This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book describes the democratic stalemate in European politics through an examination of European integration as a general transformation of practices, norms and identities. It also describes France's European policy as an executive political strategy that attempts to influence the shaping of European institutions and common European interests. The book explains the integration of French politicians and civil servants into European institutions, the European Parliament and the European Commission. It examines the constitutional reforms of 2000 in the only two semi-presidential political systems in the European Union, France and Finland. The book analyses the European Parliament elections of 1999 in Finland and France. It demonstrates that European Parliament elections have also provided French intellectuals with an opportunity to reaffirm their role in public debate.

James Kenward's 1937 novel The Manewood Line described local people resuscitating an abandoned branch line. In Britain, modern steam railways' birth generated huge and novel demands. Building and running these gigantic enterprises required vast capital resources. Though by 1960 the British railway preservation movement could flaunt only four lines: the Talyllyn, the Festiniog, the Middleton and the Bluebell. On the brutal bottom line all preserved railways are businesses. Running a small business efficiently means getting embroiled in the labour process. Located in prime holiday spots, the reborn Talyllyn and Festiniog railways could coin money from train services in a short summer season. The Middleton's antithesis, Bluebell trains trundled deeply rural rather than industrial territory, running through soft southern England rather than the flint-hard West Riding.

This book examines the historical formation of ideas about sexuality in modern Irish culture. It analyses the history of sexuality in Ireland and the Catholic Church's regulation of Irish sexuality from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century. It focuses on the study of a literary genre, the Bildungsroman and its significance in twentieth-century Irish writing.

This chapter examines the expanding corpus of experimental science at different levels. It begins by exploring the burgeoning consumer market for pre-packaged Newtonian science in Birmingham. Erasmus Darwin had anticipated the first excursion of the West Midlands savants into the field of ballooning, by using a launch to celebrate the founding of the Derby Philosophical Society. International savants were all in favour of knowledge dissemination, but apparently only after priority rights had been fairly attributed. Some sense of the role of Birmingham and its district in the distribution network for natural knowledge and experimental data emerges from our attempt to analyse the activities of the Lunar Society. But the real hub of international exchange, as it impinged upon the West Midlands in the second half of the eighteenth century, was the Soho Manufactory.

This chapter examines the relationship between French political traditions and the construction of a European security structure. In France's Grand Strategy for Europe, French hegemony in the European Union was to be achieved by maintaining a dominant position in the French-German duo and by modelling European institutions on French administrative structures and their culture. France's quitting North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 1966 was designed to reinforce the impression that it was the only alternative to American security dominance. The more Europe has become integrated, the more France's goal of constructing Europe in its image has become unrealistic. In general terms, President Jacques Chirac's vision of France and Europe has been very much in line with Charles de Gaulle's intergovernmentalist vision of the 1950s and 1960s. In the sector on justice and internal affairs, the French presidency would work on putting together a European policy of asylum and immigration.

Chapter 4 shows how The Four Zoas, as an unfinished manuscript, formally registers Blake’s troubled fascination with evolutionary models of the mind. The first section of the chapter compares the images of fluidity associated with Tharmas, who continually emerges from and dissolves into the waves of the unconscious, against Erasmus Darwin’s poetic descriptions of liquid ontogeny. The next section examines how the sexual drive appears in the text as a disruptive fluid force, illustrating and criticising the materialist argument (found in Mandeville and Malthus) that love and altruism are merely the evolutionary products of libidinal self-interest. The final section returns to the textuality of The Four Zoas and shows how the nervous mind and the sinuous text work together to give unreliable body to thought. Comparing Blake’s poetics to that of Erasmus Darwin and Edward Young, the chapter discusses the mimetic qualities of Blake’s revisionary verse and ends with an analysis of the poem’s fantasies of symbolic liberation through physical destruction.

Chapter 2 discusses the soteriological nuances of Blake’s preformationist imagery. From the seed in the husk to the larva in the chrysalis, preformationist science offered Blake potent images with which to present the idea that the soul might persist beyond the death of the body. This chapter examines these symbols as they appear across Blake’s corpus, from early illuminated books such as The Book of Thel (1789) and Vision of the Daughters of Albion (1793) to later works such as The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. The chapter also shows how the ecological aspect of this paradigm further provided Blake with the vocabulary to articulate how life after death is ultimately a communal affair. The final section of the chapter, reading Blake through Alfred Gell, explores how attending to the preformationist language of exuviae and shells can shed new light on how to approach the exuvial materiality of the Blakean book.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses on two groups of migrants, the Irish and the Scots, concentrating upon the important period 1921 to 1965, an era illuminated in rich detail by the types of sources utilised, particularly interviews. Scots were particularly voluble in the regard, with their confident narratives highlighting a striking demonstration of symbolic ethnicity, compared with the Irish. The book tries to engage with migration streams across the diversity of the Anglophone world, drawing upon the experiences of both Scottish and Irish migrants who went to the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. The book utilises a variety of personal testimonies including private correspondence, interviews, questionnaires, and shipboard journals, together with more traditional documentary sources such as immigration files and maritime records.

