This chapter compares the EL with the two other TNPs of the broad left-of-centre – the Party of European Socialists (PES) and the European Green Party (EGP). It shows how the social democrats have far surpassed the EL in terms of influence, even if the PES still has its limits as a TNP. The Greens, on the other hand, have perhaps advanced most down the road of ‘Europeanisation’ and the EGP now punches well above its weight – while the EL continues to punch below its weight. We argue that this is, in part, due to the fact that the EGP has adapted its structures most. The EL, by contrast, sticks consciously to the model of consensual decision-making, seeking unanimity where possible even if this means slowing down policy-making. In the second part of the chapter we compare the policies towards the European crisis of the three main left-of-centre TNPs. We argue that, on paper at least, there now seems to be much overlap and convergence between the three. However, the EL remains alone in seeking to truly transcend capitalism, rather than merely manage it. The EL’s radicalism – its insistence on its nature as a transformative party (in the sense of standing for a transformation and transcendence of capitalism) – marks it out as a singular case.

Night Must Fall seems to be an odd choice of material for a director eager to break the kitchen sink stranglehold but in retrospect it proves to be an extremely adaptable vehicle for experimental risk-taking and is arguably one of Karel Reisz's most underrated films. It fuses elements of poetic realism and Resnais-like elliptical disjuncture into a penetrating psychological hybrid. In Night Must Fall, a fluid interactivity between subject and Other, Imaginary and Real, is played out both performatively, through Albert Finney's deliberately mannered acting, and through mise-en-scène and elliptical editing. According to Penelope Houston, there are moments in the film when feels the shade of Truffaut at the Reisz's shoulder. However, Reisz did not consciously copied anyone: merely that he cannot but find himself thinking in a European idiom, however devastating the results may look in a context of old English melodramatics.

In the mountain kingdoms and other polities of the Himalayan region, colonial Britain pushed forward the frontiers of its Indian empire, played the ‘Great Game’ against Russia and jousted with China for trade opportunities and political influence. Through the 1800s and early 1900s, Britain imposed a protectorate over Sikkim, exercised considerable sway in independent Nepal, promoted the establishment of a unified Bhutan and sought to gain access to Tibet. Confrontations and negotiations with local monarchs were key to Britain’s efforts. When Britain ‘quit’ India, the destinies of the states where Britain had gained a sphere of influence, and the fate of their sovereigns, hung in the balance. This chapter charts the varying trajectories of the monarchs of Bhutan, Nepal and Sikkim (and of the Dalai Lama in Tibet) during the late colonial period, and argues that the fates of the dynasties, at that time, and during and after decolonisation, was closely bound up with British imperialist action and its legacy.

Three focuses of British travel writing from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were natural history, science, and recreation. Throughout this period and often independently of one another, widely separated writers on these topics utilised a set of consistent yet contradictory images to represent their experiences. In explicit detail they described beauty but also filth, and dangers to which they responded with expressions of awe, uncertainty, and disgust. From these contradictions emerge coherent ways to look at the modern world – especially the contrasts between Britain and Scandinavia – as well as to remember the world from which it developed. The collective impact of replicated tropes rendered visits to the modern-day Nordic regions as rides on a time machine to the British medieval past.

Part three has four chapters. The first presents the etymologies regarding the Italic king Janus and a Trojan refugee named Janus. Chapter two gives an etymology based on the Roman god Janus. Chapter three gives an etymology based on the Latin word ianua (‘door’ or ‘portal’). Chapter four seeks to explain why the Latin word for Genoa was different in Jacopo’s time (Ianua) than it was in classical sources (Genua).

This chapter is concerned with post-war British perceptions of Germany. It is argued that by continuing to locate Germanness as the alien Other to Britishness in the post-war period, Britons could hold on to a secure sense of British identity and unity forged in wartime. Many post-war British novels, films and comic strips depicted Germans as alien to all humanity. While the 1960 film Sink the Bismarck! epitomises this tradition, the 1957 box-office hit The One That Got Away, starring the German actor Hardy Krüger and based on the true story of the prisoner of war Franz von Werra, challenged the stereotype. The fact that the dashing and good-looking Krüger exhibited character traits considered typical of British heroes, such as daring, wit and resourcefulness, led to uneasy and ambivalent responses in audiences and critics. Twelve years after the war, the humanness of Germans could still only be acknowledged in British popular culture as an anomaly.

This chapter begins with Michel Houellebecq's treatment of questions of gender, most especially the portrayal of women, including the discourses of misogyny and anti-feminism by which this work is marked. It explores his use of the tropes of pornography and provides an account of his representations of group sex, swinging and sex tourism. The chapter aims to take seriously the stakes attaching to the pornographic in Houellebecq's writing. For Houellebecq, pornography demonstrates the reductive materialism of contemporary sexual relations. Somewhere between the reductive body of pornography, and the supposed nobility of the human face, lies Houellebecq's unrepresentable, implosive utopia. But if utopia is only conceivable as a puncture, or as under erasure, then any denunciation of all the misery that surrounds this utopia may well find itself also punctured, semi-effaced, irretrievably in hock to this hegemonic misery.

