This chapter discusses Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. The back cover of the 1990 Pandora Press edition described Oranges as the ‘touching and humorous account of an unusual childhood with an extraordinary mother’. The unusual child is a little girl teasingly called Jeanette who, like Jeanette Winterson, lives in a working-class town in Lancashire with her adoptive parents, Jack and Louie. Like Winterson's own mother, the fictional Jeanette's foster mother is a militant member of the Pentecostal Evangelical Church and has taken great pains to educate her daughter in her faith. The novel relates Jeanette's process of maturation from admiring and obedient child, to rebellious adolescent and ideologically self-assured and free adult, as the progressive revelation of her lesbianism clashes with her mother's religious and moral ideas.

This chapter presents translated and annotated sources on the topic of the plague in the British Isles.

Article 330 prohibited violating "public" modesty. Publicity was constituted either by space or by (institutional) structures that helped congregate a group of individuals in a certain space. In public spaces, any sexual exhibitionism was prohibited, even if there was no witness, and even if it took place in the most absolute darkness. Publicity was therefore the central element of the offense, which gave the crime its specificity within the penal framework to punish crimes and offenses against morality. Liability and publicity were two elements that overlapped when it came to private spaces. Despite everything, the possibility of taking precautions to limit visibility and accessibility of the private spaces differentiated them from public space by nature, such as streets. From the second half of the nineteenth century on, the courts began to require unprecedented conditions in order to consider precautions as sufficient.

In this chapter the author shares his thoughts about a film which is still in progress. He began to wonder if it might be possible to make a film looking at the situation. He also begins to be fascinated with the idea of doing a portrait of a musical family, showing how they faced life, branched out, grew, and tried to make ends meet. After filming for about six months, he wrote a short proposal asking for financial support and put it out to a few foundations. Although his own enthusiasm and energy had diminished, Debby Elnatan still pressed on with fantastic energy regarding her own projects. It wasn't just Debby's success that impelled him, but many other things had happened in the family that could provide new material for the project.

This chapter considers the two books that were published at the beginning of the new millennium. Jim Crace particularises issues of love, family and other intimate or domestic interpersonal relations in The Devil's Larder and Six (2003). Of The Devil's Larder, some of whose stories had appeared previously in Slow Digestions of the Night, Crace admits the project was long planned, and represents ‘an attempt at a piecemeal, patchwork novel’, something inspired by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and Primo Levy's The Periodic Table. In Crace, the short pieces at times feel like narrative equivalents of philosophic aphorisms, particularly with their broadly common gastronomic themes and the implicit architectonic of an overriding cumulative intention. Generally, the recurrent contexts and themes are overt and therefore easy to identify, and include: relationships, sexuality and desire; families and their patterns of behaviour and traditions; sociability, jollity and its absence; and forms of poisoning or allergies.

Threatening the survival of the British Empire during the post-war years was the spread of communism and the growth of the cold war. Southeast Asia appeared to be the immediate communist target, with British rule in Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong coming under threat. For the purpose of policing, Hong Kong was divided into three: the island of Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories. Within the urban centres of Hong Kong and Kowloon, there was greater emphasis on civil policing, while in the New Territories colonial police practices prevailed. In the case of both the Malayan Police and the Royal Hong Kong Police (RHKP), colonial practices were strengthened during the post-war years. The Malayan Police played a crucial role during the ensuing conflict that spanned over a decade. Improvement to practices of policing public disturbances came about after the Star Ferry riots in the 1950s.

This chapter presents translated and annotated narrative accounts on the topic of the plague in contintental Europe.

The authors present a selection of extracts from two of the most important works of preaching in the thirteenth century. The works are the tales collected by Stephen of Bourbon for use in sermons and a more technical guide for preachers written by Humbert of Romans. The authors have included two short sermons devoted specifically to heresy, because of their rarity, and geographical interest, providing as they do a brief glimpse of heresy in northern France and connections between northern Italy and southern France.

Chapter 5 examines the nature of different types of surviving manuscripts -- authors' working copies, collectors' miscellanies and gift manuscripts -- in which larger numbers of epigrams appear. Working copies of collections (such as those by Thomas Freeman and William Percy) were often were a stage towards publication or the presentation of a collection to a friend or patron, as in the cases of Francis Thynne and Sir John Harington. Other epigrams, after circulating independently, found a place in miscellanies, sometimes scattered amongst other types of poetry, at other times gathered in one part of the manuscript.