The first level of privacy discourse is the conceptual. The chapter sidesteps philosophical debates about the nature of concepts, to develop instead an open-ended, fine-grained theory of privacy conceptions, ideas of privacy subtended by particular practices, behaviours, institutions and technologies in such a way as to bear a family resemblance to other conceptions of privacy. Following Oppenheim and Rawls, conceptions are meant to be operational, clearly connected to related terms, useful, open to empirical investigation and congruent with ordinary language use. Privacy is argued to be a state, not a process. Examples are given of new technologies subtending new states of privacy and their breach. Hypothetical and fictional cases are discussed, as well as boundary cases. Connected systems of privacy conceptions are also discussed, although it is argued that these are not typically well structured.

The introduction establishes the key historical contexts in which the study is grounded. I begin by describing the events in November 1979 that led to the unmasking of Anthony Blunt, particularly the publication of Andrew Boyle’s Climate of Treason, the hostile and homophobic response in the tabloids, followed by Blunt’s “icy” and unapologetic BBC interview. This background information is followed by a brief survey of the plays, films and novels written about the Cambridge spies in response to the “Blunt Affair,” the actors and filmmakers involved in these projects, and an overview of the content. The introduction also provides a concise background the individual Cambridge spies, with particular emphasis on three major players—Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt—who feature most prominently in works about the Cambridge spies. I summarize the key known facts about their lives, their public-school background, how they were largely perceived by the public, and the dates of their exposure and circumstances surrounding their defections. I then describe the ways in which Andrew Boyle’s portrayal of the Cambridge spies in Climate of Treason reflect the appeal they garnered in the British counterculture of the 1980s.

This chapter considers the academic discourse on privacy since 1890, and distinguishes two trends, one lasting until the mid-1970s, and a second that emerged in the 1960s and which is now dominant. It begins with an examination pf three classic papers exemplifying the first trend: ‘The Right to Privacy’ by Warren and Brandeis (1890), ‘Privacy’, by Prosser (1960) and ‘The Right to Privacy’ by Thomson (1975). These three very different and opposed papers have in common that they do not define privacy, assuming that the reader is fully conversant with what it is, and focusing instead on how it is treated in law and rights-based discourse. In the second trend, typical since ‘Privacy and Freedom’ by Westin (1967), privacy is defined, and then reasoned about. Arguments from Daniel Solove and others are considered that the result has been definitional incoherence and disarray. The chapter argues that attempts to produce more complex taxonomies of privacy do not help reduce the disarray. This change in trend in academic writing is down partly to a greater diversity of academic readership, but more importantly to the greater salience of threats to privacy from technology.

There are few aspects of world history between the Roman Empire and the French Révolution that one can assume most people will know Inevitably, the Black Death probably heads the list. Almost every single person will have heard about this great epidemic that ravaged Europe in the mid-fourteenth century. Indeed, many will know that the Great Plague of London in the mid-seventeenth century was the same disease. Plague remains one of the most enduring and best-known realities of the pre-modern world. No contemporary Genevan writer, chronicler, council minute or trial record explicitly identified plague spreading with witchcraft. Rather, it was seen as a form of conspiratorial poisoning. When examining the trials of the plague spreaders it is essential to understand when and why torture was employed. Any understanding of the plague-spreading conspiracies in the western Alps during the century after 1530 will have to overcome a number of interpretative hurdles.

Most human activities at sea are conducted by or from ships, including the transport of around 90 per cent of all goods that are internationally traded. This chapter focuses on the way in which international law regulates the safety and seaworthiness of ships and the well-being of their crews. It begins by outlining the framework for such regulation, examining the varying roles of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), International Labour Organization (ILO), flag States (including the law governing the grant of nationality to a ship), coastal States and port States (including their competence to regulate foreign ships visiting their ports). The chapter continues by examining the standards for safety and seaworthiness that have been adopted by the IMO, and the ways in which those standards are implemented and enforced. That includes examination of the IMO’s mandatory audit scheme; the role of port States in inspecting ships and detaining them if they are unseaworthy; and the co-ordination of port State control activities at the regional level. The chapter then turns to examine the measures that have been prescribed by the IMO and ILO to protect and promote the well-being of seafarers, as well as the role of human rights treaties in this regard. The chapter ends by examining ships’ routeing and other measures designed to prevent collisions and ships running aground.

The chapter begins by reappraising the encounter which conventionally forms the climax of Spurzheim’s British tour – a demonstration of anatomy which Spurzheim made in Edinburgh – the content of which apparently prompted a bad-tempered verbal exchange between Spurzheim and Gordon. Greatly mythologised by proponents of phrenology, the actual details of this encounter are revealed through access to an unreprinted contemporary newspaper account published in England rather than Scotland. The subsequent reception of Spurzheim by the Edinburgh intelligentsia is then contemplated, before the chapter moves to consider the impact of Spurzheim’s teaching and writing upon George Combe, the Scottish lawyer who would become the central figure in a specifically British incarnation of the pseudoscience. A major consequence of Spurzheim’s visit was the establishment of the first British phrenological society in Edinburgh in 1820: the history, foundation, rules and activities of that influential body are discussed at length, and its influence upon a substantial network of local societies across the United Kingdom is demonstrated through insights into the meetings they organised and the museums they maintained. The activities of the Phrenological Society of London, founded in 1822, are also discussed, and in particular the examination which its members made of the crania of convicted criminals. The chapter closes by intimating the background to the slow decline of the phrenological societies and anticipates the gradual integration of phrenology into mesmerism under the particular influence of the London physician and teacher of medicine, John Elliotson.

