This chapter considers whiteness as a form of privileged environmental comfort and as an operation of racial recognition politics. I open with a reflection on modern whiteness as a deadly form of Foucauldian environmentality, then investigate the intersection among postmodern neomedievalism, environmental activism and nostalgic Southern pastoralism in crafting the ideology of American white supremacist groups, especially the fraternity formerly known as Identity Evropa that rose to international prominence in the aftermath of Charlottesville 2017. I also explore the intellectual underpinnings of Identitarianism in the work of Guillaume Faye, whose strategic deployments and polemical contortions of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’ both mimic and co-opt academic discourse within early medieval studies; the rhetorical elision of ethnicity and race provides a convenient i for mainstreaming pan-European white nationalism and revisionist historiography. Identitarians, by upgrading ecofascist tactics and Malthusian logic, situate themselves at the nexus of late capitalist precariat and contemporary economic, environmental and political crises. In contrast to Hedley Bull’s neomedievalism, Faye’s New Middle Ages is an archeofuturistic racialist imperium that rejects neoliberalism’s multiracial globalisation, revives fictive ancestral values and envisions a medievalised geopolitical sanctum of whiteness. I then shift to a reflection on white environmentality as a technique of racial violence in The Buried Giant, arguing that it takes the form of what Sloterdijk terms atmoterrorism. I end with a consideration of the politics of white fragility and precarity in the neoliberal university. Teaching Ishiguro’s novel, part of the literature of white liberalism, demands resistance to a racialised comfort zone of learning.

In its second term, the Thatcher government hoped to solve the ‘early leaver problem’ in collective occupational pensions by effectively replacing this part of the United Kingdom’s ‘second tier’ of pension arrangements with individualised personal pensions. As policy developed, though, this idea was expanded to embrace total reform of the ‘second tier’ through the outright abolition of the State Earnings-Related Pension Scheme (SERPS). In doing so, the government intended a dramatic break with the consensus reached only during the late 1970s. This chapter explores the roots of the plan to abolish SERPS, in the process tracing its two principal motivations: the desire to contain unfunded state spending on pensioners, a fear deepened by a growing awareness that SERPS could be a ‘demographic time bomb’, timed to detonate in the early decades of the twenty-first century; and the hope that, through privatisation, its former members would be imbued with the ‘vigorous virtues’ of thrift and entrepreneurialism. The chapter examines how this proposal became government policy in the 1985 Green Paper on the reform of social security, even though it was opposed by the great majority of those giving evidence to Norman Fowler’s Inquiry into Provision for Retirement (IPR). In doing so, it highlights the pivotal role of the No. 10 Policy Unit and John Redwood in persuading Margaret Thatcher to back those pushing for radical neoliberal reform.

As a result of the heavy losses inflicted on the Vietcong during the Tet offensive, North Vietnam's involvement in the campaign in the south increased at the expense of indigenous influence. Following President's Johnson's peace proposal of 31 March 1968, the North Vietnamese and US governments agreed to meet to map out common negotiating ground. The ending of the war, the restoration of peace in Vietnam will create conditions for establishing a new, equal, and mutually beneficial relationship between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the United States. It was not only non-communist southerners like Truong Nhu Tang who felt betrayed in the immediate post-war period. Northern communists, too, were uneasy. Peace was meant to lead to national reconciliation and concord. Twenty-five years on from reunification, Vietnam - the Socialist Republic of Vietnam - appears to be more at peace with itself.

This chapter discusses Munro's two early short story collections where she first learned her craft and where she marks out her fictional territory and her distinctively feminine perspective as a storyteller. The stories in Dance of the Happy Shades show the experimental quality of her writing during the 1950s and 1960s. The author has selected five stories (three from Dance of the Happy Shades and two from Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You) which illustrate Munro's distinctive textual mapping of landscape and her feminine mode of storytelling as gossip - a comparison she makes herself in one of these stories when her narrator talks about using real people as fictional characters to 'suit her purposes'. Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You is an early version of Munro's ironical female romance plots, given a sinisterly Gothic twist through one sister's lifelong jealousy of the other.

In spite of a good electoral outcome in 2005, some Liberal Democrats felt that their Party had failed to make the most of the political situation. It was decided that a narrative had to be agreed, establishing what the Party was for rather than what it was against. Meanwhile, a group of new MPs were raising concerns about a lack of internal organisation and strategic direction. In January 2016, Charles Kennedy finally made a statement about his alcohol problem and proposed a leadership contest, but he was ultimately obliged to step down in the face of a threat of mass resignations. The new Leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, made a commitment to restore stability and purpose by improving Party organisation. But he was soon under fire as a Conservative resurgence saw the Liberal Democrats lose 246 seats in the May 2007 local council elections. Facing the prospect of a general election that Autumn, Campbell secured his position with a well-received Leader’s speech, but when the election was postponed, he decided to resign rather than endure two more years of speculation over his leadership. His replacement, Nick Clegg, was elected leader in December, having narrowly defeated Chris Huhne.

Before the First World War, there were few military psychiatrists in the British Army. Traumatised soldiers presented in a variety of ways during the First World War, though the diagnosis doctors had the greatest difficulty understanding was shell shock. The doctors at greatest personal danger were regimental medical officers attached to fighting units in the front line. They shared the hazards of the infantry and were often casualties themselves. This chapter considers the experience of those British doctors thrown into the front-line treatment of 'shell shock' disorders in the First World War - an experience which produced profound disillusionment in many, and which received little support or recognition from the medical and military establishments. Despite having advanced the understanding of psychiatric disorders, many Royal Army Medical Corps physicians were disillusioned by their experiences.

Film has been around now for over a hundred years, so it is surprising that the nature of its relationship to literature is still an open question. The transfer of an 'original' (literary) text from one context of production to an (audio-visual) other has begun to attract academic attention. This book takes the question of fidelity as their primary critical point of reference. Brian Mcfarlane has shown that there is no reliable equation between fidelity and critical approval, infidelity and disapproval. It is fascinating to see that Alison Platt and Ian MacKillop are interested in what it is about the experience of reading a classic novel that its adaptation restores to us. The book presents a group of essays loosely clustered around the English literary canon and ordered according to its chronology, not that of the films in question.

This chapter examines the imbrication of whiteness, racialisation and conversion in the Middle English romance The King of Tars. The scopic regime of Christianity operates like a facial recognition system, whose limitations reflect ideological biases: faith determines whether an animate assemblage is a formless lump of flesh or an enfaced human body. Racialisation and conversion are somatechnologisations of the human, in which the figure of the turn enacts the interpellation of the white Christian subject. But the turn towards whiteness necessitates a backward turn – a dorsal turn – to the flesh, before the production of the body. It is a public secret whose revelation is only possible through the defacement of whiteness that has become normalised and social. Moreover, racialisation materialises as a double inscription of violence: first, on the flesh, then the body. Both articulations leave behind ineradicable hieroglyphics of brutality upon the material surface. Conversion imposes a white body upon the flesh, yet in medieval medicine, the natural colour of flesh is conceived as white. The white of the flesh therefore stands before the whiteness of the racialised and converted body. Whiteness as racial property defines the white melancholic subject, whose self-impoverishment is indistinguishable from their act of self-fashioning. The drive to fabricate and possess a white, racialised and Christian identity is the compulsion of habeas album: the production of the white melancholic body as thing and property. But before the making of property, the dorsality of whiteness is the structure of flesh behind the contours of the body.