This chapter examines the published works of Abdelwahab Meddeb. Of specific significance is Meddeb’s foregrounding of a language of Islamic secularism, which can be interpreted as an attempt to transform perceptions of Islam and thus to intervene in the symbolic power relations between the Republican state and France’s Muslim citizens. This chapter also poses questions about the consequences of deploying certain forms of discursive agency for secular Muslim intellectuals. What are the outcomes of their interventions in the public arena? What are the possible effets pervers (unintended consequences) of their interventions, if any? It is arguable that the work of Meddeb embodies most explicitly some of the tensions and paradoxes that can emerge when intellectuals speak for and on behalf of a ‘minority community’, or if we want to avoid that problematic term due to its suggestion of a hermetic and homogenous group, on behalf of a religious/cultural minority population.

This chapter argues that, after leaving Cambridge, Spenser was employed in London from 1574 to 1578 by John Young, Master of Pembroke College. Previously, it has been assumed that he was employed by Young only after he became Bishop of Rochester in 1578. The only source for the assumption that Spenser was the ‘secretary’ to an Elizabethan bishop is a note written inside the book that Spenser gave Gabriel Harvey for Christmas in 1578. During Spenser’s sojourn in London, he met his future wife, became disillusioned with the Church of England, and decided against taking holy orders. A re-examination of topical satire in the ecclesiastical eclogues shows that Spenser attacked John Aylmer, Bishop of London, for selling timber on church lands to enrich his offspring. This satire in the Shepheardes Calender, later echoed in the Marprelate tracts, indicates that Spenser no longer planned to take holy orders. In an eclogue such as Maye, Spenser has been identified as a Puritan, Church of England Protestant, and even a Catholic. In the ecclesiastical eclogues, he deliberately uses a dialogic structure to conceal his religious persuasion.

There really is a great deal to say about British films and specifically about British films in the 1950s. This is especially true of those made by J. Lee Thompson. He is not a name with household status. Since his first directorial commission at Welwyn Studios in 1950, Lee Thompson has directed forty-five pictures for theatrical release, covering almost every genre of the cinema. His remarkable ability to adapt his style to suit the material has made him perhaps the most versatile director ever produced by Britain. This introduction presents the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book intends to plot the trajectory of a unique film-maker through the typical constraints and opportunities offered by British cinema as a dominant studio system gave way to independent production in the two decades after the Second World War.

Part seven presents moral advice for civic magistrates in four chapters, asserting that they should be powerful and magnanimous so that they can govern without fear; that they ought to be God-fearing men; that they ought to be truthful in all things; and that they ought to hate all avarice and cupidity.

Coinciding with the excavations of the Spanish Civil War's mass graves, media is playing a crucial role in the construction and dissemination of 'spaces of memory' of the war. This chapter discusses the contribution of Patricia Ferreira, who in her Para que no me olvides, relocates in the present the collective response to loss and pain caused by the war, as well as the subsequent oblivion and remembrance, all from an individual perspective that attempts to connect personal trauma to socio-political awareness, while bridging the differences of three generations of Spaniards. Ferreira's melodramatic mode provides a means through which individual memory can become official history, as well as a potential therapeutic model for dealing with the trauma. The film articulates the unfulfilled needs of individual Republican victims and exposes the still incomplete collective and institutional work of mourning implicit in the shortcomings of Law of Historical Memory project.

In Vertigo, James Stewart's look is as important as the figure of Novak whom he regards and who he transforms by his desires: it combines the objective (the object seen) and the subjective. The Hitchcockian system of shot (object) /counter-shot (look) needs to be considered in this context. Every image in a Alfred Hitchcock film has a double aspect. Even the most documentary, plain and seemingly innocent Hitchcock image contains something disquieting and unsettling. In Vertigo, in Madge's studio and in Elster's office, an initial ordinary frontality and symmetrical balance in the framing and editing of shots becomes distorted, askew, unbalanced and imperceptibly so, less perceived than felt. In Hitchcock what comes into play between shot and counter-shot is the look as in Rear Window where the foreshortening of space (a distortion) is a matter of a perverse, secretive, voyeuristic look through a camera lens that brings the distant close.

Although Joseph Losey was ambivalent about how to represent an active class consciousness, as he focused exclusively on the foibles of the bourgeoisie through the representation of hermetic upper- and middle-class milieu, this limited focus starts to expand later. Losey introduces some form of class analysis into each of his next four films, Time Without Pity, The Gypsy and the Gentleman, Blind Date and The Criminal, his first English features released under his own name. Each represents an initial stab at exploring the complex codes and mores of the British class system, a project that will reach full fruition in the Harold Pinter-scripted films of the 1960s. Usually in Losey, the victims of impulse resort to an over-reliance on the structure of segmented time as a security blanket against the annihilating effects of non-linear duration. The irony is that in Time Without Pity the situation is reversed.

The post-war Conservative party sustained its natural links with traditional Englishness. George Orwell's natural preference was for Labour to construct a 'National' metaphor, but the record of the Conservative party suggested something different. English Conservatism can be traced back to Restoration Toryism but the modern party took its shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period of profound social change. This chapter examines the origins of Conservatism, then its historical development, locating in each the part that Englishness has played. It investigates briefly the apparent paradox of working-class support for the Conservatives. Compassionate Conservatism is new only in the sense that it flatly contradicts the accepted wisdom of Thatcherite Conservatism. The most striking social feature of the modern Conservative leadership has been the fact that six of the seven most recent Conservative leaders have been meritocrats of modest social origins.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in this book. It discusses a particular sequence from Joseph Losey's The Servant. This sequence is a perfect example of Losey's expressive genius with discordant space as an objective correlative of shifting identities and class relations. As Roger Greenspun noted in relation to Secret Ceremony, 'among filmmakers Losey is the greatest poet of mirrors, greater even than Cocteau, because he knows they are environments in their own right, accepting, changing, and never quite giving back the world they reflect'. This facility for creating complex spatial depth helps explain the MacMahon critics' lionization of Losey less as a true auteur than as a metteur-en-scène. In contrast, the skills of metteurs-en-scène lie in their performative qualities, their ability to transpose a pre-existing script, book or play into specifically cinematic codes.

Jack Clayton would have been the first to acknowledge the cinema as a collaborative medium and to pay tribute to his cast and crew. Writing about Clayton, Roy Armes claimed that 'good intentions in no way compensate for lack of real passion or concern'. The fact that Clayton's films fit David Bordwell's paradigm of the art film is one explanation why producers had difficulty with him and why mainstream cinema found his work hard to place and assimilate. Bordwell writes of narratives that drift rather than are goal-oriented, that are dissections of feeling and emphasise reaction more than action, and have a hero or heroine 'shuddering on the edge of breakdown'. Again that can be applied directly to Clayton's films such as The Innocents, The Pumpkin Eater and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.

The great achievement of D. W. Griffith was not this or that narrative technique of editing or shooting but his realisation that the image had first to be detached from what it represented enabling it to attain autonomy and independence as an image. Autonomy allows images to be related one to another, to become 'writing', and to return to reality indirectly by images of it, the writing of a story with images of absent realities. This realisation gives Griffith's films an uncertainty and fragility as if representation is made relative by the realities it can never fully grasp and that threaten its disappearance. His fictions had realistic aims achieved by unrealistic means. Griffith was an inventor, creator and champion of cinematic forms, largely attentive, seldom negligent. Alternating montage is ruled by temporal and causal rules, for example, in a chase scene or a shot counter-shot in a scene of dialogue.