In applying immigration law, the British government made the occasional concession and its agents at the ports of entry their occasional mistake. The British public had apparently become persuaded by 1937 that the regulations contained in the Alien Acts represented a valid and minimal defence of the ‘national interest’. The temporary and conditional admission of the Basque children suggests the very limited impact which even as potentially explosive a mix of international events, popular sentiment and voluntary action, such as that which came to exist in the spring of 1937, might exert on public as well as governmental perceptions of the national interest. It seems clear from the imagery and language surrounding discussions of the Basque children that notions of Britain's humanitarian tradition floated freely within the whole of Britain's political spectrum.

The collection was assembled by William Parkhurst in the first decades of the seventeenth century, and later passed into the hands of the Finch family, at whose seat of Burley-on-the-Hill it was examined in the nineteenth century by Alfred J Horwood of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, and in the early twentieth by the scholar Logan Pearsall Smith, who caused transcripts to be made of some of the material. These were used by later scholars, the manuscript itself being believed to have been destroyed by fire. The circumstances of this fire, and of the manuscript’s mysterious survival and subsequent discovery by I A Shapiro are described, as are its disappearance once again and rediscovery by Peter Beal. The survival was still not widely publicised and, until now, no detailed study of the Burley manuscript has been published.

Much of the information and research on which this book was built slightly predates the economic crisis of 2009. Immigration in the Irish case was driven by economic growth and, like other post-boom challenges being reckoned with in hard times, the integration of immigrants cannot be deferred without imposing considerable future social costs upon Irish society. The first major integration challenge is to move from begrudging to proactive integration through citizenship. Inclusive naturalisation, a policy of turning ‘strangers into citizens’, would create further knock-on incentives for political integration. The second major integration challenge is to recognise that integration is best addressed through social policy rather than by means of security policy. What is crucially needed is the cognitive shift that recognises the relationship between social inclusion for citizens and integration of immigrants. The third major integration challenge is to invest in the capabilities of immigrants no less than in those of Irish citizens. A fourth major integration challenge relates to the inclusion of immigrants in decision making in the various domains within which integration occurs.

Jacques Demy has assumed mythical status among many admirers in France and beyond since his death in 1990. According to Jean Marc Lalanne, few oeuvres have permeated the memories of successive generations of French movie watchers as much as that of Demy. Demy explicitly lays the foundations for his myth in Trois places pour le 26, an amalgamation of all the distinctive markers of the director's cinema. Through the films she made following his death, Agnes Varda constructs her husband's cinema as constituting a universe of significations and sensibilities, and upholds Demy as the original creator of that universe. Jacquot de Nantes connects Demy's films to the past moments by inserting carefully chosen extracts, often indicated by a hand pointing forward or backward in time and space, modelled on a sign in the Demy garage.

The Life of Harold Godwinson is an unsteady blend of hagiography and pseudo-history that was composed in defence of a defeated Anglo-Saxon king at a point well into the Anglo-Norman period. Harold is the last Anglo-Saxon in Anglo-Norman England; in his Vita Haroldi, the Welsh borderlands are the last place where this English identity can survive. The Welsh borderlands in the Vita Haroldi serve as the last refuge of a past identity, a place where the last Anglo-Saxon king can hide in plain sight. The preservation of Englishness in this region of cultural nexus over a century after the Battle of Hastings reflects the strength of the society that flourished there for so many centuries. After the arrival of the Normans had altered so much in England, the Welsh borderlands remained as a last embodiment of Anglo-Saxon England.

This chapter sets out to delineate the broad historical developments and the main structural features that condition the potential emergence and scope of a regional political class in Catalonia and Scotland. It outlines the main processes and structures of the functional and territorial differentiation of Catalan and Scottish politics that are setting the stage for a regional political class. This chapter suggests that the notions of democracy, the modern state and professional politics that have informed regional mobilisation.

This chapter describes how the Conservative Party dealt with the extreme right after Winston Churchill regained office in 1951, confirming that Central Office based its different actions on its perception of the nature of a group or individual's extremism, and the usefulness of such a group to the Conservative Party. Churchill's reputation probably muted the degree of right-wing criticism because it remained an electoral asset. Central Office was unarguably more positive towards Aims of Industry (AIMS) than other group to the right of the Conservative Party. AIMS provided the valuable service of propagating Conservative Party thinking to a polarised people. Central Office was unlikely to fear that Common Cause was a sectarian, potential rival. Central Office maintained surveillance of right-wing organisations and individuals, whether they were inside or outside the Conservative Party, regardless of what prompted their actions.

The common image of the Dutch Republic is that of a Protestant bulwark from which Catholics were by and large excluded so that they had to look for refuge, including education, abroad. The creation of a semi-national church conflicted with the prevailing option of Catholic education abroad, because the foreign educational institutions attended by Dutch Catholics were always under the final supervision of the Holy See. Catholics could fund scholarships or grants for study abroad, and occasionally even for schools or boarding houses inside the Netherlands. For this funding, it was needed they did not infringe upon the educational monopoly of the cities and provinces with regard to grammar schools, colleges and universities. Although toleration is a key dimension of the historical image of the Dutch Republic, in accurate sense of the word it had to wait for the Batavian Revolution of 1795 to be formally granted and implemented.

This chapter focuses on the foreign and defence policy of the Labour Party during the 1970s. During this time, the party's political programme moved to the left in an attempt to recuperate its base inside the trade unions and reconnect with the constituency parties. The party became united in condemning the ongoing Vietnamese conflict and urging the withdrawal of American forces, in advocating for the dissolution of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the closure of nuclear bases and the rejection of a British defence policy based on the threat of the use of nuclear weapons. The chapter also discusses the party's commitment to bolstering the Anglo-American relationship and to strengthening Britain's nuclear deterrent.