This speculative comment considers the potential worthof raising questions that appear simple but may berewardingly complex. It asks whether routine aspectsof curatorial work, such as captioning objects andjuxtaposing them in displays, may not have moresuggestive dimensions than has been recognisedpreviously. It asks what the implications of aconception of ‘the museum as method’ might have forcurrent approaches to public exhibition.

Using the findings of the Royal Historical Society’s Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change, published in 2018, this chapter considers how anti-racist action has been undertaken in history higher education in the UK. The report found that undergraduate-level history was overwhelmingly white in terms of students, that the numbers were even lower when it came to postgraduate-level history and that ‘history academic staff are less diverse than H&PS student cohorts’. Taking stock of these findings, many history departments across UK universities reviewed, strengthened or created anew their equality, diversity and inclusivity agendas. Ranging from efforts to diversify curriculum content to improving mechanisms to report racial abuse, this chapter will reflect on the effectiveness of these proposals. As the postdoctoral fellow funded by the Past and Present Society to embed the impact of the Race Report, the author offers a critical perspective on how the race equality work so clearly envisioned in the report not only mirrors but is reinforced by the equality work taking place in wider Britain. The museum and heritage sector, those working with schools and the curriculum and those producing history for the public are working in a mutually constitutive set of structures to engender anti-racist action and behaviour. By tracing the intellectual development of the RHS’s equalities work as it ties to the anti-racist work we can see in Britain more broadly, the chapter reflects on the extent to which meaningful change can occur in history higher education.

Chapter 3 will consider how Conservative strategy towards opposing and undermining Labour evolved during the Cameron era. The chapter will demonstrate how initially when in opposition, the Conservatives set about nullifying the ‘investment under Labour or cuts under the Conservatives’ narrative, which had been so successful for New Labour and Blair in the era of economic prosperity between 1997 and 2007. It will then identify how, in the aftermath of the financial crash, Cameron abandoned this strategy of converging on Labour to neutralise the economy as an electoral issue. The chapter will then explore how the Conservatives set about establishing their narrative of the financial crash – i.e. it was the fault of a profligate Labour government. Apportioning blame was thus central to electoral strategy in 2010, and establishing risk about Labour regaining power was central to electoral strategy in 2015. The chapter will also identify how, alongside emphasising perceptions of economic competence, Conservative strategy also came to revolve around emphasising perceptions of leadership credibility, as Cameron was seen by voters as a more credible political leader than either Brown or Miliband.

This chapter aims to consider how Dans Ma Peau frees the female werewolf from the status of the body to allow it to be considered as a mode of embodiment. Dans Ma Peau has been classed among a large number of films emerging from France that are aggressively difficult to watch. The chapter discusses similarities between Dans Ma Peau and werewolf narratives, such as the split-self, the split world within the film, representations of transformation, and how each have severe limitations for theorising female subjectivity. In the case of Dans Ma Peau, the entire film is arguably a transformation scene for Esther as she slowly and irreversibly loses herself to her desire for self-harm, yet there is one particular scene where she significantly represents the shape-shifter. A dominant werewolf and shape-shifter narrative is that of the split-self.

The ‘cellarage scene’, which follows Hamlet’s interview with the Ghost, stages the latter in a very ambiguous and disconcerting way. This chapter turns to more popular, medieval, intertextual antecedents of Hamlet’s ghostly figure, arguing that this sequence looks back towards medieval stage traditions that survived into the late-sixteenth century, not only because the couple formed by the subterranean Ghost and Hamlet is reminiscent of that of the Devil and the Vice in morality plays, but also because of other, more specific elements like the plurality of the oath, Hamlet’s disrespectful tone and the nicknames given by Hamlet to the Ghost. The whole sequence may be seen both as a living tableau on the stage and as comic relief, part of Hamlet’s wider propensity for puns.

