This first chapter introduces the issues of Humanitarianism and conflict in Afghanistan. Five commonly held assumptions are presented and Afghanistan and its wider relevance are discussed. As a foundation, a number of key concepts are outlined and the book’s structure is presented.

The Beer family made stained glass from the earliest days of the Victorian Gothic Revival and did not cease until the last years of the nineteenth century. This chapter concentrates on the extant corpus of glass produced by Robert and Alfred Beer and the network of patrons that they served. Running a glass-painting business in a city like Exeter gave the Beers several potential advantages over a glass-painter like John Toms, who worked from a small market town. Toms's relationship with the Exeter Diocesan Architectural Society (EDAS) was probably distant at best; he did not enjoy the connections with architects and ecclesiologists that the Beers profited from. Many of Robert's early windows bear a strong resemblance to John Loveband Fulford's tracings of medieval glass. In 1850, when Alfred started doing the bulk of the figure work for the Beer studio, he was only twenty years old.

The recreation of the Australian film industry in the 1970s and its subsequent survival on economic and aesthetic terms have been inseparable from debate over sources of finance. The reception and encouragement of the period film cycle has been taken as evidence of a regimentation of treatment in the service of a primary political objective. This is to define and broadcast an expedient, respectable and marketable form of Australian identity at a crucial moment in the development of national consciousness. The groups of films addressed in this book have been categorised by critics or have aligned themselves with generic patterns, in response to their maker's intentions and their audience's expectations. Stereotypical representations of Australian masculinity are found in The Overlanders, They're A Weird Mob and Crocodile Dundee. These representations strive to designate the white, classless, individualistic male as the archetypal Australian, defined strictly by or in relation to outsiders.

The author argues that the readers should not understand the Gothic as a set of prose conventions, but as a discursive site crossing the genres. He argues that a suppression of this understanding of the Gothic seriously decontextualizes Christabel and its immediate ripostes, The Eve of St Agnes and Lamia. He counters the bias whereby the Gothic is read as a prose genre, a bias not shared by Coleridge, Walter Scott and Byron. They understood poetry to be the most fashionable medium for the Gothic tale of the supernatural. Christabel's status as a Gothic tale of the supernatural is universally accepted. The author argues that The Eve of St Agnes and Lamia establish a polemical conversation with Christabel and the Gothic. In this conversation the Gothic emerges as a language of subjective representation, for that nexus of tropes that includes the self, the body, boundaries, invasion, transgression, repression and desire.

Evidencing the literary hybridity of The Milesian Chief, Charles Robert Maturin's novel begins with a traditional national tale plot but graphically transforms and skews its conventions. The Milesian Chief has been described very rightly as 'a ruin text'; a text about the ruins and ruin of a nation. The Milesian Chief is a ruin itself, a physical reminder of the devastation of Irish history, forever haunted by the ghosts of the past, the (fictional) bodies sacrificed to history heaving within its pages. Confirming its status as a ruin text, Maturin's text echoes with the ghostly voices of the Gothic novel, the national tale, and the historical novel. It emerges as a hybrid text that accurately reflects the social, cultural, and political fragmentation of the author's contemporary Ireland. Irish reality, Maturin declares, is haunted by the past, preventing any kind of meaningful mediation between conflicting temporal or, indeed, geographical zones.

Quinine became an integral part of the colonial lifestyle and part of regulated health regimes. The Handbook set out specific recommendations for the use of curative quinine among Europeans: different prescriptions were set out for intermittent and irregular manifestations of malarial fevers. The Second World War brought with it an acute concern about the supply of quinine and cinchona. In post-war Nyasaland increasing use of aircraft had greatly improved colonial mobility, and van der Post simply flew over some of the rivers, swamps and lowlands that had been such dangerous zones for the colonialists of earlier generations. Totaquine could only be administered orally and its use more frequently caused gastrointestinal disturbances than was the case with either quinine or mepacrine. The availability and use of quinine and other antimalarials in Nyasaland were directly affected by imperial and global developments.

This chapter untangles some of the ways in which Goth style has permeated contemporary Gothic discourses, from the vampire fiction of Brite and Rice to the representation of Goth girls in teen movies. It foregrounds the dialectic between individual participants in the subculture and representations of Goth in a variety of media, from fashion journalism to fiction. The chapter explores the kind of critical investments made in contemporary depictions of Goth, in particular constructions of the subculture as middle-class, 'Taking it', and gendered feminine. It also examines the recycling of Goth style in mainstream fashion and haute couture, questioning why throughout the 1990s, the Gothic look always seemed to be coming back. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the critical discourses surrounding Gothic demonstrated a shift away from psychoanalytical modes towards historicism. In doing so, these discourses exhibited a heightened self-consciousness about the processes of critical and textual production.

The conclusion begins by looking at the treatment of sport in Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant’s purist journal L’Esprit Nouveau. The eclectic and episodic fragments on sport are contrasted with the three-part essay by their associate Pierre Winter. Winter, later the founder of the French Revolutionary Fascist Party, concentrates of a regime of physical exercise and bodily training, in which it is argued an emphasis on competitive elite sport is incidental. But fascism could also demonstrate a keen interest in competitive sport, never more so than when Benito Mussolini instigated a National Exhibition of Sport in Milan in 1935, with exhibition halls designed by some of the most prominent figures of Italian rationalist architecture.