This chapter explores the intentional and unintentional ways that martial race discourse was deployed against nationalist claims in both Britain and India. It documents the concrete ways that the 'martial races' themselves were self-conscious constructs of the British imagination in spite of the naturalised racial and gendered language that surrounded them. The chapter charts the uneven impact of martial race discourse across the metropolitan and colonial contexts. One of the neglected sub-plots in the growing appeal of martial race discourse between 1880 and 1914 was its relationship to colonial nationalist movements in Ireland and India. The Fenian crisis was in fact a key moment in the polarisation of Irish Catholic and Scottish soldiers. In contrast to the Indian Army, in the British Army the Highland element of martial race discourse did not function as an exclusionary ideology.

This section introduction presents an overview of modern and contempory understandings of the plague and provides the cotext for the following translated narrative accounts.

This chapter is the result of a visit in 2006 to observe the work of Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW) in the Timbuktu region of Northern Mali, whose struggling economy was at that time benefiting from a short period of peace in the "Tuareg rebellions". IRW’s local headquarters was based in the remote town of Gourma Rharous. The chapter describes its remarkable integration with the local community, and its commitment to staying there rather than moving on like some other aid agencies have done. Since Islam is deeply embedded in Malian life, this chapter provides a positive example of "cultural proximity", i.e. the proposition that a Faith Based Organization can have a privileged access to beneficiaries who share the same religious culture.

This chapter discusses the films of Doris Day and Rock Hudson and their roles' social construction of normative gender and sexuality. The chapter is centrally concerned with the formation of the heterosexual couple in Pillow Talk. Day and Hudson only made three films together—Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers—and in one film they play a married couple. Although they form a heterosexual union in each film, the dynamics of the coupling are complicated by the presence of Tony Randall, who co-stars in all three. The films are very conscious of the cultural discourses around masculinity and sexuality and repeatedly place Hudson and Randall in queer positions. The progressive potential of their films lies in the films' interrogation of the ideology of normative gender and sexuality. Ultimately, this potential is limited because the queer possibilities are focused only on the male body, at the expense of the heterosexual couple's equality.

This chapter explores the sense of historical and personal transition for two communities in Continent and The Gift of Stones, one a Third World seventh continent and the other a Stone Age village. In both, traditional cultures are challenged. Jim Crace's commentary is embedded in the parabolic and allegorical structures of his fictions, and his worlds are not fantastical ones. Continent has a loose form, with varied characters and settings. Despite the dynamics of modernity, individuals retain a sense of the past and certain mythopoeic possibilities reassert themselves almost uncannily. Invented elements recur, such as the manac beans dropped by the prisoner on his arrest in ‘The World with One Eye Shut’, which are sold to prevent erotic desire in The Devil's Larder. Crace's storytelling strategies depend on the innate, if partial, failure of more rational and familiar methods of explication.

The documents in this chapter describe the Normans in Normandy. By 1066 Normandy had established itself as one of the most stable and successful principalities in France. The widescale building programmes of castles, bourgs and churches in eleventh-century Normandy testify to the wealth amassed by its dukes and the aristocracy, both secular and ecclesiastical.

The documents in this section explore civitc religion. A feature of civic Christianity is the lay confraternities that were common in towns in north and central Italy. Civic religion is useful for a group of religious practices that gave prominence to the role of the laity and that asserted or protected civic identity. If the emphasis in civic religion was increasingly on religion in the service of the city, and on lay domination of the church, the church's long and eventually victorious struggle against heresy reveals the successful imposition of orthodoxy, often to popular opposition. The presence of Cathar heretics in the first half of the thirteenth century was favoured by local political conflict, which weakened communal government, and by an influx of refugee heretics from southern France.

When the eminent British cultural theorist Raymond Williams published Keywords in 1976, he intended an 'inquiry into a vocabulary'. In the UK, the late 1970s and early 1980s saw the real academic debate about the form. The 'wordsearch' for a phrase that will tie docudrama down has been going on, since television in particular became culturally important. The first recorded usages of the adjective 'documentary' in English are from the early nineteenth century and can be linked to a post-Enlightenment faith in positivist science and rationality. Docudrama's truth-claim, based as it is on 'fact' and derived from the linkage of the documentary with systems of incontrovertible facts, is frequently wrecked on the rocks of such scepticism. Dictionaries have increasingly been forced to take note of the coinages and compound nouns forged from 'drama', 'documentary', 'fact' and 'fiction'.