college. By 1598, English women had finally found a nationally specific outlet for their religious life having previously entered local 'foreign' convents, such as the Flemish Augustinian convent of St Ursula's in Louvain. It was not just as potential ideological partners that the convents were viewed by the male colleges; the convents also offered official outlets to college hierarchies. Notionally, the English convents should have been united with not just English, but also Scottish and Irish exile institutions in a spirit of Counter-Reformation zeal. The members of these various institutions were all theoretically excluded to varying degrees by the same Protestant authorities. The exile institutions became focal points for expatriate communities, fulfilling various social, educational and political functions not normally associated with religious foundations.

Lyric poems are usually brief and compressed utterances, so it would be surprising if poets always wrote just a single poem on each theme or topic that interested them. A rough distinction between the sequence and the cluster is that the former is usually intended as a group from the outset. The former is given a distinct structure with recognisable phases in the Elizabethan sonnet sequences of William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, or Edmund Spenser. Spenser's sonnet sequence Amoretti and Epithalamion was published in 1595, and records the progress of his protracted courtship of the Irish heiress Elizabeth Boyle, when he was in his forties. A sonnet sequence usually has a gradual shift of atmosphere which becomes evident as it goes on.

This chapter analyses the impact of the Sunningdale Agreement and its aftermath on unionist politics in Northern Ireland. It will begin by placing divisions within the unionist bloc, many of which preceded Sunningdale, in context. It will outline how divisions on power-sharing crystalized between the publication of the Northern Ireland Constitutional Proposals in March 1973 and the collapse of the power-sharing executive at the hands of the Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) in May 1974. It will consider how opposition to Sunningdale created short-lived unity among disparate strands of unionism, which disintegrated once the executive collapsed. Drawing extensively from archival evidence, it will demonstrate how, after 1974, unionists experienced a prolonged limitation of their capacity to influence policy as British governments refused to countenance a return of devolution without nationalist involvement. This cemented a lasting cleavage within unionism between a small minority prepared to countenance power-sharing and the considerable majority that demanded a return to majority rule. Both desired devolution, but the latter, paradoxically, pursued policies that ultimately reinforced direct rule. The consistency of the British government’s stance on nationalist involvement in any devolved settlement and the absence of a local administration that unionists could focus their protests against ensured that the 1974 UWC strike was the zenith of rejectionist unionism. This combination of factors imposed clear limits on unionist political influence in subsequent years.

The playhouse in Lincoln's Inn Fields had reverted to its original use as an indoor tennis court following the move of the Duke's Company into its own purpose-built theatre in Dorset Gardens in 1674. The first task facing the rebels was to convert it once again into a playhouse, and Edward Langhans is the only theatre historian to note the significance of the fact that the ‘new’ theatre the company decided to occupy was in fact the first playhouse created by Davenant in 1660. Theatre historians agree that the strength of the new company lay in the fact that it contained the most experienced and popular players of the day. The most innovative aspect of this company is that it formed itself on the basis of a players' co-operative in which the actors and, for the first time, actresses were allocated shares. The sharing agreement made no attempt to designate any one player as overall leader or manager.

This chapter explores how the migrants understood their homes and what the migrants' home-making practices revealed about their identities and their lifestyle ambitions. It moves on from the wider discussion of property selection that has characterized previous research on the British in rural France, to reveal the role of individual biographies, histories and desires in shaping the home. In particular, it opens the door on three different households, putting the material culture of these homes on public display. The various examples presented in the chapter demonstrate that while the home could be the site of new identities and ways of living, it could also be used as continuation of their lives before migration, allowing the migrants to retreat into the comfort and familiarity of their home in what remain unfamiliar social and physical environments.

In earlier years, the problem for the Quakers was that of reconciling their objective of international harmony with the rescue of Jews from Germany, one of the chief national fields of their welfare services and missionary endeavour. In their eyes, too, the rise of Nazism, and the economic crisis and sense of national humiliation which had helped bring it about, were largely a consequence of Britain's treatment of Germany at the Versailles conference. Germany's reaction to this treatment, even if part of that reaction was an unacceptable anti-Semitism, was a natural consequence. The Manchester Quakers sought to retain a friendly relationship with Germany, including an annual exchange of students, until the outbreak of war. While the London Quakers were prepared from 1933 to lend organised support to refugees seeking a way out, their Manchester co-religionists were reluctant to follow suit.

