explores the infancy of graphic design education in the interwar period and traces the lineage of Italian graphic design to typography and the printing trades. Focusing on the vocational school, Scuola del Libro, it argues that practitioners’ interest in education attests to the growing confidence and self-awareness of the practice, and that the development of a specialist language as well as practitioners’ agreement on a shared body of skills and knowledge demonstrate the gradual shaping of a new collective identity. The chapter positions the Scuola del Libro at the centre of heated debates on education and on the modernisation of Italian graphics, and demonstrates that different interest groups used the school to promote conflicting agendas. It provides a nuanced picture by building the analysis around key moments of change. Drawing a comparison between the commercial art course at ISIA, the school of decorative and applied arts, in Monza and the Scuola del Libro, the chapter shows that differences between the two accounted for the undefined position of graphic design caught in between affiliated fields of practice: typography and printing, on the one hand, and commercial and poster art, on the other.

develops two lines of argument: first, it suggests that for Milan’s graphic designers teaching was a means of collectively defining their practice; secondly, it argues that in the post-war period education was a key factor in the broader quest to imbue design with social value and cultural meaning. The Scuola del Libro and the Convitto Scuola Rinascita serve as case studies to explore the experimental intermediate phase of design education in Italy and for investigating the social values and political stance acquired by both design education and practice in post-war Milan. There taught a community of practitioners who furthered the ongoing articulation of Italian graphic design practice by contributing to transnational exchanges on design pedagogy and practice. Looking at international design conferences, design organisations, magazines and educational experiences abroad, the chapter shows how domestic and international debates over the economic and cultural impact of design mirrored a growing interest in design education. Macro historical narratives are approaches through the lenses of design education and practice with a focus on the Cold War rewriting of the Bauhaus legacy and the constructed nature of post-war discourses around modernism.

So much of our lives has been subsumed by drugs and medicine—do we really need another ‘pill’ to add to the mix? This brief epilogue argues that the answer is, actually, no. We need fewer, but better drugs—drugs with less severe side-effects, and more power to genuinely improve our well-being. The potential of MDMA and some psychedelics to replace a range of harmful medications is discussed, with a renewed call for high-quality research into this possibility as applied to relationships.

Starting from Adam Ant’s make-up and costume design for the 1981 single ‘Stand and Deliver’, Chapter 2 explores the role of masculinity and heroism in 1980s Britain. Adam Ant portrayed a composite time-travelling warrior hero The 1980s heralded new historical approaches to military identity, popular memory and the role of popular culture. The jingoism around the Falklands War shook some historical certainties about nationalism. This chapter takes Adam Ant’s performance personas – dandy, highway man and Prince Charming – as an entry point for discussion about military identities, masculinity and popular culture. The costumes and music videos at the heart of his career can be understood within established myths and public memories of war. Solider heroes, the SAS and H. Jones, for example, were caught up in the same stories, myths and memories as Adam Ant’s Prince Charming. These warrior heroes and their soldiers’ stories provided Britain opportunities to talk through the experiences, memories and resonances of militarised culture. They became ways to criticise, celebrate and identify the relationship between the government, the people and the military. Heroes are made, not by their deeds, but by the stories that are told about them. The pop icon and the soldier hero worked together to populate these stories. Both were produced and disseminated through popular culture in the forms available in films, videos, computer games, music, television fact and fiction, toys, clothes and material culture. Together these forms of popular culture regenerated stories of heroes and mediated them for a new audience.