Chapter 2 examines the intellectual origins of the philosophy of Personalism, which was adopted as the official state doctrine of the first South Vietnamese state, or the First Republic (Đệ Nhất Cộng Hòa Việt Nam, 1954–63). Contrary to the caricature of this doctrine as an incoherent and reactionary religious ideology, Personalism was in fact a theoretically rigorous form of Marxist humanist theology, one that appealed, moreover, to anti-colonial leaders from throughout the developing world. The reading of Personalism proposed in the chapter, which focuses on the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier’s Marxist critique of capitalism and liberal democracy, will provide the broader theoretical framework for this study and its attempt to reinterpret the war from a South Vietnamese perspective.

The mainstream British film career of Norman Wisdom lasted from 1953 to 1966, during which time he was a box office success and frequently a figure of critical derision. This chapter details the origins of his stage and screen character ‘the gump’ and how Wisdom’s talents came to be overlooked by the critical Establishment of the day. It further examines the comedian’s need for a straight man for his pictures to succeed and how Wisdom’s routines, with their roots in Victorian music hall, also needed to function within the context of a rigidly hierarchical society. The chapter concludes with his most atypical work for William Friedkin and Stephen Frears.

The theme of this chapter is that historians of philanthropy have started out with a definition of what ‘philanthropy’ is, even if the word was never used in their centuries, and proceeded from there. Prime examples are the two major histories of philanthropy in England, dating from the 1950s and 1960s, W. K. Jordan’s Philanthropy in England 1480–1660 and David Owen’s English Philanthropy 1660–1960. For the nineteenth century there is one history that excludes anything where the gifting of private money was not vital, another that includes social reform movements, and yet another that defines philanthropy simply as ‘kindness’. None of them are alert to what contemporaries thought of ‘philanthropy’. I go on to consider the ways in which in recent years historians have turned to the anthropological model of gift relationships to understand philanthropy and how concepts of ‘civil society’ have generated new thinking.

The argument from Kingdoms and Communities explains much of Susan Reynolds's approach to medieval history, both in that book and in Fiefs and Vassals. The interpretation of early medieval law as 'essentially formal and ritualised depends on assuming that it must have been, because primitive law must by definition be formal and ritualised and because the early Middle Ages look primitive'. Mentalities have been treated as entities with a distinctive life of their own. This chapter discusses a case which came before the royal judges in the court of King John in 1213, when the prior of Durham's attorney produced a charter with a broken knife attached to it instead of a seal. Legal practice in the recording of contracts differs from one society to another, as it is rooted in particular cultural traditions which are sanctioned by custom, though changes may come fast when a new technology obtrudes itself.

Patience is a poem that combines discussion of a moral quality with biblical narrative, in the case of Patience, one narrative only, the story of Jonah. It is reader-friendly and engaging. In both poems human beings are at odds with God, but the outcomes are very different. Patience sets out to explore the meaning of the virtue of its title. Through its God, the poem exemplifies and explains a more spiritual view of patience which the narrator gives no sign of understanding. The reader is led to suspect that his total lack of comment on Jonah's second lesson indicates that he is not only out of sympathy with Jonah but himself does not understand God's forgiveness of the Ninevites. Patience does not end with a prayer, a confirming sign, perhaps, that its narrator is meant to be seen as not attuned to spiritual matters.

Cleanness combines discussion of a religious virtue with retelling of stories from the Bible. Its three main stories are from the Old Testament, and they centre on Noah, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Belshazzar's feast. All three have a number of episodes. The overarching structure of the poem is based on the pattern of alternating passages of discussion and narrative. The discussions not only link the narratives to each other and reiterate the importance of cleanness; each also draws attention to a particular aspect of cleanness which the story it introduces highlights. Cleanness offers only an abstract discussion of penance, and a shadowy instance of it in action, showing it not as forestalling God's punishment but following it. It uses its considerable length not to develop its opening message, examine it, or move on from it, but to drive it home.

This chapter draws primarily on periodical literature to show the meanings attached to philanthropy in the second half of the eighteenth century. Philanthropy was a feeling of love for humanity that brought pleasure, even rapture, to those who experienced it, all the more so as it was envisaged as universal in extent, covering all humans in the globe. The word was not used to describe what are often considered to be the hallmarks of eighteenth-century philanthropy, the voluntary hospitals, the Marine Society and other institutions. There was criticism, for example by Adam Smith, of the claim that mere humans could love all other humans, even some suggestions that misanthropy was more characteristic of humanity than philanthropy. But in the vast majority of references philanthropy was a sensation experienced in the body; it was not something that urged you to do anything or to spend money.