This chapter traces the ideas that shaped the concept of power-sharing within the SDLP, and subsequently Northern nationalism, highlighting the significance attached to the Irish dimension as a core feature of power-sharing, which caused divisive debates within the party post-Sunningdale. It will also trace how the concept evolved within British and Irish government circles, where much of the talk focussed on ‘government by consent’ as opposed to power-sharing during the rest of the 1970s. The fall of Sunningdale in 1974 has been attributed to many things, and the popular narrative emphasises that it was an agreement too soon, or a lost opportunity. This explanation does not account for the level of intra-party conflict that existed before the executive was even set up or during the negotiations. Further, it overlooks the very real challenge that power-sharing posed (and continues to pose) to democracy and legitimacy. Brian Faulkner, Chief Executive in the 1974 power-sharing Executive, retrospectively questioned the legitimacy of the SDLP sharing power in Northern Ireland: ‘Given the history of the SDLP over the previous years, and particularly their attitude that Northern Ireland had no right to exist, it was natural that unionists should feel strongly against SDLP participation in government’. The mandatory coalition between parties who were at ideologically opposite ends of the spectrum, including a party that had the demise of the state as one of its core aims, further highlighted the undemocratic nature of the agreement that inevitability would have caused problems, had the experiment not failed in 1974. The emphasis the SDLP attached to the Irish dimension as an integral part of power-sharing additionally eroded the democratic complexion of power-sharing. This has very real repercussions for the Northern Ireland Assembly today. While the 1998 Agreement ended the violence (or at least the level of violence) associated with the prior three decades of the ‘troubles’, there is no real commitment to democratic pluralist institutions at Stormont and instead there has been a reinforcing of the historical choices offered to the electorate of selecting candidates or voting on the basis of their shade of orange or green.

A leading Manchester proponent of pacifism was Lionel Cowan, a Manchester Jew who in 1929 was converted to the cause at a meeting he attended at the Friends Meeting House in Mount Street on the evils of war. His subsequent efforts on behalf of refugees may be seen in part as a result of his reading of the pacifist creed, an unusual ideology for a man brought up in an orthodox Jewish home; in part as a result of his own background in a family of immigrant origin; in part as the consequence of the personal links he established in the early 1930s, largely through the peace movement, with Jewish families in Nazi Germany. Most of all, however, they were the outcome of an emotional empathy with the suffering which had triggered his pacifism, which informed his Judaism and transformed the influences at work on him into determined action.

This chapter explores the constitutional path that was laid down for the process by which the Provisional Government constructed the civil service of the Irish Free State. It is stressed that ‘it [was] of the highest importance for the Provisional Government to get in touch with and take the fullest advantage of the experience of the Irish civil service generally’. The split in the republican movement profoundly affected the Dáil Éireann civil service. Under the terms of the 1920 Act, there were three categories of applicant to the Wylie committee: those discharged by the Irish government, those seeking permission to retire and those opting to retire under the statutory conditions provided by the Act. The Provisional Government squandered the goodwill of its civil service, ans as 1923 dawned and the Irish Free State came into office, the attitude of the civil service was one of suspicion and defensiveness.

This chapter focuses on John Irving’s The Cider House Rules (1985), and Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster (1987) and The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster (2006), novels that remember earlier American and English novels to revise the conventions of the bildungsroman and challenge its conventional gender boundaries. In the process, the novels describe the kinship building of the protagonists, who develop complex understandings of kinship ties and a consciously affirmative stance on the value of “alternative family.” Because they are orphans, Irving’s and Gibbons’s protagonists are outsiders, but because they are white they may still lay claim to the dominant formulation of American identity; and the challenge they launch against the nuclear family ideal may be effectual precisely because they occupy a position of racial privilege.