This section presents an annotated critical edition of La nochebuena de 1836. Yo y mi criado. Delirio filosófico , 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).

This chapter seeks to examine the norms which the European Union (EU) has established regarding the role of national parliaments, and how these norms have evolved over time. It then offers some brief reflections on how domestic legal systems within the EU have tailored the role of their national parliaments in EU affairs. The chapter examines the Lisbon Treaty which saw the emergence of a more multi- dimensional role for national parliaments than had ever heretofore existed. An attempt had been made at the Nice conference to improve the Amsterdam Protocol. The Maastricht Treaty's ratification process had positive effects for national parliaments, with extra rights being conferred on them. The Constitutional Treaty was signed at Rome in 2004 but never entered into force, its ratification process halting after referendum defeats in France and the Netherlands in May and June 2005.

One irony of the turbulent history of France's wartime empire is that, while the Gaullist recovery was mounted from colonial territory, it was the Vichy state which made empire central to the ethos of its regime. Between 1940 and 1942 both Gaullist and Vichy propaganda emphasised the need to preserve imperial solidarity and a colonial patrimony for France. In general, where Vichy looked southward towards a collapsing imperial position, Free France inevitably gazed northward to metropolitan France. The severity of French colonial rule in black Africa was much affected by the local availability of cheap labour in individual colonies. To the Vichy government, the Levant states were never fertile grounds for the national revolution. After June 1940, possession of the Maghreb territories was the single most important diplomatic lever remaining to the Vichy regime.

The Books of Blood, first published in six volumes in 1984 and 1985, collectively added up to the most important work of British horror fiction of the 1980s. Formally and aesthetically, the Books of Blood were clear products of their time. The short-form horror fiction anthology was enduringly popular in postwar Britain, a familiar feature in bookstores and public libraries, and increasingly so on television from the mid-1960s. For Clive Barker, the severed hands were doubly political, signifying both disenfranchised post-industrial youth and the decolonised subjects of the former British Empire. The riotous body politic was a recurring image throughout the Books of Blood . One might say that it was the collection's controlling metaphor, and certainly a central tenet of 'body horror' movement with which Barker was closely associated.

The inner-city missionary effort to India's poor reinforced in its British setting not only the supposed norms of lower-class Indian society but also those of their middle- and upper-class counterparts. Joseph Salter served as the London City Mission (LCM) missionary to Asians and Africans from 1853 to 1893 and as the religious instructor for inmates of the Strangers' Home from its foundation in 1857 to 1876. The overwhelming presence of Hinduism and Islam among the Indian community in London evoked Salter's sweeping condemnation of Indian culture as heathen. Like upstanding Englishmen, Indians were 'sons of honest toil', loyal to the Queen, and optimistic about the opportunities that the British Empire offered. Salter had trained Abraham Challis in Hindustani and Swahili during the late 1880s. F. E. A. Chamier's stereotypes of workers by occupation confirmed his personal approval of a social hierarchy based on it.

Secretary of State Lord Crewe was commenting on a fundamental difference in the ways that administrators in Britain and those in the dominions perceived their shared hierarchical empire. The Secretary of State's perspective reflected the discourses of social hierarchy that British institutions applied to Indians in the United Kingdom. British elitist attitudes toward education help to explain much of the institutional antipathy toward the 'babu class' of Indian students who came to England seeking positions in the Indian Civil Service (ICS). Overt and official racial discrimination in India rankled administrators of institutions committed to the civilising mission. The behaviour of British institutions toward Indian women in the United Kingdom was somewhat more problematic than was their behaviour toward men. The practice of purdah prevented Indian women from participating in social events that their British counterparts normally attended.

Allen Ginsberg’s Judaism is a fraught subject. Although he was brought up in a family that felt itself unquestionably Jewish, his parents did not practice Judaism as a religion. The family felt keenly the brunt of antisemitism and were deeply traumatized by the Holocaust. Both “Howl” and “Kaddish” bear its unmistakable impact. Unlike his father and many others he knew, Ginsberg did not, though, become a booster for the state of Israel. In fact, he came to revile the concepts of nationhood and religious exclusivity, opting instead for an ethos of compassion and fellow feeling. His universalism linked him with secular Jewish pioneers such as Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Sigmund Freud, and Leon Trotsky, all of whom have been characterized as “non-Jewish Jews.” Ultimately, his Jewishness appears most strongly in his practice of “lovingkindness” and in his role as prophet against capitalist greed and militaristic warmongering, which allies him with the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.

The publication of Allen Ginsberg in Context marks a dramatic shift in Ginsberg Studies (and Beat Studies), clearing important new ground for scholarship on the poet. This volume offers a crucial reminder of the need for continued study of Ginsberg’s full body of work and widest range of influences. The case for Ginsberg’s importance has not always been as clear. Ginsberg’s considerable popular readership has not translated often enough into serious attention from scholars. Allen Ginsberg in Context signals to the larger critical community that Ginsberg’s life and work are essential to the study of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry, culture, and political activism. This book starts the necessary conversation as to why Ginsberg’s poetry can still matter. Ginsberg’s body of work might find its big-bang moment in the 1956 publication of “Howl” and the poem’s subsequent triumph against obscenity charges the following year, but his work in its totality can be seen as a primer for how to live and speak freely in a world that increasingly is bent upon state surveillance and restrictions upon movement and expression.

This chapter posits that domesticity played a central role in Ginsberg’s life and work. Although images of mobility recur in his work, reflections on his childhood home and his adult apartment life recur as well. The first section of the chapter interprets Ginsberg’s needs for both travel and a homelife as a nexus rather than a binary opposition. The second section provides an account of his discordant childhood home, a midlife pivot in his sense of the domestic, and the varying circumstances of his apartment existence in the East Village of Manhattan. The final section analyzes the role that home, neighborhood, and his “Jewish-enough” identity played in his poems, including “Manhattan May Day Midnight,” “Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters,” and “My Kitchen in New York.” In Ginsberg's later poems, home is an arena of presentness and a harbor of writing.

This chapter argues that the profane challenge posed by lay misbehaviour and sacrilege in the church paradoxically strengthens sacred space. Sermon exempla from the literature of pastoral care (e.g. Mirk’s Festial, Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne) show how devils and demons assist in the cleansing of the church from profane contamination and the chapter argues for the integral relationship between violence and the sacred, focusing on the punishment of sinners and on the sacrificial blood of Christ, depicted in lyrics and wall paintings. The chapter reassesses the relationship between church art and sermon exempla and argues for a symbiotic relationship that presents the material church and its devotional objects as living, breathing actors in the drama of salvation. The performance of narrative exempla animates the visual depictions of angels, devils, and saints in the church who come to life to protect and fight for their sacred spaces.

While candidly acknowledging that African governments, institutions, and societies need to take more responsibility and ought to do more to address their security challenges, they just cannot do it alone. Given the increasingly complex and interdependent nature of the African security environment the continent simply lacks the resources and capacity to tackle current and future problems. Thus, the active involvement and constructive participation of the wider global community is essential. This chapter calls for international involvement that is intelligently focused, prudently implemented, and done in partnership with Africans. Involvement that requires listening to African concerns and geared toward addressing African needs and not any external agenda. This will require an across the board overhaul of international programs, tools, and strategic vision. It also means a vastly reduced role for militaries and short-term fixes and a greater emphasis on finding the ways and means that empower people and societies through political, social and economic development.