This chapter sets the scene: it opens by tracing the puzzling illness that afflicted Harry Pace from the summer of 1927 to his agonising death in January 1928. It discusses an aspect of the story not only helps to introduce Beatrice Annie Pace and Harry but also gives initial insight into how the press presented their lives and marriage. Journalist Bernard O'Donnell's handling of the case clearly applied his principle that 'tactful sympathy and practical help will unlock the door to an inside story more surely than any amount of uncouth bluster'. He certainly seems to have been the journalist who was most successful in developing a rapport with Beatrice and her children. All the post-trial life stories used the couple's courtship to shape particular narrative arcs, with Beatrice's depiction as a rural ingénue adding to her life's drama, tragedy and pathos.

This chapter alludes to William Lambarde's well-known account of his interview with Queen Elizabeth in August, 1601, seven months after the Essex rebellion and Essex's execution for treason. Lambarde was the royal archivist, and had brought Elizabeth a summary of the historical documents stored in the Tower of London. The chapter focuses on Elizabeth's portrait of Richard II. In comparison with the individualized and assertive Holbein and Hornebolte portraits of her father, or the domesticated portraits of her sister by Antonio Mor, the painting is strikingly iconic. It employs a pictorial formula used occasionally on royal documents, but it is most strikingly similar to the Westminster portrait of Richard II. The painting iconographically abolishes a century and a half of both English history and royal iconography, and returns us to the last moment when the legitimacy of the monarchy was not a problem.

In the early to mid-eighteenth century, the majority of Irish Protestants would have given lip service to the benefits of converting the native Irish Catholic population to the Protestant religion. Early modern Irish Protestants took one of two approaches to the problem of conversion. The first mooted that Catholics would convert in large numbers if their religion was suppressed by penal legislation. When Francis Hutchinson reached Ireland in 1721, Catholics were able to practise their religion, primarily because those Penal Laws that related to religious worship were enforced at times of acute political crisis, in particular during Jacobite invasion or rebellion scares. The second approach to conversion adopted by Irish Protestants was the use of the Irish language to evangelise the native population. The political pacification of the native population may have been foremost in Hutchinson's mind when advocating conversion, but he also noted its economic benefits.

Chapter 2 gives an introduction to the rapidly changing patterns of family life that prompted the emergence of new ideas and perspectives in family studies at the turn of the millennium. It includes a detailed overview of the demographic evidence on contemporary families in Ireland, placing them in comparative perspective, and introduces the major new data sources and studies that have recently become available. The authors emphasize the importance of longitudinal perspectives for understanding family change in ageing societies. The chapter provides a state-of-the-art summary of recent developments in the theory and scholarship on family life, including the second demographic transition, postmodernism, individualisation and globalisation, and the new scholarship on family practices, meanings and displays that informs the main body of the book.

Prior to the First World War, while most wounded soldiers were cared for by male orderlies, paid female nurses were sometimes attached to military services and army wives did their share of nursing. This chapter explores the origins of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) and historicizes their founding in the social and cultural forces of the day. Given the ideals associated with Edwardian womanhood, it made sense that girls might want to escape the constraints of the normative femininity. Feminine virtues were broadened from the nurturance and management of the family, household and local community to society at large and the traits associated with femininity were translated into a call for public service. After the reorganization in 1910 and the consolidation of the Corps, the weekend and more extended summer camps became increasingly important as training sites and recruitment endeavours.

The contemplation of a horrible death is an unlikely topic for most mainstream pop songs, but is actually very common in some genres of metal, particularly death metal, with which Slipknot has many affinities. In the mosh pit, beneath the 'hell-hop polydrumming and nail-bomb showers of soprano-drone guitar and sampled squeal', Slipknot's audience are a mass of swarming maggots writhing in ecstasy. In death metal, as with grind core and other extreme forms of metal, the force of the low frequencies is particularly intense, with the bass and guitars usually tuned half a step or a whole step below standard tunings. Ronald Bogue writes, 'practitioners of death metal frequently refer to the sound as crunching, grinding, and shredding, the guitars resembling buzzsaws, chainsaws, and (less frequently) jet engines. The project of this music is to create an aggressive sonic machine of destruction, an electronic nonhuman sound shredder'.