At a time when women were beginning to find opportunities for voluntary public work under the aegis of philanthropic bodies, it became possible for them to take on leading roles in the new field of animal welfare. As well as being the foremost sponsors of charities like the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association, women themselves founded the majority of animal refuges. They included the Battersea Dogs’ Home initiated by Mary Tealby, which overcame misogynistic prejudice to become a prominent state-subsidised institution – arguably by compromising its original home-making ideals. Sir Arthur Helps in Some Talk about Animals (1873) discerned the differences between male and female attitudes to animal suffering – women being much more impulsively compassionate. The book’s dedicatee, Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts, was the most influential of all female animal advocates in the Victorian era, as leader of the newly created RSPCA ladies’ committee, as a very generous donor to animal causes, and as a frequent letter-writer to the press. The statue of a dog, ‘Greyfriars Bobby’, which she commissioned, was a celebration of canine fidelity; it invested animals with the moral faculties that justified human solicitude for them.

This part investigates the dramatic expansion of the television market in the 1980s–1990s, which also led to a notable shift in TV antiquity. Technological advances such as the introduction of satellite and cable television, plus the increasing dominance of colour meant that TV antiquity now tried to compete with cinema with regard to spectacle and scale. While the production of British antiquity dramas declined, a number of US miniseries conquered the screens. With Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995–99) popular entertainment programmes emerged that drew inspiration from sword-and-sorcery films made a decade earlier, but also high-profile productions such as ABC’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1984). As this part demonstrates, changes in technology went hand in hand with changes in the production environment, such as network syndication and new global markets, which affected the content of the shows produced during this time.

This chapter uses letters, diaries and under-explored ‘battle experience’ forms produced by British servicemen to understand the everyday lived experience of fighting the Korean War. But it also traces how, through the repeated discussion of ‘experience’ and collective memories of the Second World War, the seeds for Korea’s subsequent cultural obscurity were sown. Korea lacked the moral virtue of the 1939-45 conflict, despite the harsh toll it exacted on its participants. Constant comparisons often concealed the unique elements of the Korean War, including the unfamiliar and often inhospitably landscape to the physical and psychological demands of both rapid movement up and down the peninsula. These forgotten elements of British military experience in Korea are vital to any social history of the conflict.

This book proposes that Herminie (1805-74) and Fanny Pereire (1825-1910) played essential but often unremarked roles in the lives and the ultimately spectacular businesses of their husbands, respectively, Emile and Isaac Pereire. For Herminie and Fanny not only provided a family life that was at once supportive, calm, stable, and united, and contributed substantially to the public face their husbands enjoyed and that enabled the Pereire businesses to flourish - as was expected of women of their class - they played an often-unacknowledged role in those businesses. Kinship was the bedrock of the Pereires’ business success. Elite Jewish women also played a role during the Great War similar to the one they had played during the Franco-Prussian War. The fate of Jews in France thereafter and during the Second World War is a tragedy known only too well, however.

This chapter focuses on Bess’s textile production, starting with the textile hangings she produced for Chatsworth, which constitute the most ambitious known artwork produced by an Englishwoman in the early modern period. Although these textiles are in many ways distinct from the emblematic embroideries that Bess produced working alongside Mary, Queen of Scots, her royal prisoner during this period of time, there are also areas of overlap in style and subject matter. These areas of connection between Bess’s textile work and Mary Stuart’s support the assertion that Mary was a catalyst in Bess’s transformation from able embroiderer to what today we would call a textile artist. The chapter pieces together the story of her workshop at Chatsworth, located in the guarderobe there and in its attached room.

The introduction offers an insight into what is a multidisciplinary, sizeable and vibrant academic literature on Muslims in post-war Britain. It outlines the main arguments and theories regarding migration, integration, racism, multiculturalism and Muslim communities in more rural, peripheral and non-metropolitan areas. It presents and explains the study’s aims, rationale and methodology, and introduces the key arguments and themes that run throughout the book through which it makes a contribution to academic scholarship. Finally, it offers an overview of the book’s source material and structure, as well as synopses of the chapters that follow.