Greyhound racing in Britain declined rapidly from the late 1940s onwards from about 200 tracks and more than thirty million attendances to about twenty-five licensed Greyhound Board of Great Britain (GBGB) tracks and two million attendances by 2017. The main reason for this is the discriminatory taxes imposed upon greyhound tracks that led to betting moving to the off-course bookmakers, which were not faced with such taxes. As a result greyhound tracks closed and those that remained became increasingly drawn into the business of streaming their races into Licensed Betting Offices and into the hands of the large bookmaking organisations. These organisations have taken over the industry and faced with competition from other forms of gambling activities have, often with property companies, closed down tracks that have proved to be uneconomic and built housing where they once stood. In recent years the sport has also had to deal with the controversial issue of cruelty to greyhounds, which has resulted in the issue of the GBGB Greyhound Commitment on 14 March 2018. Faced with this situation, greyhound racing would appear to be marking time and never has this looked to be the case more than when the Wimbledon tracks closed on 25 March 2017.

This final chapter examines Hoccleve’s engagement with both female shamefastness and masculinity in two of his early works, the Letter of Cupid (his translation of Christine de Pizan’s anti-misogynist Epistre au dieu d’Amours) and La Male Regle, through the lens of what has been characterized as Hoccleve’s distinctive pattern of self-effacement. It argues that, in presenting himself as a ‘poore shamefast man’, Hoccleve plays on two of the key beliefs underpinning the medieval practice of honourable female shamefastness: the belief that such emotional practices can be learned, and the belief that they can also be counterfeited. The chapter begins by taking a closer look at the Middle English language of ‘manhood’ and ‘manliness’ in relation to shamefastness. It then turns to Hoccleve’s treatment of misleading appearances in his Letter of Cupid, in which Hoccleve claims to have proto-feminist intentions but ultimately suggests that the behaviour of neither men nor women can be taken at face value. Finally, it considers La Male Regle in order to show how Hoccleve exploits the idea of shamefastness as a replicable practice, transforming what medieval women were encouraged to make an apparently artless performance of virtue into a performance of conspicuous artifice.

Chapter 8 looks at the election of 2011 and shows how the economic crisis at that time changed the framing of the election. Irish newspapers reacted by adopting a sharp shift towards coverage of economic policy, but this happened too late to mitigate a crisis to which media cheerleading for the property industry had contributed.

This chapter turns to discussion of developments in the states that developed lobbying in the first decade of the 2000s: Lithuania, Poland, Taiwan, Australia, France and Israel. This follows a similar structure Chapter 2, considering the countries’ history and structure of government; the nature of lobbying; and the main aspects of the legislation in place. Readers will note that Hungary, which was reported on in the first edition, is absent from this chapter in this second edition. This is because in 2011, under the leadership of the right-wing populist party Fidesz, the country abandoned its lobbying law which had previously been in enacted in 2006.

This chapter reviews the more standardised cave burial practices which appear to have developed after around 3300 BC. All the burials from Middle Neolithic caves where a rite can be reconstructed were successive inhumations. At this date, there is also a trend towards burial further into the cave system. This may point to the development of a burial rite which was specifically tied to the use of caves. By the Late Neolithic, there were very low numbers of cave burials but there seems to have been a similar concern with placing burials deep in the cave systems. In both these periods, the intermediary period seems to have become something which involved the agency of caves and dead bodies but not of living people. In the Beaker period, there are also low numbers of burials but there seems to be both more input from living people and more similarity to other kinds of Beaker burial site.

This chapter explains that Brazil is the dominant military actor in South America, which brings an added element of security and opens new space for leadership. It looks at how this freedom to manoeuver has been worked into national defence and security policy, allowing these ostensibly military fields of public policy to become new vectors for pursuing national development as well as the regional and South-South leadership central to the larger foreign policy priority of reframing the nature and application of structural power. Discussion of security relations with South America, Africa and the US highlights the persistence of a geopolitical approach to strategic thinking concentrated on maximizing national autonomy and excluding foreign powers from a wide space around Brazil. The high level of intra-continental security is magnified by Brazil's geostrategic location in the South Atlantic, far from the main axes of conflict in the North Atlantic and Middle East.

This chapter sets up the volume by introducing the current state of the historiography on the first British empire, in terms of the sometimes divisive debates about the ‘cultural turn’ and ‘new imperial history’. It highlights the ways in which scholars now seek to build upon such developments while also re-integrating different perspectives and themes, from political economy to religion, law and geography, as well as the interrelationship between policy making in the metropole and policy formation and implementation across the empire. It then demonstrates how the various chapters fit within, but also move beyond, recent scholarship, in order to highlight the wider contribution that the volume makes.

Here Ann Buckley presents an appraisal of the collection known as ‘The Cambridge Songs’, found in a mid-eleventh-century English manuscript but derived from a German source which also included material from the international clerical court culture of the period. Buckley suggests that the collection can be viewed as an example of an ‘anthology of musical knowledge’, which informs on genres, techniques, performance practice and the types of repertory that would have been usual in the eleventh century among learned audiences. The chapter focuses firstly on the collection’s song texts as a source of information on musical knowledge and musical practice in German court culture of the eleventh century but takes account too of the wider European clerical and intellectual framework, interrogating the raison d’être of such a collection in the context of anthologies of knowledge of the time.

In the nineteenth century, the French were seeking an outpost in Southeast Asia to compete with the well established British, Dutch and Spanish, and at the end of the 1850s, gunboat diplomacy secured a foothold in Saigon. French occupation of Hué sparked four years of armed resistance in Annam and Tonkin that targeted the foreigners and Vietnamese Christians, the Can Vuong movement. From the emperor's hideout, an imperial edict was issued in Ham Nghi's name and under his seal. French residents of Vietnam appeared little troubled by the tempests. The French nevertheless maintained support for the throne in Hué, though with the sovereign reduced to virtual impotence. The circumstances of the exile of Ham Nghi in the 1880s, Thanh Thai in 1907 and Duy Tan in 1916 illustrate the difficult coexistence of a paramount colonial power and a vassal 'protected' monarchy.

The mechanisms through which Brazil Inc. has moved out into the world is complex and variagated, involving obvious foreign policy and state financing initiatives and integrated cooperation amongst Brazilian firms and trail-blazing by some of the larger former state-owned and private enterprises. This chapter begins with a review of the liberalization of the Brazilian economy in the 1990s before turning to shifts in foreign direct investment patterns of the Lula era. These elements then set the stage for an exploration of how foreign policy iniatives have supported the internationalization of the Brazilian economy as a strategy for advancing national development and how the outward expansion of the economy has supported growth of Brazil's influence in South America, Africa and beyond. The dense networks of Brazilian corporate ownership captured by Sergio Lazzarini's 'capitalism of linkages' had an important impact on the internationalization of Brazilian business.

Chapter 6 investigates Irish election coverage of leaders and personalities. Again, contrary to the hypercritical infotainment hypothesis, there has been no increase in focus on leaders. Nonetheless, the authors do see some instances of where party decisions to calibrate the leader-centrism of their campaigns are reflected in election coverage.