Television broadcasting in Britain has traditionally been the 'primary site where the nation is imagined and imagines itself'. This chapter examines a group of programmes broadcast since 2011 that engage with the domestic realities of London in the 1950s and presents a corrective to established notions of the nation at that time. Since the broadcast of its second episode, Call the Midwife has been the nation's top-rated show, regularly garnering an astonishing 30 per cent share of the total viewing audience. Where Call the Midwife has frequently been dismissed as cosy, Sunday evening heritage programming, The Hour was greeted as a 'quality' television with episode-by-episode review blogs appearing on the Guardian site and elsewhere. Arguably, The Hour represents the most confrontational engagement seen in British television drama with the institutional racism of 1950s Britain, the limited role of television to correct the era's dominant myths and the era's neo-fascism roots.

This chapter is the first extended study of the Eleanor Crosses. Commissioned by Edward I and built in the years immediately following Eleanor’s death in 1290, the monuments fashioned an idealised image of Eleanor that stands distinct from the historical record but which defined cultural memories of her. Over time, however, what were once memorials to an individual woman came to signify a more general sense of loss, melancholy and nostalgia that signified differently in particular times and places. E. M. Barry’s refashioned Charing Cross of the 1860s is but one of a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century monuments that self-consciously repeated and reflected the medieval precedents of the Eleanor Crosses to create an idealised image of the medieval past. This chapter traces the reception, recreation and influence of the crosses in postmedieval England.

This chapter contains a collection of gothic texts between 1797 and 1845 connected with Gothic Renovations. William Godwin was one of the leading radical intellectuals of the Romantic era. Thomas Carlyle finds romance in the phantasmagoria of common experience; romance exists 'in Reality alone'. The logic of Carlyle's position is that one should no longer seek the supernatural in the manners of the Middle Ages, and therefore in Gothic romances; one finds it, rather, in the theatre of everyday life. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, nee Aikin, was a radical Dissenter and an important figure in the history of Gothic writing. The 'Gothic', in the shape of Sir Walter Scott's version of historical romance, supports the cause of conservative idealism. This thesis is antithetical to that of the essay by Godwin and demonstrates the way in which Gothic writing remains a site of contention.

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the recent situation in Afghanistan with a focus on international actors. It will be shown that apart from the humanitarian-military relationship, close and overlapping interests continue with the linkage between security and development, policy coherence and a belligerence that does not recognize the separation between humanitarian and military spheres. These interlinked issues contributed to the humanitarian-military relationship to be a highly contentious issue in Afghanistan. This chapter discusses the recent context from late 2001 to the end of 2014 by focusing on the proximal causes and manifestations of tension within the humanitarian-military relationship.

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Terry Gilliam suggested a film based on Lewis Carroll's nonsense verse, 'Jabberwocky', taken from Through the Looking Glass. Gilliam reworked the traditional fairy tale narrative, so that the storyline would precipitate 'a collision of fairytales'. In Holy Grail the many-eyed monster had been an animation, but that was not an option in Jabberwocky. Drawing from Carroll, Pieter Bruegel, Paolo Pasolini and others, and incorporating elements of social document, social satire, evocative nonsense, slapstick comedy, distorted fairy tale, the grotesque and the monster film, Jabberwocky did not play safe. Jabberwocky offered Gilliam the chance to represent the intricacies of medieval society, celebrate its vital humanity, offer a comically inflected critique of his own world, and learn his craft. Despite its huge success, in terms of Gilliam's career as a film-maker Life of Brian was a step backwards from Jabberwocky.

This chapter presents the narratives of two groups of second-generation Italian women: those who bore the brunt of racial hostility on the 'home front' and the slightly older age cohort who were called up into the auxiliary services or war work. It analyses narratives of resistance. It was common within Italian immigrant families in Scotland for children to help out in the family business from a very early age, by helping to prepare food or to serve customers. The two main groups marginalised within communal discourse about World War Two are Italian Scots who served in the British forces and women. The interviews undertaken with second-generation Italian women indicate the importance of oral testimony in illuminating how service in the British forces during the war could quite dramatically reinforce a sense of difference.

This chapter explores 'resistance' to call-up, by examining declarations of alienage and conscientious objection amongst dual national Italians, and also addresses the experiences of the 'negotiators'. It focuses on those who served in 270 Company of the Pioneer Corps, an army unit which was partly established to accommodate second-generation Italians who were unwilling to fight Italian troops. Amongst the narratives of internees, the Pioneer Corps has been consistently represented in a negative light, with the overall emphasis resting on the image of the pioneers as 'scavengers' who dug latrines. A small number of second-generation Italians decided to 'resist' military service either by making use of the mechanism of declarations of alienage or by serving prison sentences. During the First World War, when Britain and Italy fought as Allies, Italian citizens had the option of returning to Italy to fight in the Italian Army or serving in a British regiment.

This chapter examines how the enthusiasm for stained glass spread from clerical circles into a more secular territory. The fact that the market for stained glass grew enormously in the 1840s and 1850s is not in dispute, but the ways in which it spread needs clarification. To see a display of the work of over thirty different stained glass studios in a secular context was unprecedented, and has important implications for the relationship between stained glass and Victorian culture. Exhibitions were held quite regularly before the Victorian period but they were normally small-scale shows designed to promote the work of one glass-painter. The consistent Gothic style in the Medieval Court must have provided just the context that many of the other English glass-painters needed, though the glass was not as well lit as that in the stained glass gallery.

This chapter presents the early memories of Anne Clifford during the period of 1616-1619. Anne Clifford had a miscarriage in December of 1618 year. John Chamberlain records: 'The countesse of Dorset the last weeke miscaried of a sonne that was borne dead'. In her Great Books Anne records that she bore three sons: Thomas Sackville, who was born on 2 February 1620 and died on 26 July 1620, and two other sons to Richard who 'died in their infancy'. Anne's autobiographies reveal her joys and griefs within a vivid description of seventeenth-century life. They reveal a personality that was vulnerable and determined; charitable and canny. Her autobiographies provide a window into a vibrant world of seventeenth-century life as lived by this complex and intriguing seventeenth-century woman.

This chapter examines Scottish townspeople’s personal and private religious practices by considering religious exclusion, private devotion, personal donations to religious institutions, and the case study of Jonet Rynd’s foundation of the Magdalen Chapel and Hospital in Edinburgh. It argues that people often personalized their religious practices to suit individual circumstances, with many of the wealthier inhabitants of Scottish towns taking a growing interest in individualized, private religious experience, but that the trend of individualization evident in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries ought not to be used simplistically as evidence for a breakdown in corporate Christianity of the kind discussed in Chapter 3; rather, inhabitants of Scottish towns joined their individual welfare to that of the wider society so that personal efforts and communal forms of devotion converged in pursuit of salvation. The personal and the particular were important for many in the towns of Scotland, but individual religious responsibility was undertaken in the context of the wider religious society and individuals could establish their own personal religious priorities while remaining connected to others within corporate religious structures.