This chapter surveys previous biographies by Alexander Grosart (1882–84), Alexander Judson (1945), and Andrew Hadfield (2012), re-examining the evidence concerning Spenser’s lineage and concludes that we know only that he was born in 1554. His father’s name and occupation are unknown – although conjectures that he was a journeyman merchant tailor have found their way into reference works. From an important manuscript source, the ‘Nowell Account Book’, Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS A.6.50, we know that Spenser was the protégé of a circle of London clergymen, who expected him to take holy orders. This important documentary source details funds distributed from the estate of Robert Nowell, Attorney of the Queen’s Court of Wards, and brother of Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul’s. Spenser’s name does not appear in the admission records for Merchant Taylors’ School. We know that he attended Merchant Taylors’ School only because of bequests he received in the ‘Nowell Account Book’.

This chapter elaborates on the impact of the Anglo-Irish Agreement and how the Irish worked in Belfast to create closer ties with the British by monitoring and assessing policing and justice issues and raising questions about possible discrimination and anti-equality activities.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins with a brief overview of Catherine Deneuve's career, followed by a critical survey of the field of theoretical star studies, highlighting its potential and limitations for European, and particularly French, film scholarship. It argues the need for the single-star case study as a model for understanding the multiple signifying elements of transnational stardom. From the outset, Deneuve was engaged in provocative screen roles that highlighted questions of female sexual identity. Her first role, at the age of 13, was a brief appearance as a schoolgirl in André Hunebelle's Collégiennes/The Twilight Girls (1956). Deneuve's first serious success came with her role in Jacques Demy's contemporary musical fable, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg/ The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

This chapter demonstrates the validity of Alain Bergala's assertion regarding the thematic and aesthetic parallels between Jean-Luc Godard's four films: Sauve qui peut, Passion, Prénom Carmen, and Je vous salue Marie which were made between 1979 and 1984. In the films of the early eighties, Godard is seeking nothing less than a new way of seeing, a way of looking afresh at those things (bodies, nature) and those activities (love, work) that are at once most familiar and most profoundly unknown. If love and work are connected, as Godard repeatedly insists, it is perhaps because love - whether physical or spiritual love - involves renouncing possession, which ultimately amounts to renouncing the self. By the same token, the work of art - which is a labour of love - if it is truly to become art, must involve a similar renunciation, a dispossession.

The overwhelming majority of the examples mentioned in theorisations of contemporary romantic comedy are not only generically more or less 'pure' but also commercial films. However, there has also been life for the genre outside the mainstream. This chapter argues that the variety of narrative and ideological approaches to intimate matters articulated by the genre of romantic comedy in recent years may be, at least in part, attributed to the growing impact of independent cinema on the mainstream and the subsequent all-but-complete absorption of the former by the latter. It suggests some of the possible directions that the genre's secret life might take in the twenty-first century. Before Sunset makes abundant use of the genre's conventions but has not been primarily seen as a romantic comedy, probably because of its allegiance to the aesthetic forms and conventions of independent cinema.

Explores the role of chance and contingency in ensuring that high-profile London sympathisers with the cause of radical change did not join the Cato Street Conspiracy

This chapter focuses on Izaak Walton and his discovery of a biographical technique that anticipates literary biography, through his uncommon educational background, his experience of the Civil War and his interest in the concept of a ‘private’ life. The chapter examines how in his different versions of the Life of Donne, written over the course of thirty-five years, Walton grew increasingly interested in Donne’s works (especially his poetic works) and attempted to use them in his Life to recover the poet’s own voice or ventriloquise it through paraphrases. Over the course of his revisions to the Life of Donne, Walton developed a new model for writing a Life, which, unlike the vita activa model, was suitable for writing the life of a poet and culminated in Walton’s Life of Herbert, the first life of an English poet as a poet. The chapter argues that Walton’s biographical technique was substantially shaped by his use of literary quotation, which differs from the aphoristic style of quotation more commonly used by his contemporaries. It also proposes that Walton’s innovative approach played an important role in the success of his Lives and proved highly influential for the development of literary biography.

Georges Méliès is universally acknowledged to be an early film Pioneer. However, his work has often been dismissed as simplistic, both narratively and technically. For a long time, Méliès's work was cited as the foremost example of 'primitive mode of representation'; films made before around 1906 were characterized by four traits. These are 'autarky and unicity of each frame', or framing that is self-contained and unchanged throughout the scene; 'the noncentered quality of the image', or the use of the edges of the frame as well as the centre; 'consistent medium long-shot camera distance'; and the 'nonclosure' of the narrative. This introduction presents the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book's primary aim is to give an idea of the complexity and the modernity of his work. It also aims to dispel a number of myths about Méliès's contribution to film history.

Given their common roots, the evolution from Sequence to Free Cinema, from Karel Reisz's career as a critic to that of amateur film-maker, seems both logical and, with the 20-20 power of hindsight, smoothly preordained. Reisz's Momma Don't Allow is a prime example of the 'story documentary' form, in order to set up a series of binary juxtapositions, all the better to contrast but also deconstruct class stereotypes. Although We Are the Lambeth Boys represents a major step forward artistically and technically, particularly in its use of faster Ilford film stock and synchronized sound, its incorporation of several of Gavin Lambert's dialectical suggestions and the use of an overly didactic commentary created some serious aesthetic shortcomings. Reisz and Lindsay Anderson became directly involved in developing New Left strategy with March to Aldermaston, which focuses on halts in the march to the atomic weapons factory in Berkshire.