This chapter introduces the central theme of a dual crisis threatening humanity: a planetary crisis driven by environmental degradation and climate change, and a societal crisis rooted in extreme wealth concentration. The author recounts the foundational work on “planetary boundaries,” highlighting climate change and biodiversity loss as the two most critical threats. Despite the overwhelming complexity of global issues, the text argues that solutions are already known—ending fossil-fuel extraction and shifting to plant-based diets. However, implementation remains elusive due to political, economic, and societal inertia. The narrative explores humanity’s climate “niche,” showing how most people live in a narrow temperature range and how global warming threatens to push billions outside that comfort zone. Parallel to the environmental crisis, the chapter delves into the implications of wealth inequality, illustrating how economic power undermines democratic institutions and perpetuates the very systems harming the planet. The author stresses that inequality arises not from merit but from structural mechanisms, both in society and in nature.

This chapter explores the impact of board nationalisation both on poor law administration and on the relationship between central and local administrators. It then assesses the extent to which elected guardians attempted to use their powers to advance nationalist campaigns. Poor law boards ceased to operate as a branch of landlord-dominated local government and became tenant-controlled assemblies committed to the achievement of Irish self-rule. Having studied the poor law elections of 1839-1842 throughout the country, Gerard O'Brien concluded that, 'politics generally eclipsed the pure selection of men who sympathised with the plight of the poor. Local activists, as William L. Feingold noted, identified two main enemies: the Local Government Board as the representative of government, and the ex-officio guardians as the representatives of landlordism. Prior to 1883, boards were free to discuss political topics and pass political resolutions at any stage of their proceedings.

This chapter focuses on the 'ideological' or 'normative' debate, which is essentially centred on the question of cultural difference in democratic societies. 'Anglo-Saxon-style multiculturalism' has been caricatured by the républicaniste camp, which has argued that the recognition of cultural difference would lead to the increasing fragmentation or 'ghettoisation' of French society. The chapter discusses the contours of the academic debates which are concerned with collective mobilisation among immigrant populations and their descendants. It presents the main parameters of research on young people of 'immigrant origin'. A critical evaluation of intellectual discourse on immigration can point towards alternative perspectives for intellectual engagement with the topics of immigration, integration and citizenship in culturally diverse societies. The intellectual debate tends to concentrate on individuals aged between twelve and twenty-five and themes such as the banlieue, the family, juvenile delinquency/urban violence, unemployment and discrimination are central.

This chapter describes the role played by literature in human subjectivity and identity under the working conditions of late-capitalism as these affect the well-being of specialist, middle-class and public sector professionals. While stress is recognised as increasing in the workplace, its cause is commonly attributed to job insecurity linked to recessional conditions. Two of the many critics who have looked at the psychological effects of the instabilities of the new economy are Richard Layard and Madeleine Bunting. They have commented on the relationship of professional status for motivation and well-being in the context of public reform. Ian McEwan's novel Saturday is a mainstream creative text that includes a reflection of contemporary cultural issues concerning the experience of the professional at work. By analysing various forms of literature, the attempt has been made to understand how other types of labour counter the experiential difficulties caused by modern work conditions.

The chapter demonstrates that investment competition was paradoxically the most important precondition for the emergence of cross-border trade union cooperation initiatives at Ford and General Motors. There were many attempts for cooperation already in the 1960s and 1970s, but it was only during the 1990s that risk perceptions flowing from investment competition became stronger and increasingly shared across borders, in turn translating into more determined cooperation efforts. However, the interest-driven nature of these initiatives also limited their scope.

In the decade after 1971, new social and political conceptualisations of lesbianism proliferated. Following the demise of Arena Three, a group of women, including Angela Chilton and Jackie Forster, established a new lesbian organisation and magazine, Sappho. The Hall Carpenter Oral History Archive, which represents the largest single archive of lesbian and gay personal narratives in the UK, exemplifies the connections between lesbian politics and history. Its history, and that of the larger archive of which it forms a part, is intimately connected with the development of lesbian and gay historical research in Britain and the place of oral history within it. The ambiguities in concepts such as 'tomboy' and 'bachelor girl', which enabled them to be deployed as indicators of sexual dissidence, also afforded a protection from the explicit naming of a deviant sexual identity.