Recent scholarship has shown that an Old English riddle’s description may at times relate not only to its solution but also to an unspoken metaphor, lending the riddle an underlying coherence beyond the literal answer. While it has long been agreed that the solution to the first Exeter Book riddle(s) is a meteorological event, a natural phenomenon, here the ‘wind’ is described in terms akin to the workings and movements of the human mind (OE mod or hyge) within and without the body. Therefore, OE mod provides the unspoken metaphor for the opening riddle(s). This chapter contends that the human mind is not detached or divided off from nature in these riddles, but participates in the violent moods of the storm. Like one of Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, the storm is so massively distributed across time and space that it cannot be grasped, and the power of the wind destabilises dualisms such as human–nonhuman, self–other, internal–external, forcing us to question whether the mod is inside or outside, apart from or a part of, the storm.

This chapter discusses the author's experience in dealing with W. H. Auden's works. She was introduced to Auden's poetry in her O-level English literature class, South London, in the 1962-1963 school years. The author found Derek Attridge's theory of poetry more legible than Auden's because of her own education, which, despite its being Latin-less, was closer in time to Attridge. Auden was in the primary school classrooms the author inhabited between 1974 and 1982 because of the long extracts she taped from Geoffrey Summerfield's Junior Voices 1-4. From 1991 onwards, she used lines from 'Homage to Clio' as an epigraph many, many times. She did not want to know what Auden really meant; she wanted to know what the poem told her about the thing she did: history; about history's quiddity, its beingness in the world, its social and cultural function; what it is.

Like Southall, Bradford was faced in 1960–62 with a sudden influx of Asian immigrants, the great majority of whom hailed from Pakistan. This wave of immigration did cause some early panic, with the outbreak of smallpox in 1962. This chapter studies the introduction of bussing locally, which took place without a real white mobilisation in favour of it. Dispersal in Bradford was a fairly smooth affair compared with Southall. It was hailed by members of the Wilson government as a model type of dispersal, particularly because the city proved efficient at gathering statistics about immigrant children, but archives reveal that, as elsewhere, there were many shortcomings to the operation of dispersal locally, which had a detrimental effect on immigrant children.

More than a decade on from the Belfast agreement, the sectarian 'force field' of antagonism in Northern Ireland remained as strong as ever. The Belfast agreement restricts north-south collaboration to twelve specified policy domains in an annexe, though the main body of the text speaks of 'at least' six implementation bodies and six areas of policy cooperation. To make the 'external' arrangements work, 'internal' governance of Northern Ireland must place a premium on dialogue and deliberation across sectarian boundaries. This can best be done through a requirement to reach cross-communal majorities on executive formation and dissolution. To implement the constitutional changes, new legislation would be required substantially amending the Northern Ireland Act 1998, passed at Westminster to implement the agreement, and the Northern Ireland Act 2006, which paved the way for renewed devolution.

The chapters in this section go beyond the riddles’ words to explore the ideas that theoretically-inflected approaches can reveal in them. This approach is not new; the study of early medieval riddles has already benefitted from gender and sexuality studies, among other interdisciplinary approaches. The chapters here use the riddles to test ideas about humour, sentience, monstrosity, ecofeminism, hyper-objects, and conceptual blending.

This introductory chapter lays down the theoretical framework for the foregoing analyses, taking many cues from legal studies, US Supreme Court cases and Foucauldian theory. In the world of the Western, the procedural focus of American law gets in the way of justice. The genre embraces justice by gun violence rather than by trial, and has therefore often been read as ‘anti-law.’ From the early dime-novel fascination with such outlaws and renegades as Billy the Kid and Jesse James, through depictions of lynching in Owen Wister’s 1902 novel, The Virginian, and the film The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), to the guns-blazing heroics of films such as Rio Bravo (1959), High Noon (1952), and Shane (1953), through the darker critiques of The Gunfighter (1950), The Wild Bunch (1969), and Unforgiven (1992), to the postmodern pastiche of Django Unchained (2012), the Western has nourished a vision of social organization and a means for delivering justice that operates outside the official parameters of American law, relying on a gunslinging hero to uphold order. This chapter argues, in fact, that this opposition is progressively undone in the genre’s formulaic shootouts. The cherished antipathy between ‘the law’ and the Western’s ‘law of the gun’ is, in short, unfounded.

Chapter 7 highlights the unique features of Ireland’s biodiversity profile and emphasises the importance of its conservation. The discussion explores Ireland’s experience of implementing the birds and habitats directives which form the cornerstone of EU nature policy and its international commitments. Central to their implementation is the creation of a European-wide network of sites for habitats and species called Natura 2000. The chapter illustrates that in Ireland many of these habitats do not reach a favourable status when measured against international and legal obligations to protect biodiversity. Central to explanations of Ireland’s biodiversity conservation approaches is that all stages of implementation of the birds and habitats directives have been subject to high adaptational pressures and conflict between the National Parks and Wildlife Services and stakeholders whose private property can be subject to this legislation. The discussion pays particular attention to the efforts to ban turf cutting on raised boglands in special areas of conservation and the conflict this has sparked.

The conclusion takes stock of the variety of scientific practices and performances that animated the meetings of nineteenth-century medical societies. It identifies a process of growing autonomy of the medical sciences as a connecting thread. It also highlights how societies met a need for deliberation and debate among physicians, and acted as spaces where scientific standards could be set and imposed. This need for a broader basis did not disappear with the advent of professionalized science, the book concludes, but was articulated in new ways in the twentieth century.

This chapter deploys a critical security studies approach to 'unpack' environmental security in the Asia-Pacific. A critical approach resists a disciplinary neo-liberalism as the paradigm for achieving 'freedom' or overcoming environmental harm. As Axel Honneth suggests, harm is implicated in the problems of recognition. Environmental harm arises in part through the costs to life and health associated with environmental degradation and unsustainable development. Environmental degradation and resource decline, and the important matter of how to overcome them, have become crucial challenges for the Asia-Pacific. The chapter claims that 'emancipatory change constitutes the primary purpose' of critical security studies. A human security approach provides a broader window on the relationship between environmental decline and insecurity. The human security dimension of environmental degradation is acknowledged in the Asia-Pacific, in official policy discourse and in what might be called the 'commentary' and research community.

This chapter proposes to return the female characters to the centre of history's stage, to reopen the closet to which they were seemingly confined in Henry V. In King John, in addition to the stage presence of the warlike Queen Eleanor, whilst the men are failing to protect their country and save 'mother England' from foreign occupation, brave English women are taking matters into their own hands. Constance's verbal performance in King John is reminiscent of the female roles in Richard III, for here women's tongues are likewise sharp and active. The impact of images of women conveyed via the language of the plays should not be underestimated. It has been argued that William Shakespeare's audiences possessed a highly tuned 'image consciousness' inherited from their medieval ancestors, so that spectators at the drama could readily construct offstage pictures in the mind's eye.

Devolution was one of the defining issues in British politics during the late 1970s. It was a fundamental concern for the Conservative Party. The party had a uniquely strong tradition of support for the principle of the United Kingdom, but by the mid-1970s it had accepted the need for some kind of devolution as a means of avoiding other more radical changes. Official policy was therefore to support a directly elected assembly in Scotland. Though this commitment remained it was less concrete by 1979 than it had been at the beginning of the period. Support for such an institution became more circumstantial and qualified. Philosophical arguments in support of devolution appear to have been employed less often. The focus was more on the negative consequences of Labour’s specific proposals. However, devolution was not rejected outright. That eighteen years of Conservative government in which nothing was done about devolution followed, was not as inevitable in the preceding years as it might later appear.