The first explicitly heroic masque created for the Jacobean monarchy was Ben Jonson's and Inigo Jones's Masque of Queens, performed at Whitehall in 1609. The masque, for all its spectacle and martial imagery, celebrates the sovereign word. For all the military chic of Jones's costumes, there is no suggestion in The Masque of Queens that the power of Bel-Anna and her Amazons derives in any way from their erotic attractions. Jonson's reformulation of the chivalric myth is, in its way, far more radically disarming than Queens Elizabeth's had been. An important component of personal style was the chivalric mythology with which she surrounded herself. The popular adulation accorded to Sir Philip Sidney for the most meager of military careers, the exaggerated hopes invested in the disastrous Earl of Essex, are indices to how badly the realm yearned for glory as Elizabeth's rule came to end.

In 1857 Emperor Napoleon III invited celebrated photographer Gustave Le Gray to visit the newly established Châlons Camp to record its imperial glory. The camp's anxiety-provoking medical geographies are overlooked within the nineteenth-century French medical history and the global environmental histories of health. Long before the creation of Châlons Camp, military forts were some of the most prominent signs of the militarization of the French environment. Creating the imperial militarized environment required considerable effort and money. The nineteenth century saw the medicalization of France. Not only did the medical profession expand and become more organized, but 'medical discourse infused all areas of French society'. As well as paying careful attention to the Châlons Camp's medical geographies, Napoleon III and his supporters intended it to act as a vector of modernization.

This chapter examines the role of Irish soldiers in British India during the long nineteenth century. Rather than focusing on familiar representations of the Irish soldier abroad, this chapter links Irish service in the Empire to contemporary imperial ideology and changing patterns of economic and political thought. Ireland was central to British imperial expansion in the East, a point vital to our understanding of the multifaceted and pluralized nature of the British imperial experience, an experience which embedded Irish Catholics into British India. This chapter draws attention to the close, informal bonds that existed between Irish individuals within the imperial armed forces in India, which gradually gave rise to soldier networks based along ethnic lines. This was bolstered by the presence of Irish Catholic chaplains, stationed in British military cantonments. These networks were important conduits of cultural, financial and political interchange between Irish, Indian and Eurasian communities. These networks transmitted material items, capital, information and knowledge across the Empire, adding yet more links to the imperial systems of mobility and exchange.

This chapter considers how the French experienced and challenged the foreign militarization of their country from the German occupation that began in 1940 to the withdrawal of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) forces in 1967. It examines how Axis, Allied, and NATO forces mobilized nature during this period. As well as establishing the Colleville-sur-Mer and other cemeteries in the postwar period, the USA occupied other sites across France under the framework of NATO agreements. With French armed forces defeated and reduced to 100,000 men charged with maintaining law and order under the terms of the 1940 armistice, German occupation troops were the main instigators of environmental militarization between 1940 and 1944. Occupation forces did not monopolize the mobilization of nature between 1940 and 1944. As the occupation continued, the hills, mountains, and forests of France became places of refuge and resistance.

This chapter extends the key themes of chapter six – the ‘fire brigade’ response to Afro-Asian radicalism, and the growing influence of the international anti-apartheid movement – into a new decade. It shows that the principles that allowed the ‘fire brigade’ to gain prominence in earlier years were re-shaped to fit a changing international context in the 1970s. In the Irish and Danish cases that meant using their progressive approach on issues such as apartheid and minority rule to shape new identities for themselves as members of the European Community (EC) from 1973. While those core values were being re-articulated and re-defined at official level, anti-apartheid movements in Europe and North America continued to be a thorn in the side of the South African, Rhodesian and Portuguese regimes. This chapter describes the 1970s as a time of ever-increasing integration and inter-dependence in the campaign against minority rule, and asks, what impact did that have on Irish politics and society?