This chapter explores the creation of Black British beauty spaces for and by African-Caribbean women in postwar Britain between 1948 and 1990 by scrutinising physical spaces and the literary narratives that represented them – previously overlooked in discussions about postwar migration and multiculturalism. In doing so, it considers how negotiations of beauty, often multilayered and divisive, became resources for fashioning Black British identities. African-Caribbean women mediated Eurocentric beauty ideals, using elements of both conformity and subversion, to create innovative beauty spaces. As part of wider anti-racist community building, quotidian beauty consumption played a formative role in nurturing spaces of belonging for African-Caribbean women in Britain. Configurations of hair and skin colour were navigated in salons, Black businesses, beauty contests, and media outputs. I interdiscursively read visual and textual outputs in two pioneering Black-owned newspapers, The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean news (1958–1964) and The Voice (f.1982), alongside the early novels of Andrea Levy. This interdisciplinary approach, supplemented by anecdotal evidence and testimonies from The Heart of the Race (1985), accentuate the importance of Black beauty discourse in identity formation in modern Britain.

This chapter explores the heated debate over the memory of the British Empire through an examination of the public interventions by scholars Nigel Biggar and Niall Ferguson and their critics. On either side of the debate, scholars agree that the colonial past is too complex to be reduced to a simple question of for or against. To begin to understand why the debate is nevertheless so fierce, this chapter studies it as a case of disagreement over ‘exemplar empires’. The chapter argues that contemporary British memory culture is marked by a singularisation of the imperial past. Here, the Empire is summed up in a few emblematic images and episodes that are seen as representative of the whole. This gives rise to disagreement over which exemplars are the most appropriate, how they should be judged and a fear that one account will crowd out the other. The chapter explores how Ferguson and Biggar and their critics have discussed the British Empire often using similar rhetorical flourishes: accusing their opponents of reducing past complexities, disagreeing over how best to sum up empire, questioning each other’s moral evaluation of it and worrying that their version of the past will be forgotten.

The Vampyre initiates two tantalising elements in vampire fiction which continue to inform its postmodern iterations today. The disclosure of a terrible secret and the forbidden, if not downright blasphemous, nature of vampirism itself informs a myriad of vampire confessions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn shows how Polidori’s tale incepts several elements that directly inform the literary legacy of Anne Rice and the cinematic vampires of director Neil Jordan. Jordan returns to numerous themes haunting the margins of Polidori’s tale and Byron’s unfinished vampire ‘Fragment’. His own vampire films, Interview with the Vampire (1994) and Byzantium (2012), meditate on the horrid nature of immortality as a brutal, masculine force which threatens to strip away and destroy all remnants of feeling and feminine influence. These tales also foreground vampire subjectivity as a means to liberate vampires from the torment of their lingering human guilt. These rich and cinematic ‘vulgar fictions’ disclose an unpaid debt to Polidori’s tale, and its continued influence in contemporary reimaginings of immortality.

Sri Vikrama Rajasinha and his dynasty out of the way, the British monarchy and its viceregal representatives assumed the place of the Kandy monarchy, while extending royal power over the whole island in a way the Nayakkars never managed. The dramatic circumstances of Vikrama's capture were recounted in a memoir by a British-employed interpreter, William Adrian Dias Bandaranayaka. Vikrama and earlier Kandyan kings indeed used coerced labour, and only after his death was slavery abolished throughout the empire. In the late 1700s and during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Britain and France were embroiled in commercial rivalries and military conflicts that constituted a world war fought in Europe, the Americas and Asia. As the years passed, Britain entrenched itself in Ceylon and India, the world largely ignorant about the captive in Vellore. Revolts, insurrections and conspiracies occurred with regularity in Ceylon from 1817 to 1848.

This chapter shows that the young white people who spent their nights sharing music and organising around musical activism in postcolonial London built a shared culture that struck an often-tenuous balance between culturally appropriating Black spaces and music and building friendships and solidarities within them. These spaces had the power to make such interactions banal but, particularly in the case of the Brixton Academy, they also foregrounded the possibility of inter-racial encounters.

Sam George explores vampire theatricals, focusing on the stage progeny of Polidori’s The Vampyre. In 1820, John Robinson Planché adapted Charles Nodier’s Parisian dramatisation Le Vampire of the same year for the English stage. Focusing on Planché, George argues that the Romantic vampire, and the plays that are its legacy, have a shared origin in phantasmagoria, from the German ghost stories that inspired Byron’s vampire fragment at the Villa Diodati, to the spectacular summoning of revenants on stage in Paris. George demonstrates how crucial stage props and stage effects (such as the star trap and vampire trap) are to the changing representation of the vampire, registering important shifts. George argues that it was Polidori, not Byron (nor Bram Stoker, the stage manager at The Lyceum), whose work succeeded in founding the stage vampire.

This chapter highlights the key themes and conclusions of the book, calling for a more integrated approach to studying the Cold War and post-war British history.

Chapter 3 looks at the general coverage of the political system in Irish elections in terms of framing, tone, and the distribution of coverage. It shows that there has been no steady increase in negativity and no increase in the political competition frame and, therefore, little evidence of hypercritical infotainment. Notwithstanding a number of fundamental shifts in the nature of Irish politics, the political system has not had any systematic influence on framing and tone. Most importantly, the authors present strong evidence of a tight consensus on norms of critical impartiality across fifty years and across radio, television, and print.

This chapter considers whether cave burial in Britain starts in the Late Mesolithic or the Early Neolithic. It explores the evidence from cave and shell midden burial sites with early 4th millennium BC dates. There are examples from western Scotland of similar burial rites at Late Mesolithic Cnoc Coig and Early Neolithic Carding Mill Bay. There are also different styles of Neolithic midden burial in rock shelters at Raschoille and An Corran. There were also a number of other possible midden burials in other part of Britain. Cave burial practice could be considered as evidence for continuity between the Late Mesolithic and the Early Neolithic in these regions. There are cave burials with early dates, and these may provide indications of cave burial as a Late Mesolithic practice. However, it is more likely that these represent the very earliest manifestations of a ‘culturally’ Neolithic burial practice.

This chapter identifies some of the cinematic strategies for the visual presentation of the female werewolf. It considers the issue of female violence as it relates to this particular horror monster in terms both of agency and of representation. The chapter focuses on some basic, even mundane, questions that often get overlooked in more straightforwardly ideological analysis, namely 'what does a female werewolf look like?' and 'what does it do?' It is the chapter's contention that a film's posing of, and attempts to answer, such questions informs and shapes both narration and style, and an appreciation of such elements can feed back into and ultimately bring nuance to more ideology-based readings. Horror cinema's female werewolf emerges from this as both more complex and more variegated in her various manifestations than has sometimes been allowed by horror criticism.

In the last chapter, the book returns to the work of architects. It argues that architects’ engagement with popular journals helped shape new interior decorating styles by examining the projects undertaken by architect Alexandre Sandier and sponsored by the popular journal the Revue Illustrée. The chapter ultimately claims that imagination and theming played a most important role in the development of the profession of interior designer as well as in the formulation of new decorative styles such as Art Nouveau. These two developments are inextricably linked and cannot be understood in separation from each other.