In 2012, the author made a feature docudrama called The First Fagin. Films are born out of moments of madness, and that was one of those moments. The main story, and the film's backbone, was the life and adventure of Ikey Solomon, a likeable man who was once seen as 'the most famous criminal of his time.' In the course of general exploration, the author had also gone along to see Adrian Wootton, the head of Film London, which provided location advice for people who wanted to film in the metropolitan area. Early on in the script, the author put Ikey in the context of the aftermath of the French revolution and the end of the Napoleonic wars. Most of filming had been of Tasmanian interiors.

This concluding chapter summarises the discussion on the four ‘special author’ representatives of absurdism that were presented in previous chapters. It emphasises that the term ‘absurd’ can be applied to literature in three ways, namely: as a prominent period style, as a category with philosophical implications and as a modern reworking of much older works. The chapter also describes how one can study the absurd in literature.

This chapter is about the Hollywood actors Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, who epitomised the adage that opposites attract. Sexual difference is not their only opposition: she is upper-class, while he is lower-class; she is liberal, he is conservative; she is Anglo-Saxon Protestant, he is Irish Catholic; she is intellectual, he has common sense. The various textual and extratextual discourses about the Hepburn/Tracy couple repeatedly work out this structural opposition through a process of moderation. Seemingly having nothing in common, Hepburn and Tracy's union symbolises the moderation of oppositional idiosyncrasies creating a stable equilibrium. The metaphor of economy and excess proves extremely useful in characterising this dynamic, but it also suggests a hidden gender essentialism: male as practical and rational, female as impractical and irrational—or the difference between a straight line and a spiral.

The author got involved with Adolf Eichmann's story twice, once as a broadcaster and once as a filmmaker, and this chapter presents some of the thoughts and memories that have been drifting through the author's head for over forty years. In her articles, which were later published in book form under the title Eichmann in Jerusalem, the historian and political philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that Eichmann was an ordinary man, his actions arising from 'the banality of evil.' At the time the author was not able to accept her arguments. He had to wait nearly forty years before the answers became clear to the author as he worked on the film Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs. On 11 December 1961, Eichmann was sentenced to death for crimes against the Jewish people, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. After his appeal was rejected, he was hung in May 1962.

In British Colonial Africa throughout the post-war years notions of crime prevention became overshadowed by the need to maintain order. A broad consideration of the policing of British colonial Africa at its grassroots level provides some insight into the policing of the end of the Empire. Colour and cultural-social bars naturally touched the police, with forms of racial discrimination particularly evident in colonies with large European settler populations, Kenya and Southern Rhodesia being prime examples. The operational independence of some units meant that Kenya Police Reserve (KPR) opertives were perceived as more akin to cowboys than to policemen, indulging in their own private vendettas against Mau Mau. Attempts at civil policing were frustrated, on the one hand, by the need for containment of public disorder and civil disobedience and, on the other, by a serious shortage of manpower and resources.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered by the collection of original sources in the book. The towns of later medieval Italy were one of the high points of urban society and culture in Europe before the industrial revolution. They also produced huge amounts of written material, which is exceptional in quality and quantity for the Middle Ages. The book focuses on the buildings and their decoration, and urban 'social services'. It then addresses Italian civic religion, and deals with social groups and social tensions. The book explores 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. It examines the great variety of political regimes in late-medieval Italy.

This chapter explores the three shorts Martel has made since completing La mujer sin cabeza: Nueva Argirópolis (2010), Pescados (2010) and Muta (2011). Despite the diverse contexts within which these films arose, and their differing subject matter, their preoccupation with watery and liquid worlds can be read as part of a shared concern with fluid ontologies and becomings. Such damp and liquid worlds create different perceptual conditions, or allow for the creation of a different kind of perception. This chapter contends that these shorts are concerned with the creation of fluidity, of a liquidity of perception in which the certainties of social worlds and human ontologies dissolve. Their watery locales and aesthetics provide a setting for the undoing of fixities – of the human, of identity, of the image – and allow instead for becomings: becomings-animal, becomings-other, producing thought through the reconfiguration of would–be fixed images or ideas.

In 1900, the liberation of sexuality came in the guise of public visibility. Two methods were used to liberalize visibility in public spaces. The first was that of the chaste nudes. Courthouses became the theater for struggles aimed at admitting that nudity could be no more obscene than the wings of angels. The second method was much more radical than the first, for it sought to attack publicity rather than the meaning that judges were required to attribute to nudity.