Francis Hutchinson had aligned politically with the Whig party, an allegiance shared by members of his immediate family and which proved an invaluable asset during his slow ascent up the clerical ladder. From 1689 to 1714, Tory and Whig was the standing political division in Parliament and in the political identities assumed by most MPs. Hutchinson's overtly political sermons, along with his voting behaviour, gives us a relatively rare insight into the political views of a parish minister in the reign of Queen Anne. Hutchinson used these sermons to voice support for the Whig party's stance on some of the great issues of the day: the 1707 Union with Scotland, the conduct of the War of the Spanish Succession and the toleration of Protestant Dissent. Unlike the majority of Church of England lower clergy, Hutchinson voted consistently for the Whig party in parliamentary elections.

The lay Church of England was at its most obvious as the local community at worship in the parish church. The religious behaviour of lay conformists has been uncovered by the meticulous work of Judith Maltby and Christopher Haigh on the pre-1650 period, Donald Spaeth on the late Stuart diocese of Salisbury, and William Jacob on the eighteenth century. This chapter looks at the reigns of Charles II and James II. The sacralised image of Charles the Martyr was created and maintained by the potent volume, but it was inflated to a cult by a stream of hagiographies, the annual commemoration of the martyrdom in services and sermons each 30 January. The sermons of Lancelot Andrewes nestled alongside the poems of Abraham Cowley; geographies, herbals, and histories were shelved with Augustine, à Kempis, and Taylor's 'life' of Christ, The Great Exemplar.

The rapid expansion of illicit whisky production in the Highlands is a telling illustration of the capacity of peasant society to respond to market opportunity, when it possessed a real if ephemeral competitive advantage over the Lowland economy. The manufacture of illicit whisky took place at a time when demand for the spirit in Scotland was on the increase. The most common form of illicit distillation was household manufacture for family and local consumption, a continuation of a tradition long established before the days of costly licences and heavy duties. Some landed gentlemen invested in the peasant enterprises and so had an obvious economic interest incurtailing the activities of illicit rivals. Both legal and illegal manufacturers were able to exploit the growing demand, but the illicit advantage was dependent ultimately on the development of government revenue legislation.

To the rest of the world in the late twentieth century Scotland seems a Highland country. The roots of Highlandism can be traced back to the '45 and before, but an important institutional step in its development was first taken in 1778 with the foundation of the Highland Society in London. The Highland regiments were therefore crucial to the development of Highlandism. They added to the glamour of the Highlands, perpetuating the association with Jacobitism and clanship which were also being idealized. They also enhanced the contemporary image of a 'noble peasantry' uncontaminated by urban vice and displaying all the virtues of loyalty, courage and endurance to heroic effect. Much of the new awareness of the Highlands in the eighteenth century throughout Britain can be traced to Jacobitism in general and the '45 in particular.

The Anglo-Boer War was a complex tangle of conflicting interests in which Britain pursued economic and geopolitical benefits opposed by determined republican farmers. This chapter considers Cecil Y. Lang's terms 'cosmopolitan' and 'republican' in the light of recent critical theories of 'rooted cosmopolitanism' while revisiting the poet's change in perspective during the late years of his career. Songs of the Springtides, reasserts Algernon Charles Swinburne's treatment of the sea as origin and endpoint of life, an 'elemental voice' with 'elemental rhythms'. Peace conveyed by the sea's calm gives the amphibious singer-swimmer and his listeners access to a strange underwater seascape inaccessible in the storms of revolution. Swinburne was nonetheless capable of sustaining a negotiative ethics when meditating on radical philosophical and ontological difference. This capability is borne out by one of his last swimming poems, 'The Lake of Gaube', published only days before the outbreak of the South African war.

Paul Cohen-Portheim claimed that 'religion played an astonishingly small part in the men's life' although he did point to the availability of services. Within the concentration camps the most obvious manifestation of religion, apart from the holding of services, consisted of the celebrations of the major religious festivals which remained the most important day in the calendar. Despite the development of barbed wire disease and the feelings of isolation which some internees felt, the vast majority participated in the educational, social and cultural activity which developed in the camps. This took a variety of forms, including religion; reading, writing and learning; high culture; and sport. In some camps the majority of prisoners found little useful employment, which meant that they had to develop other ways of passing their time. This led to the evolution of 'prison camp societies', to use John Davidson Ketchum's phrase.

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.