This chapter is about the wider institutional context of public decision-making, which may need to be reformed if think is going to work. Thinking requires linking, and only makes sense if the ideas that citizens come up with are reviewed and judged openly by policy-makers. Why participate if no one is listening? The chapter presents findings about how citizens link to government and reveals the extent of the gap between citizens and local representatives. It may be the case that the difficulty of linking elites to citizens is the central limitation of the think strategy. The chapter reports the results of an experiment that tested how responsive policy-makers are to requests from a citizen’s interest group.

The task in writing about Charles Martel is to set the record straight. It is thus necessary to unpick both sides of his reputation and to confront the massive implications of the Heinrich Brunner thesis, which means examining very carefully the grounds on which this period is seen as a watershed. On all three counts, the work of Susan Reynolds can never be far from mind. Where Charles Martel is concerned, her work is the spur to revisit even the most familiar sources to check the terminology of landholding, lordship and clientage to see whether early medieval authors used the words and terms associated with 'feudalism', which modern historians read into them. This chapter aims to point to areas in which our understanding of the career of Charles Martel has changed significantly, that is, to draw attention to the recent refutation of old views and misunderstandings.

Chapter 1 examines the development of a Vietnamese national culture. This culture was a result of the advent of mass reproduction and print capitalism, which were introduced in the colonial era as instruments of surveillance, used by the French in order to monitor the political activity of their colonial subjects. In deploying modern print media as a means of surveillance, however, the state would also create the conditions for a new “imagined community” of the nation. During the 1920s and ’30s, the new media would be instrumental in spreading the modern mythology of a 2,000-year history of resistance to foreign invaders. This modern tradition was the result of an anti-colonial interpretation of the precolonial past, based on a European conception of sovereignty as the right of a “people” (dân tộc) possessing a distinct national culture. In the new national history, the Vietnamese people (who had previously appeared in the old imperial records only as subjects (dân) of the emperor) would become the foundation of a new “sovereignty of the people” (dân quyền). Projecting this modern conception of sovereignty into the precolonial past, writers working in the vernacular media produced a new national history of the Vietnamese people.

The memory of twentieth century conflict is the ‘third pillar’ on which Anglosphere thinking rests and a major point of intersection between Englishness and Euroscepticism, but one that again occludes England. It positions Anglosphere countries on the side of ‘right’ in the pivotal conflict of the twentieth century against Nazism, totalitarianism and militarism; a conflict remembered as a straightforward contest between good and evil compared to the more complicated memories of conflicts of the Cold War era and afterwards. In the Anglo-British memory, the Second World War also serves as a point of difference between the EU narrative of ‘never again’ and an English worldview which represents ‘1940’ as the apogee of Britain’s greatness. If in the ‘European’ narrative the Second World War represents a catastrophe followed by a renaissance, then in the dominant English narrative it represents an apogee followed by a decline: a decline, moreover, institutionalised in the form of the European Union.

This chapter examines the earliest attempts, in terms of a modern historiography dating from the second half of the nineteenth century, to discuss the medieval English peasantry. It begins with one of the most resilient of the themes in the historiography of the medieval English peasantry: lordship. The chapter explores the following main themes from this early period: economy, population and demography, and the village community. One of the more vibrant themes in later nineteenth-century historiography of the medieval peasantry was the nature and development of the village community. Political theorists and historians in the middle decades of the nineteenth century sought to identify long-term continuums and the interconnectedness of village communities over time. Studies of the village community by H. S. Maine, F. Seebohm and G. L. Gomme identified the organisation of the farming landscape as a major factor in the regulation and nature of the village community.

This chapter brings three principal French intertexts (and some secondary ones) to bear on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It first argues that Dream evokes a recent play comically adapting Italianate pastoral conventions, La Diane, by Nicolas de Montreux (1594). The next key intertext explored is Le proumenoir (1594), by Marie de Gournay, which offers a feminist slant on the histoire tragique as exemplified by her source, the Champs faëz of Claude de Taillemont. Gournay’s novel presents love as tragic, particularly for women as victims of male inconstancy, as in the legend of Theseus and Ariadne. Gournay introduces this exemplum through the Epithalamium of Catullus, where it counterpoints celebration of a mythical marriage – an effect matching the intrusion of sombre overtones on Shakespeare’s representation of marriage as comic fulfilment. Finally foregrounded is the relation between the burlesque ‘tragedy’ of Pyramus and Thisbe staged by Shakespeare’s Mechanicals and an anonymous Moralité, which illuminates the Mechanicals’ absurd approach to theatrical challenges. Also considered is a poetic reworking of Ovid’s narrative by Antoine de Baïf, which anticipates Shakespeare’s embellishment of this material with humanist trappings. These intertexts highlight the parodic potential Shakespeare exploited in insinuating the fragility of generic boundaries.