This chapter discusses absurdist practice during the twentieth century, examining absurdism in the works of some writers, namely Fernando Pessoa, Antonin Artaud and Camus. It notes that these writers can be regarded as absurdists, and that they sometimes embrace absurdist qualities. The chapter also clarifies that the use of the word ‘absurd’ does not guarantee that a work is to be considered – with justification – as fully or solely belonging to the ‘literature of the absurd’.

Married to the Marimba looks at the lifestyle of an itinerant musician, Alex Jacobowitz, who plays a xylophone in the streets of Europe. The author and his old friend Larry Price worked on many films together. Larry wanted to make an analytical hard-hitting probing documentary about Alex. For a working title, the author and Larry settled on Gonna Travel On, to symbolize Alex's life on the road. Larry and the author rarely agreed on how to approach a film, and this could be both stimulating and tremendously infuriating. Unfortunately in Married to the Marimba it was often the latter. Investigatory and crisis films like The Chair tend to follow the chronological pattern. Married to the Marimba clearly did not fit into that pattern. Like many cinéma vérité and observational films, its themes varied, and it did not help that it was shot over ten years.

A large proportion of evidence for heresy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries comes from chronicles. Peter of Les Vaux-de-Cernay was writing an account of a specific set of events with heresy at their centre, drawing primarily on first-hand experience. The 'Deeds of bishops' were popular subgenre, focused of course on a particular diocese and its sequence of incumbents. The work which the Inquisitor Bernard Gui produced on the development of his religious order, the Dominicans, in which his topics were the foundation and spread of Dominican convents in the south of France, and their priors.

Adducing some insights from cultural anthropology, this Chapter compares and contrasts the histories of the Christian and the Islamic traditions of religious toleration, considering in particular the blurring of the distinction between "People of the Book" and "pagans" or "polytheists". It argues that each tradition has strengths and weaknesses if we consider them as contributions to a humanism acceptable to people today who subscribe to various religious beliefs or to none. Christendom was guilty historically of worse religious intolerance than Islam, yet it also engendered a humanistic respect for "primitive" belief systems. Islam institutionalized the concept of People of the Book, which gave a qualified recognition to its "confessional cousins", but it excluded "pagan" cultures unless they agreed to convert. Yet Islam was also capable of flexibility when a small Muslim court in India ruled over a vast non-Muslim population. An extended prefatory note reviews the progress of scholarship since the first publication of this text in Anthropology Today in 2005, and asks whether it is necessary to modify the suggestion that Muslim social scientists are inhibited from choosing to study non-monotheistic cultures. The conclusion reached ten years later is that there are at least some major exceptions.

This review of Mona Siddiqui’s Christians, Muslims, and Jesus (Yale University Press) was published in the Times Literary Supplement on 29 January 2014, under the heading "Abraham’s children". As well as being a senior academic in religious studies, Siddiqui is well known to the British public as a frequent contributor to the "Thought for the Day" religious slot in the early morning "Today" programme broadcast by the BBC’s Radio Four. SIddiqui makes an important contribution to comparative theological debate by comparing and contrasting the roles of Jesus (Isa) and Mary (Maryam) in the New Testament and the Qur’an, and more broadly in the two religious traditions as they evolved. She also reflects on the specifically Christian semiotics of the Cross. The Chapter ventures some further reflections on how the two traditions may be compared along broader lines.

Beyond the Velvet Curtain' deals with the development of a four-part series on opera, while 'Hopes and Dreams' explores the challenges of making a complex cinéma vérité family film. To prepare for the pitching sessions, and 'with the hope that blooms eternal within the human breast', the author printed some new visiting cards. The author also printed out some beautiful glossy color copies of the proposal, replete with glorious photos of fantastically decorated opera halls, charismatic long-haired conductors, ravishing sopranos, and handsome swashbuckling baritones. The author asked Andy Thomson to outline his experience in pitching to the US public broadcasting system (PBS), and reaching out generally in America and Canada. The author's last hope was the BBC. He thought Velvet Curtain might well tickle some commissioning editor's fancy. After scanning the list of heads of BBC departments, he decided to write to Jan Younghusband, senior commissioner for Music and Events.

Policing the end of the Empire in the British Caribbean was as fraught with difficulties as it was in the rest of the Empire. In the aftermath of the Second World War, British Guiana faced regular public disturbances and civil unrest, as did many of the islands of the British Caribbean. There was no exception in the British Caribbean, where the first glimmers of independence came with the extension of adult suffrage to women in British Guiana, and the adoption of limited self-government in Jamaica and Trinidad. In contrast, the creation of the West Indies Federation comprising Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, and the Windward and Leeward Islands between 1958 and 1962 was perceived as a means of minimising the cost of Empire. During the post-war years, British Honduras and Anguilla stand out as cases where the British Government's policy approached the farcical.

This chapter argues that the Victorian army, so frequently depicted by historians as peripheral to 'mainstream' culture, was in fact instrumental in shaping late Victorian British popular culture. It shows how the ideology of martial races could be transformed from a military policy in India to a popular sentiment that included Scottish Highlanders. Through the multiple cultural interventions of General Frederick Roberts, the chapter argues that Victorian officers frequently gained privileged access to the Victorian media, and that they used this access to forward their own interests. In Roberts's case, this access allowed his fascination with 'martial' Highlanders, Sikhs and Gurkhas to enter public discourse on a mass scale. Roberts seemed determined to use the popular example of the 'martial races' to forward his own interests in reforming the army and focusing attention on India's northwest frontier.