This chapter focuses on ekphrastic writing in the work of the American artist Raymond Pettibon – mostly pen-and-ink drawings with varying amounts of written texts – in order to explore and question the implicit opposition between the verbal and the visual that underlies many critical definitions of ekphrasis. It demonstrates how Pettibon introduces textual fragmentation and nonlinearity through his complex responses to and paraphrasing of ekphrastic authors, which opens up writing to the contingencies usually associated with drawing. Similarly, Pettibon’s texts are surveyed for typographic, orthographic, and chirographic characteristics, which emphasize writing’s status as simultaneously visual and verbal. The artist’s texts thus appear as though they have been written twice – graphically and verbally – marking them both inside and outside language. This transgressive power of the graphic in writing is traced via Jacques Derrida’s notion of the trait, that stroke or feature crucially linked to the gaze, which marks the space between the visible and invisible. The chapter proposes that this quality makes Pettibon’s work reducible to neither the discourse of language nor that of the image.

At the core of this chapter is the development of Old Poor Law historiography after 1750. The chapter argues that the thrust of such historiography has moved inexorably to a greater understanding of the lives and words of the poor. In this context, medical welfare has been sadly neglected. Historians have felt that sickness was so ubiquitous that the sick poor themselves cannot and should not be the subject of discrete study. The chapter disagrees.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins by outlining the rationale for the research project on political cartoons, while explaining the choice of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a case study. Cartoon analysis is the study of a non-elite communication. It is premised on the idea that audiences inadvertently shape the media they consume by rewarding producers who create content that reflects and reinforces their beliefs. The book identifies the challenges of cartoon research and outlines the methodological approaches available to researchers. It details the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process into full-scale violence by October 2000. It then follows with a description of Israeli and Palestinian media production. The book demonstrates the cartoon's ability to chronicle changes in conflict. It shows that Israeli and Palestinian cartoons also changed the way that each portrayed the other.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about poets who have written about history, about the poetics of the very idea of 'history' itself, the long persistence of the philosophy that separates one from the other. It is also about the choices there have been, in different times and places, of 'telling what had been'. The book discusses W. H. Auden's poetry, of which two are famous for his later renunciation of their historiography. In the earlier century, English and History were taught together. Their separation, as forms of composition and understanding, and the traces of their indissoluble partnership are the topics of this book. As a historical thinker, Auden worked within the framework of Christianity.

Over the past four hundred years an enormous community of scholars have heeded assiduously John Hemminges's and Henry Condell's advice. They have read and reread William Shakespeare, edited his language, modernized his punctuation, parsed usages, debated intentions, and analyzed his words with tests: syntactical, historical, linguistical, and digital. There's a convenient example of Shakespeare writing for a tiny clique in Julius Caesar, the tragedy he purpose-wrote to christen the new Bankside Globe in 1599. Shakespeare composed his Roman tragedy for the delectation of a mass audience who shared a common appetite to see a tyrant ridiculed and slain. But Shakespeare also wrote into this play more than one passage intelligible only to that handful of the wiser sort who had read Plutarch and knew their Suetonius.

Intellectual life experienced a dramatic change in China after the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), leaving an indelible impact on the shaping and structuring of the scholarly persona among Chinese historians. Examining the careers of four scholars – Zhang Taiyan (1869–1936), Liang Qichao (1873–1929), Hu Shi (1891–1962) and Fu Sinian (1896–1950), this chapter discusses two types of persona that at once reflected and embodied the transformation of historical scholarship, and intellectual life in general, in modern China. Blending traditional and modern elements, these two personae were shown not only in where and how the scholars conducted their research and teaching, but also in how they pursued and displayed sociopolitical virtues through their scholarly careers. The author notes that while internal disposition played a primary role in forming a persona, it also negotiated with external factors, resulting in the alternating appeal of a particular persona in a given period while a scholar adjusted his/her predisposed interest in and inclined aptitude for scholarship.

The Epilogue talks about freedom as a category without which we cannot successfully theorise the social reality. I consider how categories like democracy, freedom, and justice have become ‘compromised categories’ (Hemment 2015: 34) not only in former socialist societies but in social theory as well. And yet, as the ethnographic analysis presented in this book shows, the Latvian politics of waiting, produced by the austerity state, can only be understood if we recognise how this waiting has been offered as a sacrifice for freedom.

Many countries claim to be democracies and the criteria for inclusion in the democratic category are necessarily very broad. The analysis of political change and especially democracy in China avoids the problems of conceptual stretching. This chapter examines Chinese practice, rhetoric and aspirations, to assess whether politics in the People's Republic of China (PRC) is becoming recognisably more democratic or not. There are a number of areas of Chinese politics where, some observers argue, features of democracy, as it exists or developed elsewhere, have emerged since the l990s and that may be viewed as the beginning of 'democratisation' in China. The chapter also examines the aspects of politics in China. They are constitutional principles and the role assigned to the Communist Party of China (CCP); protests and petitions; development of civil society including experiments in deliberative techniques; use of democratic rhetoric and intra-party democracy; and the rule of law.

Chapter 3 focuses on the advancement of EU environmental policy, which is regarded as one of the most developed, regulatory dense areas of EU policy making, and a most likely case for Europeanisation. The chapter commences with a commentary on international and EU developments in environmental regulation which have, over time, become intertwined with an agenda of sustainable development and seven environmental action plans. An analysis of the features and principles of the EU environmental policy process is examined, including the shift from from a ‘command and control’ system to interventionist approaches increasingly linked with new forms of governance and instruments such as the ‘polluter pays principle’. These initiatives are linked to recognition of the extent of the implementation challenge. In order to provide a context for the empirical cases investigated in later chapters, the environmental, social and economic problems of three major environmental areas – waste management, water and biodiversity – are considered concurrently with an overview of EU policy responses.

The hierarchy in 'B' film-making is partly explained in terms of studios and companies, partly in terms of a distinction made between 'second features' and 'co-features', on the basis of cost, concept, length and billing. Most British 'B' films did not look like even modest 'A's, though a couple of Lance Comfort's do fall within this description. It was more common, drawing again on Picturegoer, to find much more characteristic British double-bills advertised. The most unusual of Comfort's co-features is Bang! You're Dead, the title of which is taken from a record played constantly by a simple-minded boy Willy on a gramophone. He has salvaged from a former wartime US army base in Southern England. One of the recurring characteristics of Comfort's later films is his use of the popular music of the day, because he felt it helped to make co-features more acceptable to wider audiences.