The employment of combatant prisoners took off during the second half of the Great War with the increasing need for labour and the growing numbers of captives within the country. The Members of British Parliament began asking questions about the employment of both civilian and military internees at the end of 1915. Gerald Davis divided the employment carried out by prisoners into two categories, 'service work for the armed force detaining the prisoners' and 'contract employment in agriculture and industry'. First World War Britain utilized prisoners in both of these senses, although those working for the British forces laboured in the conflict zone in France rather than in mainland Britain. In December 1916, the Prisoners of War Employment Committee came into existence with the task of considering 'all applications for the employment of prisoners of war, and to decide whether they should be adopted'.

This chapter discusses Aldous Huxley's early novella 'Farcical History of Richard Greenow' as an example of non-combatant war fiction, and offers a reading and critique of this text which examine discourses of gender during the war period. While the fantastic form of 'Farcical History' is distinctive in Huxley's early writing, its central themes of division and self-division are anticipatory of his subsequent development up to and including Brave New World. In the 1920s, Huxley employed the genre of the novel of ideas to examine the disparate modes of intellectual, cultural and political division that were evident in the post-war period and the related modes of self-division that affected the individual. The leading literary voices of the 1920s were to be Huxley and Virginia Woolf, and her anonymous review of Limbo in the TLS is interesting reading.

Tenant dissatisfaction continued throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980s. Problems escalated as the council was faced with internal strife that eventually led to the rise of the New Left. The council had to compete for resources and work in partnership with housing groups. New developments, designed finally to bring an end to the slums and chronic overcrowding, started to crumble, creating at least as much human misery as the Victorian slums they had supposedly replaced. Financial problems and mounting costs were threatening to cripple the council. Lack of money meant lack of investment that led to further deterioration of an already crumbling housing stock. At the end of the decade, angry tenants in north Manchester claimed they had been left waiting for a month just to talk to officials. Following the Conservative victory in the general election of 1987, Manchester's Labour council began to shift its ideological stance.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book traces Algernon Charles Swinburne's responses to Matthew Arnold, focusing in particular on the young Swinburne's challenge to the older critic who was held as the foremost English authority on French literature and cosmopolitan culture. It concentrates on Swinburne's poetry, in particular on his use of images of open-air swimming as a 'ubiquitous in nineteenth-century poetic meditations on democratic reform'. The book argues for the importance of Swinburne's prose writings in our understanding of his overall achievement. It shows that a close analysis of metre and poetic form leads to a radical rethinking of how sexuality is encoded and expressed in Swinburne's poems. The book looks at Swinburne in intellectual dialogue with two of the major poets of his age: Christina Rossetti and Robert Browning.

This chapter discusses the family life stage of ‘grandparenthood’ and addresses topical questions about flows of help and support between older and younger generations, and the increasing significance of grandparents in the lives of children and young adults. Ireland’s ‘new’ grandparents are distinctive, in part because many started their own families at comparatively younger ages and because of the ‘longevity revolution’ – the increased duration of healthy ageing - making them available to contribute to the family lives of their children and grandchildren to an unprecedented extent. The chapter uncovers compelling evidence that grandparents have consistently been held in high regard in Irish families and that they continue to play a central part in facilitating family connectedness and providing a sense of family continuity over time. It argues that power in inter-generational relationships shifted in favour of parents during the last century, and that the grandparental role remains an ambivalent one, despite parents growing need for help with childcare and other resources. As grandparents age, the flow of resources changes direction. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the challenges faced by Irish families and the Irish state as they plan to meet a growing demand for elder care.

Introduces the subject and sets forth the argument regarding nation building in American foreign policy, describes the overall approach and explains the rationale for the case studies used. Provides a brief overview of how and why foreign aid programs and specifically nation building became a key instrument of US security policy. The chapter also introduces the book's critique of Realism and the Critical Security Studies School with respect to containment, security and development.

