For contrast and completeness, the scale and timing of inward defections to the Liberal/Liberal Democrats between 1910 and 2010 can be compared to the loss of outward defectors. Compared to the Liberals with their on-going problems, the Labour Party recovered relatively quickly from its 1931 debacle and its reduction to only fifty-two seats in the election that year. The boldest of the Labour dissenters was Dick Taverne. His path out of the Labour Party blazed a trail which was to be followed, first by Christopher Mayhew and then by the breakaway Social Democratic Party (SDP). The inward defectors from Labour and the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats all brought either a direct local electoral advantage or donations of much needed money. They also brought an indirect electoral advantage at a national level.

Chapter 5 moves from the global to the local level and explores how the global constructions of reconciliation are brought to a local post-conflict situation and how they perform there. Focusing on the example of Sierra Leone, the chapter shows how the activities of global reconciliation agents were crucial for shaping the local reconciliation process according to the global standards, despite some local resistance. Once the global constructions shaped the local understanding of reconciliation, the reconciliation discourse performed by producing a particular ‘reconciliation reality’ in the country. The reconciliation discourse constructed Sierra Leone’s post-war society as the ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ of past human rights violations, which are in need of reconciliation and healing. This re-interpretation must not be understood as a neutral or innocent process, however. Rather, the reconciliation discourse thereby overwrote and neutralized the polarized identities that had emerged from the narrative on the civil war, such as ‘rebel’, ‘soldier’, or ‘civilian collaborator’, and it also overwrote the political demands raised by these identities.

This chapter outlines the Western Front's environmental history to show how the First World War was fought in, through, and against nature. If sterility implies the absence of life and infertility, it seemed that the war had sterilized vast swathes of northern and eastern France. The mobilization of terrain and topography had begun before the establishment of trench warfare during the initial war of movement. The military mobilization of animals during the war was, at times, symbolic. As well as featuring on propaganda posters, animal imagery appeared on actual war machines. Bases and training grounds served a variety of purposes during the war. Among them were training troops in trench warfare, testing weapons, and providing places of repose for soldiers recovering from life in the trenches. The mobilization of nature for military training and weapons testing militarized sites beyond northern and eastern France.

Comus exists in two quite different early states: the performing text that John Milton initially provided his employers with, and the revised and greatly elaborated version that he subsequently prepared for publication. Most discussions of Comus focus on its political or religious implications, and its status as a precursor to Milton's ethical and revolutionary thinking in his prose pamphlets and major poems. Leah Marcus has made a persuasive case for explicitly anti-Laudian elements in the masque, though these may have more to do with Milton's interests at the time than with the Earl's. William Shakespeare's version of Milton's masque is Venus and Adonis. Adonis denounces Venus as the Lady denounces Comus, as the embodiment not of love but of "sweating lust," and Venus is certainly represented as gross and unattractive.

By the mid-nineteenth century, trading networks between London and Freetown, Sierra Leone, were well-established. White and black businessmen and women were beginning to profit from the shift from the slave trade to “legitimate” commerce. Sierra Leone’s emerging, property-owning middle class lived in comfortable two-story stone houses. These homes were decorated with articles of material comfort and markers, in the imperial cultural complex, of accumulating wealth: mahogany chairs, tables, sofas, and four-post bedsteads, pier glasses, and floor cloths. Sierra Leoneans consumed the products of Empire, dressing as British subjects, building houses with British brick, and buying British luxury goods. But how did different groups of Sierra Leoneans adopt and adapt British material culture? Did trading connections foster a sense of British identity, or were these products used in particularly “West African” ways? How did the growth of the project of “legitimate trade” contribute to a sense of the British imperial project amongst Sierra Leoneans? This chapter will explore the ways that material culture and commodities shaped the lives of settlers in this colony and their interactions with both the metropole and the rest of West Africa.

This chapter sets the scene: it opens by tracing the puzzling illness that afflicted Harry Pace from the summer of 1927 to his agonising death in January 1928. It discusses an aspect of the story not only helps to introduce Beatrice Annie Pace and Harry but also gives initial insight into how the press presented their lives and marriage. Journalist Bernard O'Donnell's handling of the case clearly applied his principle that 'tactful sympathy and practical help will unlock the door to an inside story more surely than any amount of uncouth bluster'. He certainly seems to have been the journalist who was most successful in developing a rapport with Beatrice and her children. All the post-trial life stories used the couple's courtship to shape particular narrative arcs, with Beatrice's depiction as a rural ingénue adding to her life's drama, tragedy and pathos.

This chapter alludes to William Lambarde's well-known account of his interview with Queen Elizabeth in August, 1601, seven months after the Essex rebellion and Essex's execution for treason. Lambarde was the royal archivist, and had brought Elizabeth a summary of the historical documents stored in the Tower of London. The chapter focuses on Elizabeth's portrait of Richard II. In comparison with the individualized and assertive Holbein and Hornebolte portraits of her father, or the domesticated portraits of her sister by Antonio Mor, the painting is strikingly iconic. It employs a pictorial formula used occasionally on royal documents, but it is most strikingly similar to the Westminster portrait of Richard II. The painting iconographically abolishes a century and a half of both English history and royal iconography, and returns us to the last moment when the legitimacy of the monarchy was not a problem.

In the early to mid-eighteenth century, the majority of Irish Protestants would have given lip service to the benefits of converting the native Irish Catholic population to the Protestant religion. Early modern Irish Protestants took one of two approaches to the problem of conversion. The first mooted that Catholics would convert in large numbers if their religion was suppressed by penal legislation. When Francis Hutchinson reached Ireland in 1721, Catholics were able to practise their religion, primarily because those Penal Laws that related to religious worship were enforced at times of acute political crisis, in particular during Jacobite invasion or rebellion scares. The second approach to conversion adopted by Irish Protestants was the use of the Irish language to evangelise the native population. The political pacification of the native population may have been foremost in Hutchinson's mind when advocating conversion, but he also noted its economic benefits.

Chapter 2 gives an introduction to the rapidly changing patterns of family life that prompted the emergence of new ideas and perspectives in family studies at the turn of the millennium. It includes a detailed overview of the demographic evidence on contemporary families in Ireland, placing them in comparative perspective, and introduces the major new data sources and studies that have recently become available. The authors emphasize the importance of longitudinal perspectives for understanding family change in ageing societies. The chapter provides a state-of-the-art summary of recent developments in the theory and scholarship on family life, including the second demographic transition, postmodernism, individualisation and globalisation, and the new scholarship on family practices, meanings and displays that informs the main body of the book.

Prior to the First World War, while most wounded soldiers were cared for by male orderlies, paid female nurses were sometimes attached to military services and army wives did their share of nursing. This chapter explores the origins of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) and historicizes their founding in the social and cultural forces of the day. Given the ideals associated with Edwardian womanhood, it made sense that girls might want to escape the constraints of the normative femininity. Feminine virtues were broadened from the nurturance and management of the family, household and local community to society at large and the traits associated with femininity were translated into a call for public service. After the reorganization in 1910 and the consolidation of the Corps, the weekend and more extended summer camps became increasingly important as training sites and recruitment endeavours.