Cultural occupations have long-standing problems associated with a lack of social mobility. This chapter explains how those problems are experienced by cultural workers. In doing so it shows some of the mechanisms by which exclusions operate.The chapter introduces academic critiques of the idea of social mobility, linking them to the way particular individuals and communities are given value in cultural occupations. The chapter outlines the idea of embodied cultural resources, or capitals, along with the ‘norm’ of the White, middle-class male, in cultural occupations. This somatic norm helps to explain the negative experiences of cultural workers who are not White, middle-class origin men. The chapter highlights the experiences of socially mobile women of colour, a group who are most likely to face marginalisation and discrimination. In doing so the chapter shows the powerful underlying mechanisms preventing change in cultural occupations.

The period between the early 1950s and mid-1960s was one of meaningful transition and significant change in the development of post-war youth cultures. Across Britain, young people carved out spaces for themselves in coffee bars and beat clubs, talking with friends and dancing. This chapter argues that the growth of commercial youth spaces reflected a new era of leisure provision, one that prioritised access to leisure as a sign of the modern city.

This chapter contextualises the Persian Gulf as a regional system, drawing upon seminal literature from scholars specialising in regional systems and the Middle East. It provides a critical review of this literature to frame the book’s analysis and argue for the analytical value of the concept of regions to explore patterns of intrastate relations, international politics, and security concerns. It depicts the Persian Gulf as a subsystem that emerged following the British departure and defines for it four key characteristics: the interface between Islam and politics, the role of oil in consolidating regimes, militarisation, and the long-standing influence of the United States. Its main outtake is that the Persian Gulf is and has always been multipolar, in the sense that no country managed to accumulate capabilities to become a hegemon. However, it always offered challengers or candidates for regional dominance, which has changed over time. Hence, it highlights five events that have shaped the balance of power: the British withdrawal, the Iranian Revolution, the Gulf War, the 2003 Iraq invasion, and the conflict against ISIS. These events serve as defining moments for subsequent chapters, shaping the trajectory of regional dynamics. Additionally, it reviews the literature on the three dyads that comprise the triangle, namely US–Iran, US–Saudi Arabia, and Iran–Saudi Arabia. It concludes underscoring the importance of ideational, cognitive, and leadership factors as crucial explanatory elements, setting the stage for the operationalisation of these elements as intervening variables in subsequent chapters.

The powerful hegemonic perspective, constructed and encoded through the Hollywood musical and its promotion of mainstream popular music, was increasingly under challenge during the 1950s. This chapter examines Hollywood's response to the challenge of rock'n'roll and the development of a youth market in the 1950s. Hollywood's supremacy as the entertainment medium was under threat from both record sales and the burgeoning television industry; the impact of a differentiated market and the challenge to conventional 'adult' values represented a crisis in sociocultural attitudes which Hollywood found hard to deal with. After consideration of both the film and the music industries at this period, detailed analysis of a number of films, including the early films of Elvis Presley, suggests that the screen industries successfully incorporated the challenges of the new music, arguing that Presley's films perpetuate ideological and aesthetic concerns established in the classical Hollywood musical.

While material discussions of John Derricke’s Image of Irelande (1581) often focus on the woodcarvings and print history, this study focuses on the textual content and presentation, particularly the glosses, dedication, and multiple letters to the reader, in order to locate Derricke’s text in sixteenth-century poetic discussions of representation, interpretation, and reception. In the dedication to Sir Phillip Sidney, Derricke reveals his anxiety over these issues – an anxiety further illustrated in the abundance of glosses that clutter the text. The content of the glosses appear to offer a key to the text, yet fail to explicate the text or help a reader decipher the poem, often raising more questions than they answer. By examining the interplay between the glosses and their corresponding lines, this chapter argues that as the text progresses, the glosses become a free-standing work of sorts and a place where Derricke’s poetic concerns and anxieties can be traced.

This chapter examines the different ways in which the European Union seized the initiative from the European nation-state, from the formation of the Coal and Steel Community to the Maastricht Treaty. Robert Schuman, the French Foreign Minister, unveiled a plan to modernise coal and steel production and form an economic 'community' to that effect, one which embraced Germany. The key departure was that, under Maastricht, every member state, except Britain and Denmark, in principle relinquished its long-term right to make its own monetary policy. It was agreed to create a European Central Bank to take the lead in managing a new single currency that would replace national currencies. The European Parliament was unable to call it to account after 2009 when it flouted the Maastricht Treaty by organising successive bail-outs of insolvent bank.

Chapter 3 examines the various children’s homes that the children were sent to. A number of private homes were set up specifically to house ‘brown babies’, but for various reasons these did not last long. The African Churches Mission in Liverpool took in as many as it could, but it was closed for health and political reasons. One Somerset nursery, Holnicote House, attempted to find adopters for the children, including sending them to the US, but this was largely unsuccessful. Children were also sent to other local authority homes as well as to Dr Barnardo’s and the Waifs and Strays/Church of England Children’s Society homes. The very mixed experiences of those who were put in such homes is presented, from great kindness at the Somerset nursery through to sadistic beatings at a Church of England Children’s Society home.