Unlike the real goodby-ees and whizz bangs of the Great War, the playful frame the media drew around the 1926 General Strike transformed it into a joke, a lark to be remembered and passed on as such for vicarious newspaper-reading participants. But of course it was not 'just play' for everyone, and there remained something tragically incomplete, naive even, about the closing rituals and ceremonies that marked the transition back to 'normality'. Most letters to the editor, maintained the widely held view that it was the average volunteers who had defeated the strikers with the 'astonishing good nature of the amateur drivers and conductor. Letters in other papers provided a similar view of the volunteers' importance in defeating the strike. Such letters further reveal that not all volunteers were from the leisure classes, or even the middle class, or they would not have needed to make temporary jobs permanent.

This chapter presents new quantitative data on the trade of Manchester canals drawn from a number of corporate and institutional sources. It highlights the remarkable diversity of commodities carried on the canals, emphasising not just intra-regional shipments of coal and stone but also inter-regional conveyances of high-value raw materials, foodstuffs and manufactures. The chapter explains the data sources and compares the relative extent of the trade on Manchester canals. It provides a detailed examination of trade from the point of view of each of Manchester's canals and examines Manchester's waterborne trade by commodity. The chapter argues that micro-research can yield detailed estimates of the quantitative dimensions of canal trade. It concludes that Manchester's canals earned the bulk of their incomes from the long-distance, extra-regional trade in industrial inputs, foodstuffs and manufactures rather than in short-haul movements of heavy minerals.

The decline in Scotland was paralleled to some extent in nineteenth century Ireland and Wales, but the collapse in Gaelic-speaking in northern Scotland was much greater and more rapid than in either Wales or Ireland. It is sometimes argued that the victory of English speech and literacy was a result of modern educational policy. The fundamental Act of 1872 ignored Gaelic entirely in its plan for a national system of compulsory education and even in the more sympathetic legislation of 1918 there was still no requirement to teach the language. The schools system in the Highlands therefore used English as the medium of instruction and state education became a means of anglicisation. From the early seventeenth century state policy in the Highlands until after the last Jacobite rebellion was directed to the repression and eradication of 'the Irische language'.

On the eve of the neoconservative war against Iraq, Admiral Timothy Keating evoked an old mainstream hip-hop hit as his battle cry. Gangsta rap irrupts in the midst of this war in which deregulated capitalism provides the conditions of survival and combat. The term 'niggativity', indeed, which would seem a highly appropriate term to describe the attitude of Niggaz With Attitude (NWA), was actually coined by Chuck D himself on his solo album the Autobiography of Mistah Chuck. On this album, the ambivalence of niggativity is directly addressed and clear lines are drawn between progressive and non-progressive forms of African-American negativity. In academic commentary on the aesthetic of hip-hop, claims have been made for it as both a postmodern form and a form that is intrinsically African-American in its rejection of linear Western musical models.

This chapter considers a wider European context. It recalls the story of Anglicanism in terms of debates about its place in a spectrum of foreign churches. Standard histories of the Anglican Church between 1660 and 1714 combine the story of its relations with dissenting rivals and its record of defence against Catholicism with accounts of internal tensions between church 'parties'. If the Church of England was justified by Erastianism, then the church elsewhere was the communion endorsed by the local ruler. Facing pro-comprehensionists who cited international Protestant opinion in favour of their scheme, their opponents went on insisting that most Reformed Christians abroad revered the Church of England in its exact current form. The transformed polemic was the church's Protestantism, including its declared fraternity with Reformed Christians abroad. Under the Tudors and early Stuarts, this conception of the national establishment had been used to prove its credentials.

This concluding chapter, teases out the lessons learned and lessons lost from these Cold War programs, and relates these to current policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Described are Nixon's philosophy and rationale for turning away from nation building, his Nixon Doctrine, and his subsequent emphasis on bolstering authoritarian gendarmes as a means of withdrawing the US from nation building and development programs abroad. The chapter goes on to critique the US policies under study, and attempts to identify lessons that seem to have been learned or lost based on America's conduct of its ambitious wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001.