This chapter focuses on the 'crisis of formal democracy' at the local level. It considers the decline of political parties in terms of membership, activism, resources and public regard. The chapter concentrates on the perceived problem of declining electoral turnout at the local level, together with a focus on potential remedies. It includes the introduction of proportional representation, all-postal ballots and electronic voting, together with other policy initiatives. The chapter focuses on the potential for directly elected mayors to reinvigorate local politics and democracy. The political party has the potential capacity to shape and invigorate local democracy. The chapter analyses the broader role of local authorities and councillors in shaping the agenda at the local level and supporting and facilitating civic engagement. Councillors were genuine community activists who could act as an important link between the needs and demands of local neighbourhoods and the broader responsibilities of the town hall.

By focusing mainly on Sheridan Le Fanu, this chapter deals with a Victorian novelist of Irish birth and French background who utilised English, Welsh and Irish settings in his fiction. Le Fanu has been persistently aligned with a so-called Irish gothic tradition, inaugurated by Charles Robert Maturin and rendered notorious by Bram Stoker whose Dracula successfully transferred to the twentieth century and the snuff movie. The chapter also discusses the historical forces inscribed in Le Fanu's distinctive non-affiliation to the doubtful gothic tradition. In Le Fanu's recurrent character, Richard Marston, there is perhaps a nervous impersonation of Vautrin. Le Fanu's relation to his distinguished French contemporary raises far more engaging problems than those of a merely convenient tradition of Irish Gothicism.

The New Localism has been fostered and encouraged by central government as part of its strategy to reinvigorate local democracy and boost civic engagement and empowerment. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Conservative governments promoted public participation in relation to the delivery and shaping of local public services. This chapter looks at the democratic developments beyond the formal realm of elections, political parties and local political institutions. It presents the analysis of three local initiatives beyond the ballot, namely citizens' panels, local referenda and participatory budgeting. The chapter focuses on the growing trend towards neighbourhood governance at the local level over the last decade, and the town and parish councils. It considers the potential of utilising technology such as high-speed community broadband, in enhancing civic engagement, building communities and developing social capital. The chapter also presents the examination of what one could term the new forms of democracy.

This chapter illustrates some of the ways in which stained glass fitted into the mid-Victorian world. Although there was quite a lot of interconnection between the leading members of the Gothic Revival in Europe, it is difficult to find any direct European influences on the English stained glass market. Ecclesiology undoubtedly stimulated the market for stained glass, but it also created problems for aspiring glass-painters. From 1845, a small but steady stream of monographs concerned with stained glass began to appear. The influences contributing to the revival of stained glass were social, religious and economic. Church-building was clearly a major influence on the revival of stained glass but cannot explain it alone: it is of course quite possible to erect a church with plain glass. The Oxford Movement was a theological renaissance that reinterpreted the identity of the Church of England in terms of its pre-Reformation roots.

This chapter contains a collection of gothic texts between 1776 and 1801 connected with Gothic and Revolution. As the minutes make clear, radical opinion interpreted the events of 1789 in terms of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. For many historically minded commentators, a key aspect of Gothic writing was the mirroring of the Glorious and French Revolutions where the balance of similarities and differences found itself repeatedly disturbed by stubborn anxieties. Gothic imagery is used to evoke the immanence of the past within the present, for instance in the description of the French constitution as a ruined castle, or of the state 'grasped as in a kind of mortmain for ever'. Ann Radcliffe's husband was editor and proprietor of the Whig newspaper, the English Chronicle. The newspaper enthusiastically welcomed the French Revolution, while Radcliffe's own family had links with the same Dissenting culture that included Priestley and Price.

This chapter examines the reciprocal relationship between the living and the dead in Scottish towns by considering how the dead were thought to intervene in the world of the living both by making material claims and also by providing supernatural intercession. The dead, whether sainted or not, maintained a physical and a metaphysical presence in Scottish towns. Their bodies lay under and immediately around the main centres of religious activity, and their names – for a price – were remembered from year to year through commemorative masses, charters, and even inscriptions on church furnishings. Through both burial and remembrance the dead remained present in Scottish towns, enmeshed still within networks of kin, class, and occupation, as they had been during life. Of these networks, the most important for many people was that of their kin. The bond of kinship brought the responsibility of remembrance, since it was kin to whom the dead called, through their religious foundations, for help in the afterlife.

This chapter analyses Valerie Solanas's deployment of language as a tool to wield aggression for the feminist imaginary. Solanas's SCUM Manifesto gives women permission to reject the imperative to mirror the value of patriarchal culture and remake dominant images of woman. A castrating text, the SCUM Manifesto systemically undercuts the prestige bestowed upon masculinity. Solanas demonstrates her affinity with Freudian narratives and categories early in the manifesto. It is easy to see the handwritten marks Solanas made on the Olympia Press edition of the SCUM Manifesto as the scribbles of a monster. But they must be set in relationship to the typewriter and the role it plays in Solanas's history. Like Nancy Spero typing out passages from Artaud's work on the Bulletin typewriters she described as 'big old monsters,' Solanas made the typewriter a manifestation of her feminist commitments.

Monty Python's Flying Circus clearly plays the key role in launching Terry Gilliam as a filmmaker. This chapter also addresses certain pertinent aspects of one of television's greatest comedy shows. One of these aspects is the importance of Gilliam's animation to the style as well as the structure of the show. One of the few self-referential moments occurs in Gilliam's animation, The Killer Cars, in which pedestrian-devouring cars are consumed by a giant mutant cat. Gilliam's animations transfer better than many of the great verbal sketches. Holy Grail is more focused on a single set of characters and a relatively coherent narrative. Hence the animation is decidedly less surreal than on television or in Something Completely Different. Holy Grail gave Gilliam a tough and highly instructive apprenticeship in filmmaking, but the opportunity only arose because he and Terry Jones were Python members.

This chapter explores the debates over the meanings of co-operation in the ICA and its members during the inter-war period, tracing their evolution from the end of the First World War throughout the 1920s and 1930s, as the ICA struggled to respond to economic and political challenges of the Great Depression and its aftermath. While many members staunchly defended the principle of co-operative neutrality against those who would align the movement with left or right, the crisis also highlighted the need for the co-operative movement to develop its own ideology and programme, especially if co-operation were to realise its idealistic ambitions to defend peace and democracy. The chapter examines how the ICA responded to the challenges of Bolshevism and Nazism, and considers especially the role of representatives of the Nordic countries, not only in defending political neutrality, but also shaping an idealistic vision of co-operation, based on the legacy of the Rochdale Pioneers.