For some insurgent groups, terrorist campaigns are a first step in initiating a wider-scale armed conflict. Terrorists – would-be insurgents – seek to change a political system and seek to do so through the application of violent means. In order to be successful, they require some form of support, either internal or external. In other instances, terrorism is a dead end. The (would-be) insurgents are unable to develop the support and capabilities needed for engaging their adversaries in warfare, despite their interests in doing so. Context matters here, as these weak actors are more likely to find success in weak states. In still other instances, those who use terrorism lack the ambition to initiate war. These are not insurgents; they seek to change policy not political regimes.

The chapter provides an annotated translation of Historia Silense (HS) the misleadingly named composite historical miscellany whose main claim upon the attention of historians has been that it includes the principal narrative account of the Leonese monarchy between 1037 and 1072. The author suggests that there is a strong probability that the work was composed by a member of the religious community of San Isidoro in the city of León, at a date certainly after 1109 and probably before 1118.

This chapter examines how, in Caleb Williams (1794), Godwin brings the Gothic to bear on the eighteenth century. It considers the novel as a manifestation of his radical views outlined in Political Justice (1793) and explores the novel as a response to English anxieties about the French Revolution at home and abroad. This chapter examines representations of the past in the novel, particularly in relation to Godwin’s ‘Of History and Romance’ (1797), which criticises works of Enlightenment history. The psychological introspection of Caleb Williams is discussed, as well as the presence of history in the human psyche and the (unwanted) ideological legacy of the past. This chapter goes on to explore how, in a similar vein to Godwin, Wollstonecraft refuses to use a fictional past as a subterfuge to comment on the present in Maria (1798) and uses the Gothic to examine women’s plight in eighteenth-century England. Discussing Maria in relation to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, it is argued that the novel brings the Female Gothic and its political agenda into sharper focus. This chapter discusses Wollstonecraft’s exploration of the female psyche, and how Maria’s thoughts and actions are governed by anachronistic and patriarchal social customs.

Chapter 9 is concerned with two central elements of the genre: naming and responsiveness. As the majority of epigrams are ultimately concerned with the summary identification of vice, folly and virtue in individuals, the identifying of those through either fictional or literal naming is of great importance. The "lemma" or title most often provides the link between the epigram and its human subject, and epigrams engaged in ‘personation’ through the use of punning fictional names that invited literal identification. This is explored in a case study of Charles Fitzgeffry’s Affaniae. In their brevity epigrams are dependent on and responsive to things and people beyond themselves. They are not self-generating, but take their bearings from an often well-known event, person or even other epigram. Such a dynamic led to frequent exchanges between epigrammatists, where a provocative epigram led to a ‘counter-epigram’ in response: this is demonstrated through a consideration of some of Sir John Harington’s epigrams.

This chapter presents the reader with an entirely different formation: Mexico between the late 1950s and early 1960s, where, unlike in Italy at the time, highly speculative capital interests were at the top of government policy. The chapter traces the rise of Fernando Méndez from an obscure maker of generic films in the 1940s to one of Mexican cinema’s most prominent figures. Méndez’ rise coincided with the film industry’s integration into the Mexican state’s proto-neoliberal agenda. An analysis of Fernando Méndez’ horror films shows that the films stage dimensions of this process. Mexican film historians, in line with their country’s circumstances and dominant interests, have, as a result, always included Fernando Méndez in the history of their cinema, as an auteur of a certain kind of popular films.

The Brink of Peace is a film about the Arab-Israeli peace process. The author grew up with war. As a kid in England, the author's first memories include German rockets over London, and buildings being bombed only two streets away. In 1998, he was presented with a different challenge, a film about the aftermath of war. Abba Eban, a former Israeli foreign minister asked the author to work with him on a film for 13/WNET New York, about the Oslo Peace process, and subsequent events leading up to an rapprochement with the PLO and a peace treaty with Jordan. One of the main difficulties while the author was shooting Brink of Peace was trying to cross borders, Palestinian territory, Egypt, and Jordan, loaded with film equipment.

Everyone concerned with the film and television industries relies on the public's facility with codes and conventions. The tendency increasingly to create entertaining hybrids means that codes and conventions of docudrama have expanded either side of the millennium. Linking captions can supply both a narrative and a dramatic function. Use of documentary material is an important and distinctive convention of the part-fiction film that is docudrama. The voiceover is a convention that docudrama shares with documentary film. The theoretical term diegesis refers to the method of narration employed in a film and is used to mark the degree to which necessary information is conveyed to an audience from within the story-world of the film. Newspaper campaigns can be counted as part of docudrama's extra-textual. The camera's power as witness is central to many cultural phenomena, the representational codes of the docudrama being one.

The first part of this chapter looks at how the global changes described in the previous chapter manifested themselves in Italy and offers evidence that there the kind of capital typically associated with popular genre films, short-term speculative capital, was a minor and strictly contained player within the country’s economy. Mario Bava’s cult thriller La ragazza che sapeva troppo was produced under these conditions. The second part of the chapter examines Bava’s film in its broader context, where small productions seeking to make a quick profit by monetising well tested sales points such as nudity and suspense where, at best, tolerated always critically ignored, in spite of their experimental and innovative character.