The concept of 'political policing' took on a more important role as colonial governments attempted to maintain control throughout the end stages of decolonisation. Political policing encouraged a closer surveillance of public organisations and prominent political figures ostensibly to ensure that appropriate individuals gained centre stage at independence. In this way, the colonial police became pawns in the imperial endgame. After 1948, policing procedures acquired a different momentum indicating that the very nature of the colonial state had changed. The Special Branch emerged as an alternative and additional source of information-gathering and processing, dedicated to the pursuit of political and security intelligence, once the domain of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). Intelligence-gathering within the colonies seems to have muddled along until the onset of the Second World War, when a real opportunity for change and modernisation occurred.

Docudramas require pre-production research and this is a key marker of difference between docudrama and other kinds of drama. The facts portrayed in television docudrama are subject to pre-production checks, with the script drafts constantly referring to lawyers to ensure that films are legally defensible at the level of fact. This chapter focuses on the dramatic performance itself, in terms of the realisation of the docudrama in front of the camera-eye and microphone-ear, and in terms of what actors do when they act. It provides the comparisons between the television studio and the theatre space, between the activities taking place within each, and between the relative juxtapositions in the two spaces of performers, crews, and audience. The theatrical process depends upon a specific occasion when audience and actors meet in the same time and space.

The documents in this section explore production and commerce: the effects of monetary affluence, the guilds and markets, government interventions to stimulate production, to regulate exchange, and to control the city's population. Population growth was so strong that before 1300 several cities had to limit immigration from the countryside. Alongside production there developed the techniques and skills of international trade and finance, particularly in Tuscany, and where these were combined with production, there was strong economic growth and enrichment. In Italy 'between 1050 and 1300, population, wealth and resources concentrated in cities and commercial activity to a degree without precedent in the ancient or medieval world'.

This chapter explores several of Samuel Beckett's works, where one can find traces of the absurd. It first takes a look at traces of Kafka in Beckett's work, and then studies the prose fiction of Beckett's prewar period, a period that covers three works: Dream of Fair to Middling Women, More Pricks Than Kicks and Murphy. This is followed by a discussion of Beckett's foray into drama, wherein Endgame and Waiting for Godot are examined. The chapter also explores the Kharmasian trace in Beckett, views Watt as the epitome of Beckettian absurdism and considers the nature of the absurd in terms of Beckett.

This chapter focuses on the antecedents to the absurd. It first traces the antecedents of the absurd to the older stages of Greek theatre, and reveals that the absurd can be found in Greek tragedy, which returned to the European consciousness during the Italian Renaissance. The chapter then studies absurdity as seen in medieval drama, which featured a dramatised allegory of morality, and the works of Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift. It describes Sterne's work as ‘nonsense prose’ and reveals that Swift's ‘gloomy world’ in prose and poetry came from medieval forebears, and even had an affinity with the danse macabre tradition. The final part of the chapter examines the adoption of the ‘Romantic grotesque’ and pre-Surrealist nonsense by several popular authors, including Charles Dickens, Lewis Caroll, Nikolai Gogol and Ugo Foscolo.

This introduction presents an overview of the history of the Normans in Europe and a background to the sources themselves. The book aims to give readers a selection of the abundant source material generated by the Normans and the people they conquered. The Normans themselves in the eleventh and twelfth centuries drew attention to their actions all over Europe. The book covers the process of assimilation and malgamation between Scandinavians and Franks and the emergence of Normandy. It illustrates the internal organisation of the principality with a variety of source material from chronicles, miracle stories and charters. The book presents material from the main chronicle sources for the history of the Norman invasion and settlement, supplemented with some poetry. It also includes the Normans' involvement in the Mediterranean, in Italy, and to a lesser extent in Byzantium, Spain and the Holy Land.

This chapter studies the concept of the Theatre of the Absurd, which is based on the precepts of Antonin Artaud, and goes on to describe Artaud as the bridge between the present Theatre of the Absurd and the pioneers of the concept. It then identifies the five major dramatists of the absurd: Arthur Adamov, Eugène Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. The chapter focuses on the works of these dramatists – except for Beckett – and views the Theatre of the Absurd in (Soviet) Russia and in east Europe (during the Cold War).

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book introduces new material in order to account for newly flourishing mixtures of documentary and drama. Docudrama has necessarily had to adjust to the cultural moment. Developments in forms and modes of access have meant that all the codes and conventions of traditional documentary have been made available for mixture with other kinds of representation. As digitalization re-forms the economy of broadcasting worldwide, the questions about the ethics and values that obtained continue to drive both popular and academic debate. Modern film and television drama has for sometime been framed and organised to capture the 'buzz' and immediacy available in other forms of 'direct cinema'. The spectrum of 'intergeneric hybridisation' in film and television can be represented graphically.

The introduction provides a critical discussion of Radclyffe Hall’s unpublished works. It traces Hall’s career as a writer of fiction and explores the relation between her published and unpublished works. It examines Hall’s engagement with a wide range of topics, including outsiderism, sexuality, gender, feminism, religion, class, race, the supernatural, and World War I, and situates her work in the context of early twentieth-century literature and culture. Overall, the introduction argues that the critical understanding of Hall’s literary writings has remained flawed due to a narrow focus on The Well of Loneliness and demonstrates how the new materials presented in this volume can serve to enrich significantly scholarly perspectives.