Social interaction has been divided by commentators into three areas: the legitimate arena for state interference, the public sphere, where private citizens interact on an equal basis to influence and form a public opinion, and a private sphere, where individuals and families conduct their own affairs without interference from outsiders, a refuge from the artificiality and complexity of public life. While the state’s role is partly defined by law, the distinction between the public and private sphere is norm-based. These spheres have often been gendered, with the private sphere seen as a women’s space and the public sphere reserved for men. Some, such as Stanley Benn, have seen these sphere-defining norms as helping define privacy itself. However, as Nissenbaum and Habermas have argued, the norms are rarely straightforward binaries. The interests of property, for instance, can be seen as hybrid between the two. The private sphere has been defined: as whatever is not public; as the non-governmental sphere; in terms of the information passed between its occupants; in terms of enumerated lists of activities; in terms of the household. However, none of these is satisfactory, and the pressures on the private sphere are growing. Even arguments within liberalism threaten to open up the household to public scrutiny. Meanwhile, one can lack privacy in a private space, or have it ‘in public’. The chapter argues that it is simpler to accept that privacy breaches happen in all spheres, even while certain areas of life are treated as ‘private’ by social norms.

The chapter opens by contemplating the Victorian debate as to whether Shakespeare’s grave should be opened in order to ascertain not merely the presence of his body but also the conformation of his skull. The significance of that skull is outlined with reference to Wilkie Collins’s novella Mr Wray’s Cash-Box, which emphasises the role that the bust of the dramatist in the parish church of Stratford-on-Avon plays in the myth of Shakespeare’s genius. Other portraits of the Bard are then highlighted as the focus of phrenological speculation, and the connections between physiognomy, phrenology and genius are made further with reference to the actual exhumation of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, during which an authorised cast of his skull was taken specifically for phrenological analysis. Having established the presence of phrenology in a popular culture that proceeds far beyond medicine, the remainder of the chapter outlines the basic tenets of the pseudoscience, identifies the central protagonists of its early years in Britain and describes the chapters which follow.

Chapter 3 investigates how, during a period marked by a wave of student and worker protests, Italian youth-oriented popular media promoted trends inspired by ‘other’ eras and ‘other’ places. First, young people’s style drew from the American pacifist hippie movement and seemed to mirror countercultural ideals, namely pacifism, anti-authoritarianism and a rejection of consumerism.Second, a 1930s-inspired trend, which followed the global success of the film Bonnie and Clyde, brought about a glorification of the United States’ ‘Roaring ’30s’ imagery for 1960s Italian young people. Third, the emergence of the Afro trend in 1969 showed both the influence of the United States in the circulation of young people’s trends and the permanence of colonialist and Orientalist discourses in Italian popular media. References to ‘other’ times and places also appear in representations of femininities in youth-oriented popular culture. For instance, singer Patty Pravo embodied the hippy femme fatale, a sexually provocative and toxic icon. Popular media accounts also reveal the preoccupation over the perceived ‘effeminacy’ of Italian young men, which was suggested by their style choices and appearance, and testify to the circulation of discourses aiming to reaffirm Italian men’s ‘masculinity’.

Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman became must-see TV for many families in 1990s America. The show featured a woman physician practising medicine in the American West, while simultaneously bringing ‘civility’ to the frontier. Dr. Quinn followed in the footsteps of several novels, plays, TV shows, and films produced throughout the twentieth century that used the figure of the western woman physician to explore shifting sex and gender norms. This chapter examines fictionalised women physicians in three distinct periods. The Progressive Era (1900–1920) explores how feminist writers and silent filmmakers created contrasting depictions of women physicians in the American West. While feminists characterised them as guiding lights of morality and modernity, filmmakers depicted them as comically subverting traditional gender and sexual mores. The second period, mid-century (1950s–1970s), examines women physicians during the heyday of the television western. Amid the Cold War, westerns became a new vehicle for exploring masculinity, violence, and shifting political climates, with women physicians relegated to background characters. Finally, this chapter traces the re-emergence of the western woman physician as a feminist symbol in the closing decades of the twentieth century (1980s–1990s). Following the rise of women’s history, female physicians underwent a reappraisal from both feminist scholars and popular culture, culminating in the television show, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. In emphasising maternalism and progressive politics, the show embodied the goals of first-wave feminism, while also embracing a distinct 1990s multiculturalism that elided the racial politics of actual women physicians in the region at the turn of the century.

Fascination with Egyptian mummies continues to endure, linked no doubt to their recurring presence in popular culture, which in turn prompts a focus on mummified human remains in museums. This chapter consider the basic polarities in attitudes to mummies – from rapture to revulsion – and considers the idea that each encounter can represent a contradictory response to, and appropriation of, Pharaonic funerary culture. Perhaps the most enduring ‘disiy’ is that the historic and pervasive longing to know the people behind the images and funerary objects of ancient Egypt is in fact a reflection of our own modern concern with life and death, and the fascinations and fears of what is after life.