The Amherst embassy to China has long been viewed as a major diplomatic failure in Britain’s early relations with China. This chapter concentrates on the greatly overlooked aspect of the Amherst mission – the delegation’s discoveries in China after the official proceedings were concluded. Since the embassy was given unprecedented freedom of movement during its four-month return journey from Beijing to Canton, British observers were able to explore the interior of China and to communicate more fully with the Chinese government and people than ever before. As a consequence, the Amherst embassy not only provided valuable first-hand observations which increased and improved Britain’s knowledge of China, but developed the view that the Qing government was the chief obstacle to the progress of Chinese civilisation and to the general welfare of the Chinese people. These important perceptions laid the foundation for future changes in Sino-British relations and led, indirectly, to the outbreak of the Opium War.

The sixteen ballads and songs within this section fall into two camps: elegy and remembrance. Whilst a central feature of elegiac poetry is the way in which it remembers or memorialises the dead, a poem which is one of remembrance is not necessarily an elegy. Several of the songs herein use the date of Peterloo as a temporal marker – with an eye both on the contemporaneous reader or audience and the future reader. Included in this section are broadside ballads by Michael Wilson and elegies by Samuel Bamford and Peter Pindar.These songs display a self-awareness in their significance in marking the moment for posterity and in their attempts to reach an audience beyond Manchester and ensure that the public knew what had happened on 16th August as well as preserving the event in English vernacular culture. It is also a quest for ownership of the narrative of the day; the speed with which so many of these songs were written and published not only suggests the ferocity of emotions surrounding events but also the need to exert some control over the way in which they were represented.

Education was another contentious policy area during the 1970s. The Conservative Party essentially moved from a position in which standards and choice were at the centre of its approach to education – but it had gone with the grain by expanding the number of comprehensive schools in Britain – to one in which it felt even more strongly about standards and choice, and was more sceptical about the need to impose comprehensives on unwilling parents and pupils, but still did not, or could not, commit to seriously undoing many of the most important changes. The party therefore looked for alternative ways in which standards and choice could be improved, once the types of school from which parents would have to choose was less of a factor. This chapter examines those alternative policies, including an assisted places scheme, educational vouchers and a Parents’ Charter. It shows again that short-term political factors often had the greatest immediate impact on Conservative policy.

This chapter offers a brief outline of Gurwitsch’s career in the first half of his life, in Germany until 1932 and in France between 1932 and 1938. It then considers in detail the texts, published and unpublished at the time, which he produced in this period. It provides detailed analysis of his doctoral and Habilitation theses and of the texts which he produced in the period when he was mentor to Merleau-Ponty. It concludes with a summary of the correlations between these social and intellectual trajectories.

This chapter presents a reading of Unforgiven (1992), situating this film within a paradigmatic shift in the extension of due process protections for minorities, and the transformation of American self-defense doctrine brought about through a focus on battered women.

This chapter is based on a close study of the memoirs and diaries of Alexei Nikolaevich Kuropatkin (1848–1925), appointed Governor-General of Turkestan in August 1916 and tasked with suppressing the 1916 revolt. It shows that Kuropatkin was heavily influenced by his memories of the Russian campaigns of conquest in Central Asia, in which he had participated as a young man in the 1860s–1880s, and by the imagined legacy of the first Turkestan Governor-General, Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman (1818–1882). This helps to explain the disproportionate use of force and violence by Russian forces in suppressing the revolt.

This section begins by briefly examining the historical provenance of the poetic trope of awakening and its significance within radical culture prior to Peterloo, as well as those poems and songs written in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, thereby highlighting the intertextual dialogue between the poems which is illustrated not only by an ideological unity but also by the commonality of motifs, forms, styles and even tunes. Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy provides a well-known example of this trope and is used in the introduction to this section as an illustration of how radical poems and songs in the Romantic period utilised revolutionary discourse dating back to the sixteenth century. The section comprises ten poems which are exhortatory ballads or apostrophes. At times of national crisis, poets have called on their readers to ‘arise’ and awaken’, often drawing on those past events to prove that, if England could get rid of two kings, it could certainly get rid of a third.

This chapter explains the epistemological and ontological positions of the book and clarifies the methodology used for this study. The chapter examines the linguistic turn in the social sciences and establishes the relation between reality and language. Influenced by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, it argues that language is constitutive of reality and thus matters for how we understand the world. Second, the chapter excavates the role of language in securitisation theory to foreground the central argument about linguistic practice. Lastly, the chapter introduces three key linguistic aspects that play an important part in the book: strategic narratives, indirect speech acts and framing Islam as a non-security issue.

This chapter discusses W. H. Auden's household servants. The servants were present by default an essay when he contemplated the lessons taught to middle-class children of the era about relationships with working-class people. Auden may have hated dirt and disorganisation, but he had never learned how to put things right, such as his notorious habit of peeing in wash basins and being stingy with lavatory paper. However, the servant stories from Ischia are more amusing than the dirty ones. There were servants in the Solihull and Harborne households; maids and cooks, cleaners, gardeners, and odd-job men at his preparatory and public schools, and at his Oxford college. He also possessed a theology of service, or a theology of servants, believing that in literature, at least, a figure like Jeeves in P. J. Wodehouse's cycle of novels expressed Christianity's highest form of love.