Ginsberg was a ceaseless experimenter, constantly pushing boundaries whether personal, social, or literary. Drug use was one such privileged means of attaining the transcendent states that Beat writers such as Ginsberg coveted. Ginsberg began his experimentations while at Columbia, keeping detailed notes of his experiences and remaining vigilant that his experimentation did not turn into addiction. Exploring psychedelics with Timothy Leary alerted Ginsberg to the wider social possibilities of its use, and he became famous worldwide as an advocate of drug experimentation. While his use waned later in life, Ginsberg was a firm believer in the power of drugs to challenge current depictions of reality, all the while remaining honest and open about their deleterious effects. Ginsberg openly called for the legalization of many drugs, broader experimentation both socially and scientifically, and castigated US drug policies and their negative consequences. This chapter explores the reasons for Ginsberg’s use of drugs, his advocacy for them, and the various poems he wrote while under the influence of substances collected mainly in Kaddish and Other Poems (1961).

This section presents an annotated critical edition of La sociedad , one of the ‘artículos de costumbres’, a type of satirical sketch that was popular in nineteenth-century Europe, by the Romantic journalist Mariano José de Larra (1809–37).

The reality of the Anglo-Indian home differed markedly in both its practical and symbolic manifestations from the segregated domestic space. The most private and intimate spaces of the colonizers were themselves colonized by the demands of empire. The Raj drafted home and housewife into the professional service of empire and subordinated the private functions of domesticity to the public demands of imperialism. The reconceptualization of the home placed Anglo-Indian domestic space at the centre of imperial politics. The politicized imperial home stood in sharp contrast to the ideal of middle-class British domesticity that had developed from the late-eighteenth century onwards in the metropole. In India, the home was not primarily an instrument of social evaluation and exclusion but was rather a vehicle for the inclusion and integration of the official Anglo-Indian community.

Anglo-Indian women and Indian men encountered each other not in sexual terms, but rather as political competitors vying for power in the combative environment of imperial politics. Observing changes that granted political power primarily to Indian men, Anglo-Indian wives were concerned that the unofficial roles they had carved out for themselves in the politics of imperial India also would be foreclosed. In the British Raj, Anglo-Indian women's political power stemmed not from their citizenship in a democratic polity, but from their status as imperial rulers. Political reforms instituted by British imperial rulers, beginning in the late nineteenth century and escalating rapidly by the interwar years, dramatically reformulated Indian politics and political institutions, reluctantly ceding greater authority to Indian men. Ideas about race and gender further complicated the political transformations, as well as the relationship between Anglo-Indian women and Indian men.

This chapter describes the role of the Oireachtas in European affairs in the 30th Dail (2007-11) and 31st Dail (2011-16), the two most recently completed legislative periods. There are three main aspects to parliament's relationship with Government: parliament has a role in forming and dismissing governments; parliament has a role in policy-making and law-making; and parliament has a role in rendering the Government accountable. Parliament's role in policy-making and law-making in Ireland can be divided between that concerning decision-making at European level and that at Irish level. In the 30th Dáil, the Joint Committee on Justice, Equality, Defence and Women's Rights appeared to be the sectoral Oireachtas committee most dominated by EU-related issues. The first commemoration of Europe Day by the Oireachtas occurred in 2006 when both Houses met in joint session, one day after the fifty-sixth anniversary of the Schuman Declaration.

The scholarly literature on the end of the British Empire is brimming with all kinds of evocative metaphors. Paul Kennedy saw the Soviet Empire as being much longer-lasting and more intractable than the other declining great powers. Imperial markets were no longer protected by culture and sentiment. Import substitution was rampant everywhere and the Treaty of Rome and new economic alliances in Europe soon indicated further writing on the wall for Britain. By the 1940s, it was Indians who were largely running the British Empire in India. Decolonisation has been described as the 'Implosion of Empire', in order to convey a sense of the political upheavals on the colonial periphery reverberating inwards on metropolitan society. It is certainly significant that the major post-war exhibition, the Festival of Britain on London's South Bank in 1951, appeared to concentrate on metropolitan Britain.

The exploitation of wild animals has long been recognised as a prime impulse of European expansion. In 1925, Hugh Gunn wrote that 'the early training and the instincts of the hunter have had much more to do with the expansion of the Empire than is generally realised'. The British always liked to portray themselves as uniquely competent, it was a necessary myth of global power, but Gunn's remarks were equally true of the French and the Russian empires. Hunting and adherence to the code were the true signs of the virile colonial power, and the British had a tendency to judge fellow imperialists according to their capacity in the Hunt. The Germans shared the palm with the British as the most confident and effective hunters. Hunting remains important to those who continue to exercise global power.

The most productive period for individual memorials, before the Great War, was the nineteenth century, with its plentiful crop from the wars of the Empire. War memorials may be realistic, like the innumerable infantry privates up and down the country or the brutal stone howitzer with its crew at Hyde Park Corner. The Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny prompted noisy patriotism, but the mid-Victorian was clear enough about the distinction between a soldier and a civilian. The civilian might join the Volunteers, and many did when a French threat appeared in the 1860's. The flow of infantry volunteers dried up at once and the Imperial Yeomanry became attractive to many men who would not otherwise have considered enlisting. The stipulated qualifications for recruits to the Imperial Yeomanry, riding and shooting, were not seriously tested and recruits were given no training at home and little, except by experience, abroad.

This chapter traces the process by which the Charlotte Brontes came to be peculiarly associated with the ghostly, beginning in the nineteenth century, and views it as inextricably connected with their transformation from historical figures to fictional characters. It focuses, in particular, on the history of Charlotte's representation as revenant. The chapter considers how tropes of haunting are deployed across three distinct phases in Charlotte's fictionalisation: Elizabeth Gaskell's biography, nineteenth-century commemorative poetry, and the inter-war fictional biographies. Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte was essential to the development of Bronte fictional biography. Gaskell wrote ghost stories, some of which were likely inspired by the Brontes and their fiction. Matthew Arnold composed the first Bronte ghost poem as an act of commemoration prior to the publication of Gaskell's Life. Writing commemorative poetry about dead authors, their final resting places and afterlives, was an established practice in nineteenth-century literary culture.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins with a conference on the topic of Science and Society convened at Sussex University in September 1998. It provides the discussion of sugar cane production in Mauritius and addresses the intricate debates around metropolitan and colonial science. The book illustrates how the processes of census enumeration and measurement which were so central an aspect of the nineteenth-century British imperial ideology of progress and enlightenment were often greeted with suspicion by white farmers. It argues for the salience of statistics and the 'mania for measurement' in the apartheid state's attempt to manage and control South Africa's various population 'groups'. The book suggests that the inordinate faith placed in dog tracking reflected the limits of police powers over rural African populations.

This chapter explores Allen Ginsberg’s stay at the now-famous Beat Hotel. Ginsberg, along with his lover Peter Orlovsky and fellow Beat poet Gregory Corso, spent an important sojourn at this spot in Paris. Located in the Latin Quarter, this run-down hotel would come to house other Beats such as William S. Burroughs and Harold Norse as well. Ginsberg’s time there was productive. He produced “At Apollinaire’s Grave” while in Paris and began his long poem “Kaddish” as well, while simultaneously seeing the sights and meeting a variety of famous French poets and artists.