This chapter discusses the entanglement of Brexit with the subsequent pandemic and the war in Ukraine, both of which have been used to muddy Brexit’s economic impact. It first analyses the rhetoric of the Leave campaign and of those politicians advocating for and negotiating Brexit. Those negotiations are bound to continue while politicians are reluctant to acknowledge Brexit as unfinished business. It then contextualizes contemporary fears of unlimited immigration as an echo of postimperial anxieties about British identity. These also feature in literary responses to Brexit which make them condition-of-England novels rather than investigations of wider Anglo-European relations. Forging a dialogue between the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fallout from the fourteenth-century bubonic plague suggests that political leadership and economic steer are crucial in determining a country’s recovery. How the pandemic was handled in the UK, paired with the economic impact of Brexit, aggravated the global supply issues caused by the war in Ukraine. This was not an inevitable outcome.

The chapter focuses on the influence of French cuisine in Britain. The innovations of French courtly cuisine were frequently mocked in Britain which had its own tradition of sound and economical country house cooking. The Industrial Revolution brought a loss of cooking skills among the urban poor. The affluent benefitted from the flight of French chefs after the French Revolution, leading to the culinary pretensions of the (equally mocked) Regency period. French chefs set up French restaurants and cooking schools, popularising French cuisine, thus influencing the tastes of the middle classes and stimulating a range of gastronomical writings. Examples from Antony Trollope’s Vanity Fair, Virgina Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet, Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, the Wife and Her Lover and Elizabeth David’s postwar books serve to gauge the extent of French infuence and help define what makes British food, British.

The Introduction discusses the British usage of the term ’Europe’ and its historically contingent connotations before it outlines the complex historical relationship between the two entities, both of whom were in perennial flux. Global wars, imperialist ambitions, religious affiliations, revolutions political and industrial, travel and technology all played a part in shaping its permutations. The volume’s multi-pronged approach to the topic comprises four parts, covering geographical zones of influence, pan-European movements, cultural transfers, and uncertainties and anxieties. The editors also point to alternative critical approaches to ’Europe’ including philosophical discussions about the idea of Europe and literary essays on the topic.

The most common interpretation of the conjunction ‘and’ in the phrase ‘fiction and film’ is to silently convert it into a preposition; to think of adaptation of novels and short stories into film and TV. Given how many books have served as source texts for visual media, this is hardly surprising. The Russian director Sergei Eisenstein also noted that many of the narrative strategies of nineteenth-century popular novelists had inspired innovative directors such as D. W. Griffith or King Vidor in their development of cinematic techniques such as the close-up, the dissolve, the superimposed shot or montage. In turn, modernist writers learnt from cinematography: think of the scene from Mrs Dalloway (1925) in which the point of view shifts back and forth between the advertising slogan being puffed into the sky by an aeroplane and different individuals on the ground: this is classic intercutting.

This series of monographs is designed to showcase innovative new scholarship in the literary and filmic representation of war. The series embraces Anglophone literature and film of all genres, with studies adopting a range of critical approaches including transhistorical and inter-cultural analysis. ‘War’ in this context is understood to mean armed conflict of the industrialised age (that is, from the late eighteenth century onwards), including not only conventional war between sovereign states but also revolution, insurrection, civil war, guerrilla warfare, cold war and genocide (including the Holocaust). The series is concerned with the multiple, often conflicting, significations that surround the act and event of armed combat, and volumes will also consider the causes, consequences and aftermath of wars; pro- and anti-war literature and film; memorialisation, trauma and testimony. The premise of the series is that new critical perspectives need to be developed in order better to understand war representation. Rather than simply analysing war texts, or even situating those texts in their contemporary cultural contexts, Edinburgh Critical Studies in War and Culture will identify the conceptual categories and forms by which war has been mediated in literature and film, and illuminate the cultural influences that produce them. Wars shape bodies, minds and literary forms; they mediate the possibilities of expression and create discourses of repression; they construct ambivalent subjectivities such as the enemy and the veteran; they invade and distort popular genres from crime fiction to fantasy; they leave tangible scars on the landscape and generate the production of memorials both concrete and imagined.

In 1998 Piotr Uklański mounted his installation Untitled (The Nazis) at the Photographers Gallery in London. It consisted of 166 captionless stills, publicity posters and photographs showing well-known actors in Nazi roles, mostly from Hollywood productions with some shots from European arthouse films. Cinema, more than any other art form let alone history education, has shaped our visual inventory of ‘fascism’. This seemed an obvious point to make but it was not a welcome one. There were protests outside the gallery accusing the artist of glamorising fascism. When Uklanski's photo frieze was mounted at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw two years later, the actor Daniel Olbrychski, whose photo was part of the installation, slashed some of the images with a sword. Subsequently the Polish minister for culture demanded that Uklański provide captions that clarified his condemnation of Nazism or the exhibition would close. Close it did. Another two years later, Norman Kleeblatt curated a group exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York under the title Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art. It included Uklański's frieze and a number of artworks that pointed at the commercialisation of the Holocaust such as Zbigniew Libera's Lego Concentration Camp Set, Tom Sachs's Prada Deathcamp and Roee Rosen's Live and Die as Eva Braun. This exhibition too drew protests for aestheticising fascism. Such controversies indicate that a new generation of artists has begun to challenge the doxas of Holocaust piety, pointing to the fact that Western culture has merely paid lip service to it while commodifying fascism and Holocaust as entertainment.