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.

This chapter explores the absurdist tendencies in twentieth-century literature, noting that prose fiction had its own proto-absurdist moments, which can be seen in the works of Peter Conrad and Henry James. It then examines avant-garde theory and some related concepts, including futurism and surrealism, concluding with a discussion on the move towards ‘absurdism’.

Police officers who had been recruited into the Colonial Police Service from the home police forces had their years of service at home discounted from the calculation of their overall pension. As the number of police forces in the Colonial Police Service diminished at the end of Empire, so the role of the Inspector-General of Colonial Police (IGCP) was brought into question. Imperial traditions were maintained to some extent within the policing of the postcolonial state, and can still be observed today, reflected in the work of Colonial Police Advisors (CPA), in the export of personnel, and in police training and procedures. In 1983, an agreement was reached between Association of Chief of Police Officers (ACPO) and the Royal Hong Kong Police (RHKP) to permit regular 'formal' exchanges of operational officers.

This chapter explores the contexts, both educational and convivial, in which many epigrams were composed and initially circulated. The genre's central place in the educational practices of the period was particularly significant; it helped establish an “epigram habit” that poets took with them into later life, one that solidified the genre’s place in the literary landscape of the period. Overall, the university context, as reflected in the epigrams of Degory Wheare and Charles Fitzgeffry, was particularly significant in fostering epigram composition.

This chapter considers the topical and ephemeral origins of individual epigrams, and how some came to circulate widely, both by word of mouth and as posted poems. Epigrams sometimes worked as part of the oral news culture of the time and epigrams might be scrawled or posted on well-known public sites. Such free-wheeling circulation also led to a high degree of textual stability. The chapter includes a section on the influence of the Roman figure of "Pasquil" on the epigram culture of Britain, and case studies of epigrams (by Andrew Melville and Sir John Harington) in circulation.

The wars of the Albigensian crusade were brought to an end by the Peace of Paris in 1229, by which Raymond VII, Count of Toulouse, capitulated and swore to persecute heresy. This part includes the provisions of Dominican provincial chapters, which cast interesting light on relations between ordinary Dominican brothers and Dominican inquisitors. It provides a substantial portion of the documentary sources from which the early history of inquisition is written.