In this chapter the author shares his thoughts about a film which is still in progress. He began to wonder if it might be possible to make a film looking at the situation. He also begins to be fascinated with the idea of doing a portrait of a musical family, showing how they faced life, branched out, grew, and tried to make ends meet. After filming for about six months, he wrote a short proposal asking for financial support and put it out to a few foundations. Although his own enthusiasm and energy had diminished, Debby Elnatan still pressed on with fantastic energy regarding her own projects. It wasn't just Debby's success that impelled him, but many other things had happened in the family that could provide new material for the project.

This chapter considers the two books that were published at the beginning of the new millennium. Jim Crace particularises issues of love, family and other intimate or domestic interpersonal relations in The Devil's Larder and Six (2003). Of The Devil's Larder, some of whose stories had appeared previously in Slow Digestions of the Night, Crace admits the project was long planned, and represents ‘an attempt at a piecemeal, patchwork novel’, something inspired by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and Primo Levy's The Periodic Table. In Crace, the short pieces at times feel like narrative equivalents of philosophic aphorisms, particularly with their broadly common gastronomic themes and the implicit architectonic of an overriding cumulative intention. Generally, the recurrent contexts and themes are overt and therefore easy to identify, and include: relationships, sexuality and desire; families and their patterns of behaviour and traditions; sociability, jollity and its absence; and forms of poisoning or allergies.

Threatening the survival of the British Empire during the post-war years was the spread of communism and the growth of the cold war. Southeast Asia appeared to be the immediate communist target, with British rule in Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong coming under threat. For the purpose of policing, Hong Kong was divided into three: the island of Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories. Within the urban centres of Hong Kong and Kowloon, there was greater emphasis on civil policing, while in the New Territories colonial police practices prevailed. In the case of both the Malayan Police and the Royal Hong Kong Police (RHKP), colonial practices were strengthened during the post-war years. The Malayan Police played a crucial role during the ensuing conflict that spanned over a decade. Improvement to practices of policing public disturbances came about after the Star Ferry riots in the 1950s.

This chapter presents translated and annotated narrative accounts on the topic of the plague in contintental Europe.

The authors present a selection of extracts from two of the most important works of preaching in the thirteenth century. The works are the tales collected by Stephen of Bourbon for use in sermons and a more technical guide for preachers written by Humbert of Romans. The authors have included two short sermons devoted specifically to heresy, because of their rarity, and geographical interest, providing as they do a brief glimpse of heresy in northern France and connections between northern Italy and southern France.

Chapter 5 examines the nature of different types of surviving manuscripts -- authors' working copies, collectors' miscellanies and gift manuscripts -- in which larger numbers of epigrams appear. Working copies of collections (such as those by Thomas Freeman and William Percy) were often were a stage towards publication or the presentation of a collection to a friend or patron, as in the cases of Francis Thynne and Sir John Harington. Other epigrams, after circulating independently, found a place in miscellanies, sometimes scattered amongst other types of poetry, at other times gathered in one part of the manuscript.

This chapter was published as a guest editorial in Anthropology Today, 29: 4, August 2013, under the title "Foregrounding the Muslim tribal periphery". This book is arguably the finest of Professor Akbar Ahmed’s many publications, blending a literary and religious sensibility with political and historical analysis – a model for engaged anthropology. It can be read on two levels. It is a political indictment of the disproportionate victimization of Muslim tribespeople by remotely controlled military weapons – a policy which risks leading to a cycle of revenge. But the drone is also a metaphor for the current age of globalization, "something which comes from nowhere, destroys your life and goes away", while the prickly, tenacious "thistle" is an image that captures the essence of tribal societies (an image borrowed from Tolstoy’s posthumous novel Hadji Murad).

This chapter presents an introduction to the life and works of Jeanette Winterson. Winterson was born in Manchester on 27 August 1959 and brought up in the nearby mill-town of Accrington, Lancashire, by her adoptive parents, Constance and John William Winterson, in a strict Pentecostal Evangelist faith. Her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was published in 1985 and earned the Whitbread First Novel Award. In 1990, Oranges was made into a TV drama, winning two BAFTA awards (for Best TV Drama Series and for Best Actress) and the Prix d'argent for Best Script in 1991. Winterson's work has been placed in one or other of the boxes labelled ‘lesbian fiction’ or ‘postmodernist fiction’. However, the writer rejects both qualifications, particularly that of ‘lesbian writer’, and insists that she expects to be called simply ‘a writer’, as male authors usually are.

The Introduction summarizes the book’s content under the following headings. Since all the chapters have been previously published elsewhere, it also adds some complementary material to bring the book up to date on some important topics: Part One: Chapters 1 to 9: Islamic charities, Summary of the Chapters, Some recurrent themes, Faith Based Organizations and "cultural sensitivity", Islamic Relief Worldwide, The West Bank zakat committees, Banking problems, Towards a more complete description, Pakistan, Turkey, Domestic Islamic charity in the United Kingdom, A zakat movement?, Towards a more comparative approach, Part Two: Chapters 10 to 17: Islamic humanism