E. M. Forster somewhere comments on Youssef Chahine's fellow Alexandrian, his late friend the poet C. P. Cavafy, as 'standing at a slight angle to reality'. Chahine's 'slight angle to reality' also includes his relation to his country: as a Lebanese Greek Christian in an Arab Muslim nation, Chahine's Egyptian identity is not absolutely straightforward - though for Chahine himself it is quite simply not a problem. The films of the first decade, including musicals, social problem films and anticolonial films, give an indication of Chahine's seemingly effortless ability to work across genres in different films. Given the length of Chahine's career, an appropriate contextualisation might seem to require something resembling a full history of Egypt in the second half of the twentieth century. However, the Egypt had a stronger social and economic base than other countries to develop cultural forms such as theatre and cinema.

The success of Marcel Pagnol's business model was unmatched in 1930s French cinema, offering industry insiders and the general public welcome proof that their nation could defend its unique cultural identity against Americanisation and could compete economically with foreign pictures at home and abroad. From Louis Lumière's invention of the 'cinématographe' in 1895 through the end of the First World War, French films accounted for roughly 80 per cent of all those in circulation worldwide. At the peak of the crisis between 1933 and 1936, some 260 French producers declared bankruptcy and the cinema industry operated at deficit. With a large reserve of capital at his disposal from his career as a playwright and the immensely successful screen adaptations of Marius and Fanny on-screen, Pagnol was uniquely positioned to implement an artisanal model of filmmaking that was immune to the problems plaguing the rest of the industry.

This brief conclusion restates the facts of Spenser’s early life, integrating into this factual outline the points made in this biographical study. In addition, this portrait of Spenser depicts his departure for Ireland as a high point in his life. He concluded the Shepheardes Calender with the bold claim that it was a ‘Calender for euery yeare’ and the fervent hope that his pastoral would outwear ‘steele in strength’ and ‘continewe till the worlds dissolution’. The aspiration in these lines testifies to the idealism that inspired the early Spenser and that prompted him to envision a life in Ireland where he might succeed in fashioning the Renaissance epic.

Cesc Gay's V.O.S. is a romantic comedy about the writing of a romantic comedy set in Barcelona. The metafictional framework of V.O.S. fulfils a comparable function with a Shakespearean comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream: it appeals to us even more strongly by advocating the ultimate inability of the frame-breaking devices to overcome our desire for narrative. This desire for narrative is in fact one of several forms of desire which structure Gay's film and make it a relevant instance of contemporary Spanish cinema and, more specifically, a privileged space for the exploration of the uncertain and slippery concept of Catalan cinema. This chapter attempts to identify those forms of desire and the links between them. Historically, Catalan identity has been strongly linked with language, and V.O.S. is not exactly an isolated case within contemporary Catalan cinema.

The diversity of British director Roy Ward Baker's output raises the issue of genre in British filmmaking in unusually vivid terms. This chapter considers what Michael Winterbottom has done with specific popular genres as the road movie, the musical and the science-fiction thriller, how far he has adapted their conventions to contemporary film practice and ideology, and whether these films, in reworking Hollywood genres, exhibit any peculiarly British inflections by focusing on three of his movies: Butterfly Kiss, 24 Hour Party People, and Code 46. The chapter is concerned with the extent to which Winterbottom gratifies and/or subverts generic expectations and, indeed, the whole notion of classical narrative cinema, as defined by the output of the Hollywood studio years in which genre filmmaking became a staple of cinematic entertainment.

The only extant play in the dramatic oeuvre of the important Chartist politician, writer, and editor Ernest Jones, St John’s Eve appeared serially in 1848 in the Chartist literary journal the Labourer. A gothic melodrama, the play recounts a Faustian story about the love-struck Rudolf, who traffics with a Mephistophelean stranger in order to peer into the future and discern whether or not the tyrannical elderly father of his beloved will die in the next year. Although less obviously political than much Chartist drama, the play takes up questions of gender equality, a theme to which Jones’s writing frequently returned. The hero’s moral ambiguity coupled with his counter-productive efforts on the heroine’s behalf might be understood as a challenge to the Chartist endorsement of couverture, the idea that a wife’s political life should be subsumed into her husband’s. With its suspect hero, St John’s Eve marks a significant departure from the narrative of feminine vulnerability protected by working-class manhood depicted in an array of radical rhetoric (and working-class theatre) throughout the 1840s and 1850s.