When he returned from India in 1808, William Hickey discovered that Britain’s customs house officers wanted to tax as “foreign art” the collectibles he had acquired during his almost forty years in South Asia. Hickey saw their efforts as “an infamous transaction.” The art had been produced and purchased in a British settlement, it had been made by people living under British law, it was now the property of a Briton, and it had made its way from British India onboard a British East India Company ship. There was, Hickey noted, “nothing foreign from beginning to end in the whole transaction!”This chapter investigates the way late-eighteenth-century Britons in India framed their cultural life. Rather than delimiting Britishness to a domestic identity, this community braided their sense of self, nation, and empire into one singular narrative. Those, like Hickey, who left Britain with a sense of their own Britishness did not give up that sense merely because of India’s geographic distance from the metropole. Rather, they came to include India’s landscape and culture as part of their notion of what it meant to be British – even if domestic observers failed to appreciate this expanded sense of the national self.

This chapter outlines the difficulties that faced the ‘fire brigade’ states in their efforts to translate their vision of international stability based on collective security into practice. On the surface, involvement in the UN peacekeeping operation in the Congo (ONUC; 1960–64) offered an opportunity to match anti-colonial rhetoric with practical action. In that sense the experience proved successful: peacekeeping became an important outlet for expressing Irish commitment to the UN. Yet the episode was, in large part, a chastening one. With its role limited by the influence of the Cold War powers, by the relative powerlessness of the UN, and by an increasingly vocal Afro-Asian bloc, the Congo experience forced Irish officials to come of age: to recognise the limits to their actions but also to accept their standing as pro-Western, pragmatic, European states.

In many parts of the early eighteenth century Highlands the established presbyterian church of Scotland had limited impact. In the nineteenth century the religious tradition which was to have the most fundamental impact on the society and culture of Gaeldom was protestant evangelicalism. The Highlands had to be brought within the domain of the established church, because Catholicism and episcopalianism were the twin ideological sources of Jacobitism. The irreligion of the Highlander in some districts and the weakness of presbyterianism in many others had to be tackled not only for religious reasons but in order to achieve vital political ends. From the early eighteenth century, the conversion of the Highlanders became a joint mission of both church and state, a partnership designed to civilise the inhabitants of the region by destroying clanship, eradicating popery and inculcating loyalty to the Hanoverian crown.

During the 1926 General Strike, the very juxtaposition of traditional forms in a non-traditional context empowered the volunteers, just as the innovative actions had empowered workers in previous times. The volunteers' obsession with game-playing, with turning battlefields into playing fields, provides a key to the dominant ideal of Britishness in the first third of the twentieth century, and to the reason why certain themes emerged in General Strike narratives. Ironically, both volunteers and strikers were fighting a battle to retain an older, Liberal vision for British society, a society of social obligations and communal responsibilities. The class-based response cast the volunteers and their stories as inauthentic, undeserving of memory. The very condensation of the volunteers' role into an upper-class masculine image was what has enabled it to be so easily invoked as a symbol of eccentric Britishness, of good humour in a crisis, of the gentleman amateur par excellence.

This chapter traces the lives of some of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) after the war and summarizes the organizational development of the FANY through the Second World War. By the 1970s many of the First World War FANY had died. When Baxter-Ellis resigned after the Second World War she lived with her partner 'Tony' Kingston Walker. Grace McDougall inquired directly with the FANY-Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) about renewing her service commitment and was told she was over age. Perhaps motivated by Enid Bagnold's The Happy Foreigner, the novel begins with the demobilization of a beautiful 'khaki-clad English girl' who is identified as a FANY and named Marion O'Hea. The FANY were to be involved in all motor driving companies for the Army and the Women's Legion was to work with the Royal Air Force.

The graphic surface has been part of the medium of the printed book throughout its history. Thus the utilisation of the graphic surface for effect has been potentially available in all periods since Gutenberg's system of movable type was developed. This chapter considers 'representation' and 'mimesis' rather than 'realism', for reasons of precision and clarity. The effect of modernism distancing itself from realism and thus, somehow, from reality, seems to have been encouraged by favourable as well as hostile criticism and this has its legacy today in the postwar/postmodern period. Literary criticism has always tended to interpret texts diegetically, either as an acknowledged fiction presented by an author, or against a particular standard of representation. By being associated with newer developments in literature, and supposedly leaving convention and representation behind, graphic devices were seen to be mere formal play.