Charles d'Albert, duc de Luynes was a model courtier, suave, elegant, and full of bonhomie with a sleek, sophisticated façade that hid a darker, more complicated reality. Luynes had a near monopoly on the distribution of royal patronage, but he found that using it to secure the cooperation of the court nobility was a double-edged sword making him as many enemies as friends. Luynes gave Louis XIII the chance to rule alone by removing the Queen Mother's favorite Concini and ending her political dominance, and by thwarting her attempt to reestablish herself in power two years later. Historians have insufficiently appreciated Luynes's contributions to the early years of Louis XIII's government. Both marquis de Fontenay-Mareuil and François de Bassompierre believed that by the time of his death, Luynes was out of favor because the king showed no grief in public.

Four: I turn from the cormorant itself to the bird’s natural product, guano, a resource that in the nineteenth century brought the Pacific into the global economy, profoundly affected the environment worldwide and enriched Europeans through the de facto slavery of thousands of Chinese indentured labourers on the Peruvian guano islands. Beginning with the filthy riches made from the guano trade by the UK-based Gibbs family, I outline the chemistry of guano, the European capitalisation of guano, and the conditions of labour of the guano workers. I then turn to the James Bond novel Dr No, locating Ian Fleming’s interest in guano and his transposition of the guano trade from Peru to the Caribbean in his banking family’s close connection with the Gibbses. I conclude with a discussion of the origins in the history of guano of the idea of dirt as ‘matter out of place’.

This chapter discusses a number of interviewees by way of a 'portrait'. It focuses on those interviewees who can be described as engaging in a process of subjectivity. The chapter also focuses on those interviewees whose experiences are characterised by a more fragmented or precarious subjectivity and considers those interviewees who demonstrate very little subjectivity at all. It argues that Myriam's subjectivity is expressed according to the first two axes of subjectivation (circulation around the three 'poles' of identity and bricolage identitaire). Discrimination is a recurrent theme during the interview with Mahmoud and when asked about the political claims he would make, racism is central in the formulation of his demands. Nabila's 'thwarted' subjectivity is expressed mostly in terms of an unquestioning reproduction of certain roles or models of behaviour. This becomes apparent through her interactions with peers who are also of North African origin.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the themes of gender, ethnicity and class. It shows how the Catholic Church developed into a multifaceted institution on a national scale that worked to secure and safeguard a civil society and a national identity that was distinctively Scottish. The book considers the state of Catholicism up to 1834 and begins with a brief sketch of Scottish Catholicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to reveal just how disorganised and divided the church actually was. It examines how the church reacted to liberalism, legislative reform, the rise of evangelicalism and the continued growth of Irish migration between the late 1820s and the late 1850s. The book examines the development of Catholic education in Scotland and prioritises the role played by women religious in this process.

In York, many medical practitioners involved themselves in the provincial scientific movement, witnessed by the growth of literary and philosophical societies, provincial museums and mechanics' institutes. It begins by exploring the extent and significance of medical involvement in one of the city's most important cultural institutions, the Yorkshire Philosophical Society (YPS). In practice, the cultural and political profile of the YPS can be located somewhere between the alternative visions of science as socially progressive or as a polite, literary activity. The example of French medicine exerted a particularly forceful influence over debates about body-snatching and anatomical dissection in Britain. The disappearance of medicine from the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) was not so much an indication of the marginality of medical knowledge as it was the final marker in a process of intellectual disaggregation.

Britain's military intervention in Iraq from 2003 was one of the most controversial foreign policy decisions since the Suez crisis in 1956. It prompted heated exchanges between politicians at Westminster, resignations from Cabinet Ministers in Whitehall, and mass anti-war demonstrations in London and in other cities around the United Kingdom. Yet, New Labour remained undeterred in its decision to commit British troops to the United States-led ‘liberation’ of Iraq. What does Britain's second war with Iraq tell us about its small wars strategy? Despite the dedication and professionalism of the armed forces in implementing government policy, the politicians failed the soldiers. Chronically under-strength and short of the necessary equipment, the Army bore the brunt of a protracted insurgency. In this respect, an unfortunate parallel could be drawn with British involvement in Aden, where, as the sole authority responsible for the colony, withdrawal took place against the backdrop of an immediate humiliation by insurgents and the long-drawn-out diminution in British power. 40 years later, Labour ministers again presided over what amounted to Britain's strategic malaise.

Pelli and Beccaria in the 1760s produced the first comprehensive critiques of the death penalty. They did not come from nowhere. For centuries, philosophers, jurists, and religious leaders produced ideas and arguments that would feed into the abolitionist cause, in a way unpredicted by their authors, none of whom were abolitionists. The starting point (ironically, as it became the standard-bearer of retributivism) was the Lex Talionis of the Code of Hammurabi, which aimed at controlling private vengeance, while advancing the principle of crime–punishment proportionality. Plato introduced the idea that punishment must be forward- rather than backward-looking, and dismissed the latter as vengeance. Jesus’s words and actions problematized the practice of capital punishment. Thomas More was the first to argue against the death penalty for a specific crime, namely, theft, while natural jurists such as Pufendorf ruled out Grotius’s assertion that capital punishment was permissible according to the law of nature. Beccaria combined social contract theory and proto-utilitarian considerations, the latter coming into play through the agency of Enlightenment philosophers, English, Scottish, and French. The advance of abolitionism was and is far from inevitable, as illustrated by the obstacles faced in England (for a time) and North America (perhaps lasting).

On 26 September, François de Bassompierre was summoned by the king to siege headquarters at Piquecos, a red-brick château on a hill overlooking a valley north of Montauban. The 1621 campaign against the Huguenots lasted from 5 April, when the king and Charles d'Albert, duc de Luynes left Paris for Fontainebleau, until 15 December when Luynes died. Louis XIII's desire to go on campaign in the southwest motivated his handling of the Valteline affair. During March and April 1621, Bassompierre successfully negotiated the Treaty of Madrid, which stipulated that the Spanish would withdraw their troops from the Valteline, turn over control of the valley to the Grisons, and declare a general amnesty. The king and Luynes used military intimidation to increase the likelihood of Bassompierre's success in negotiating a treaty.

Narratives that establish the self as a being that is part of a natural order structured by biological and ecological rhythms sever allegiance to the mainstream economic order and substitute its value set with another. The move away from the 'natural state of things' is a consequence of industrialisation, mechanisation, automation and, lately, computer technology. This shift has been marked also by gravitation from the rural to the urban, and from the agricultural to the corporate. The interest in horticulture and cookery, enacted in both informal (dispersed) and formal (rooted) communities of likeminded individuals, is precisely the effort to deal with the identity problems of postmodern life in the secular context. The Slow Food movement, founded in 1989 as part of a wider slow living ethos counteracting not only fast food, but fast life also promotes food's central role in a new narrative.