This chapter consists of an attempt to understand the meaning of internment in First World War Britain by placing it into a series of specific themes revolving around the conflict. First World War internment had the most meaning for those who experienced it. Beginning with the incarceration of soldiers, the scale of the conflict and the size of the armies involved meant that the issue of prisoners of war surfaced in a new manner. Britain essentially carried out ethnic cleansing during the First World War, and the incarceration of German males for years represented a transitionary stage. Ethnic cleansing became part of state policy during these years. Most scholars working on the plight of ethnic outsiders in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century accept the importance of war as the background for the most extreme acts which occurred.

The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) endeavoured to achieve political advancement through fostering bodily awareness among its membership and encouraging habits of bodily improvement. The CPGB endeavoured to shape members' personal behaviour, attitudes, habits and deportment, as well as define the code by which they were meant to live. The bourgeois 'decadent' lived a life that was, in fact, considered to be the complete inverse of that of the communist. Or at least that ideal-type communist that conformed to the Party's preferred image of its activists as models of sound habits, good behaviour and right ways of living, both in their private as well as their public lives. To Margaret McCarthy, the parent Party's attempts to inculcate habits of self-restraint and discipline in one's private life were particularly hard on a young communist.

The defining features of the 1926 General Strike were its good humour and the ways in which all involved used a variety of comic forms of speech and behaviour to frame the event and express particular visions of the national community. Even leftist papers such as the British Worker, Daily Herald, and Scottish Worker joined in the joke-making, though theirs more explicitly disparaged volunteer efforts. The topics of humour included class and political differences as well as contemporary political and economic issues. The sheer amount of satirical comment directed at this topic gives some hint as to just how disturbing such a possibility actually was in the mid-1920s. It also pointed to the very real anxiety that middle and upper-class young women had about finding husbands at a time of increased competition for those men who had survived the Great War.

Having heard the suspicions of Harry Pace's family, the inquest turned to four other categories of evidence: testimony from three of the Pace children (Dorothy, Doris, and Leslie), the police, family friends and acquaintances, and medical experts. One of these categories of evidence related to medical views on Harry's illness and forensic analysis gleaned after his death. Much of the testimony of the doctors who treated Harry served as the basis for the description of his illness. Sir William Willcox, a pioneer in forensic analysis, agreed with the post-mortem diagnosis of acute arsenical poisoning and found the timing of doses offered by Walker Hall largely correct. Finally, the court would hear from the woman at the centre of the matter: the 'tragic widow' herself. The inquest jury would have much to consider, and when it finally reached its decision, the result would be both dramatic and controversial.

Food shortage was a familiar and recurrent feature of Highland life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as grain cultivation was always problematic in a region of poor natural endowment and uncertain climate. The famine induced movement from all over the Highland region, but it is important to recognise that its effects varied significantly between different areas and social groups. Potato dependency was one hallmark of the intrinsic poverty of the Highlands and, however extensive the blight, famine would not have occurred if the population had possessed the economic resources to acquire substitute food supplies from elsewhere. The potato famine can be seen as an epochal development in Highland emigration history as, though often enduring an existence of grinding poverty, the small crofter and cottar class only emigrated with great reluctance.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes photography's interrelation with three instances of political struggle, namely the uprising of May 1968, the indigenous Zapatista movement in Mexico and the anti-capitalist protests in Genoa in 2001. It examines the problematic of documenting social protest through photography taking into account diverse photographic practices, including photojournalism, amateur and professional photography. The book also examines the official representations of the movements in the mainstream press, drawing upon examples from British, French and Italian newspapers. It explains the function of photography within the movements' networks of communication, namely the movements' newspapers, leaflets, newsletters, banners and websites. The book studies how photographs of social protest find their way into the mainstream media and investigates the mechanisms used by the mass media in order to produce newsworthy stories attractive to a wide audience.

Memory has been recognized since ancient times as a basic element of artistic creativity. The chapter argues that forgetting, or the suppression or subversion of memory, is an equally essential creative principle. Forgetting is crucial within the play's action, too: it is a radical act of forgetting that precipitates William Shakespeare's catastrophe. The chapter explores the case of King Lear, and begins with a famous emendation, which is particularly germane, because it depends on a case of memorial reconstruction. Shakespeare sets up a powerful tragic momentum reminiscent of Lear in the opening three acts, only to disarm it at the conclusion with fantasy and magic. In every version of the Lear story, both in the chronicles of early British history and in the The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his Three Daughters, Cordelia's forces are victorious, and Lear's throne is restored to him.

As a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, Vera Brittain was well aware of the symptoms of shell shock. This chapter argues that Brittain's failure to identify her own breakdown as such is indicative of her belief that shell shock was an exclusively masculine condition that served to hinder the feminist cause. Brittain struggled with the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder until 1925, and only began work on Testament of Youth in 1926. In Testament of Youth, Brittain notes that although she put on civilian clothes and looked to her parents very much like the attractive young woman known throughout Somerville for her fashionable attire, she felt alienated. Brittain's Testament of Youth clearly shows her also to have been disillusioned, angry and very bitter on her return to Oxford after the war.

This establishes the central and related structural factors that shaped the character of the 1984-5 strike in Scotland: pit closures in the 1950s and 1960s; social changes in mining communities; shifts in trade union politics, with the re-emergence of militancy in the 1960s, and embodied in the leadership of Michael McGahey, Scottish Area President of the National Union of Mineworkers from 1967 onwards; and the character and meaning of the moral economy of the Scottish coalfields. The complex, highly contingent and fluid nature of coalfield communities is emphasised, and related to the process of industrial restructuring. The Thatcherite political economy of coal, and its transgression of the moral economy, is analysed.