The Introduction begins with a quote about the nature of decipherment by Alice E. Kober, a brilliant American Classicist whose work was instrumental in the decipherment of Linear B. This is followed by a section discussing proper and improper methods of deciphering undeciphered scripts, including the combinatorial or contextual method (a proper method), and the etymological method (an improper method). As an illustration of a sound and proper method of addressing the decipherment of the undeciphered Aegean scripts, Yves Duhoux’s eleven-step methodology for deciphering Linear A is discussed in detail, with reference to the ways in which the subsequent chapters follow that methodology with regard to each of the undeciphered Aegean scripts. The Introduction ends with a warning to the reader not to take the hypotheses in the book as more than hypotheses, followed by a brief presentation of the chronology used in the book.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book traces a range of gender and sexual identity models current in Britain in the post-war period, and explores the opportunities offered by specific discourses and spaces for individual women to perform distinct gendered and sexual identities. It explores attitudes toward the development of sexual identities and childhood sexuality in the post-war period, through an examination of educational and medico-scientific notions of lesbianism. The book traces the opportunities for articulating a lesbian identity in adulthood. It suggests that, in the 1950s and 60s, a specifically lesbian subculture began to emerge in the residential districts of West London. The lesbians had mixed with male homosexuals, prostitutes and other marginal figures in the growing bar and nightclub scene from the 1920s onward.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book proposes a lens through which we can view and understand certain instances of contemporary performance which are addressing trauma. The idea that performance might help us to identify where we are as a society is precisely the challenge that Raymond Williams asks us to tackle in identifying a contemporary structure of feeling in the contemporary moment rather than retrospectively. In Modern Tragedy Williams' proposition is that tragic action, in its deepest sense, is not the confirmation of disorder, but its experience, its comprehension and its resolution. While the trauma-tragic mode is undoubtedly symptomatic of the dominant structure of feeling, the book offers an emergent tool with which to approach the task of addressing trauma in or via performance in the early twenty-first century.

The deaf community could not have come into existence without places where socially isolated deaf people could gather and develop relationships based on common experiences and characteristics. Deaf clubs provided the hub of deaf community life and emerged from a number of local voluntary organisations set up to assist deaf people in their daily lives. In this chapter, the development of the deaf welfare organisations during the nineteenth century is outlined and set within the wider context of welfare provision during the Victorian era. An argument is made that the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act was a major influence on the formation of deaf societies and independent welfare organisations. Deaf clubs developed as the social arms of these welfare societies and went on to play an integral part in bonding deaf people together as a community. Without the deaf clubs, the deaf community would have had no geographical focus and deaf people would have had nowhere to come together to socialise and enjoy a range of leisure and sporting activities.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the professional roles, identities, activities and experiences of women police in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) from a historical perspective, using a range of oral testimonies, documentary and visual sources. It argues that women police negotiated their own distinct occupational identity in relation to masculine police cultures, other professional groups, and the women and young people whom they encountered on a daily basis. The book examines the ways in which policewomen's identities and work roles at the interface of policing and welfare were constituted through the cultural and structural formation of a 'feminine' professionalism. It also examines women's operations within the technologies of physical surveillance, dealing with both uniform beat patrol and undercover observations.

Deaf clubs would have remained to some extent isolated, self-contained communities without some means of maintaining contact and sharing information with each other. The main form for this communication was provided by a series of publications aimed at deaf people, the most important being British Deaf News (BDN). These newspapers and magazines allowed deaf people to keep abreast of events outside their own club and helped to maintain contact across the British deaf community, with large sections of each issue devoted to the social activities of the various deaf clubs and their members from across the United Kingdom. Because of this, BDN provides a wealth of information on the social and leisure activities of deaf people. This chapter outlines the history of deaf newspapers, emphasising their importance as historical documents and defining the unique insight they provide into the lived experience of being a deaf sign language user in post-war Britain.

This chapter outlines the Revolution's wider trajectory as a process of political and social change over fifty years, suggesting how people might view the cultural trajectory within that. The whole social revolution was fundamental to support for the Revolution, thus the 1990s' crisis threatened that support, obliging the authorities to maintain at cost the levels of provision. The chapter also identifies the general patterns of the evolution of culture within the Revolution.

The traditional date of Charles d'Albert, duc de Luynes's birth is 5 August 1578, and most historians agree he was born sometime during that year. Some sources give his birthplace as Mornas in the Comtat Venaissin, making him Comtadin by birth and a papal subject. Other sources give Pont-Saint-Esprit as his birthplace, making him Languedocian and French by birth. Honoré d'Albert de Luynes had challenged an officer in the Scots royal guards for making insulting remarks about his role as a conspirator and then killed him. This thereby earned him the court's respect for his courage and prowess, except the king's favor or trust. Contemporaries joked that a hare could quickly jump across the Albert family lands, an exaggeration, but Honoré's difficulties in paying the Pont-Saint- Esprit garrison indicate that he was not a wealthy man.

In the nineteenth-century, millennial hopes have arrived for neither combatant in British preserved railways' most notorious struggle. A light railway order permitted the company to build a three-quarter-mile track along an abandoned standard-gauge formation from their new station to meet the Croesor Tramway's historic trackbed at Pen-y-Mount. This chapter shows that in 1990 Welsh Highland Railway passenger traffic presented no threat to Festiniog Railway prosperity; but it also shows that by then the Festiniog's best traffic years lay well in the past. The Welsh Highland Light Railway's brief and inglorious interwar existence might be expected to inspire no enthusiast to propose the doomed line's revival; but new times bring new opportunities. Though the old 1922 Company's attempt to commodify scenery crashed spectacularly, postwar success in packaging Welsh narrow-gauge steam for a booming tourist market suggested a second turn round this whirligig.

This chapter looks at how Jean Genet's 1958 play The Blacks opened the hidden wounds of the period, namely those related to insecurities about France's 'racial identity' on the eve of decolonisation. In The Blacks, the object of détournement is limited, since it is focused on reversing the tropes and clichés of 'black theatre', which were rooted, at the time, in popular entertainment forms such as clown shows, music-hall routines and circus acts. The post-Lacanian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva's words highlight the extent to which objects of filth in abjection are metaphorical. Like The Mousetrap in Hamlet, the play-within-the play of The Blacks is designed to make the French spectators feel guilty, to remind them of their whiteness. The new configurations of identity are dependent upon the disclosure of a wrong that invited French subjects to disidentify with the French nation-State and to hear the call of the immigrant Other.