This chapter offers a critical investigation into the ways in which the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) sought to undermine the official narrative of nuclear weapons and civil defence policy of successive British governments during the last two decades of the Cold War. The first part of the chapter explores the ways in which CND used the tools of propaganda and parody to turn government advice and publicity surrounding policies of public protection against itself. The second part of the chapter investigates to what extent CND’s activism presented a threat to the process of policy making and to what effect the co-ordinated anti-nuclear campaign by CND and related groups was a cause of anxiety for civil defence planners and policy makers. It asks whether, by offering both the public and political groups of the left alternative politics which sought to challenge the official version of Cold War defence, CND could be said to have contributed to either non-compliance with, or early termination of, civil defence policy.

Communists and members of the New Left were involved in the Anti-Apartheid Movement [AAM] from its origins in the Boycott Committee in the late 1950s. In its early days, the AAM welcomed support from individual communists, but was reluctant to be seen to be too close to the Communist Party. Nevertheless, members of the Communist Party of Great Britain [CPGB] played a significant role at all levels of the movement throughout its history. Fundamental to this was the relationship between the CPGB and the South African Communist Party [SACP] whose cadre played a central role in the exiled structures of the African National Congress [ANC]. In contrast to the CPGB, other left tendencies had more complicated relationships with the AAM’s leadership. This chapter examines the relationship of different far Left tendencies to the anti-apartheid struggle during the 1970s and 1980s.

The arrival of the spy genre on British television came initially in the form of a cycle of adventure series focused loosely on themes of international intrigue which occupied a prominent place in the schedules of the 1960s. For the most part, this strand was overwhelmingly associated with the commercial ITV as product of its popular appeal to the growing working-class viewership and embrace of a mass public beyond that of the more paternalistic BBC. This chapter traces how the two areas later converged into the cynical, anti-heroic spy series Callan (ITV, 1967-72). This reworked the existential spy thriller tradition associated with novelists such as John le Carre and Len Deighton into an ongoing television format, adopting their tone of institutional alienation and moral ambiguity in the face of the Cold War. Production of a single episode of Callan typically lasted for a period of ten working days.

Placing the history of artificial eardrums against the backdrop of medical consumerism and advertising culture, this chapter reveals how the commericalisation of assistive technologies can blur the boundaries between prosthetics and cures. Unlike assistive aids to hearing, artificial eardrums were initially constructed as a surgical prosthetic, a replacement of a damaged part to become integrated with a user’s body. By the 1880s, however, the device captured the imagination of British and American inventors and new manufacturing firms who distanced the surgical mark of the device while still adhering to standards of its design. As the device was invisible to both the observer and the wearer, their promotion as ‘cure’ rendered deafness as a sigma, a misery that required medico-technological intervention to integrate the deaf person into hearing society.

Muslims and Jews may be said to share certain basic beliefs and similarities, the most obvious ones being monotheism and various ritual elements. Violent attacks on Jews have many ramifications. Where weapons have been used in such incidents, Jews in many French cities commonly remove their skull-caps when in public; reports repeatedly describe Muslims attacks on French Jews who wear Orthodox garb. In parallel, anti-Israel de-legitimisation has risen sharply in Europe, emanating from the Left and Muslim communities. On the one hand, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, an event clearly external to Europe, arouses anti-Israel and anti-Jewish expressions and provokes European Muslims to take action. On the other hand, the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe is strongly associated with developments within Europe. Muslim educational and cultural anti-Jewish issues in Europe can and do lead to actual violence and terrorism.

French multilingual cinema is primarily a contemporary phenomenon. The twentieth century may have seen comparatively few French films featuring other languages, yet multilingual films have in fact existed since the advent of sound cinema. The official contracts of co-productions, through which France and at least one other country create a film in collaboration, also implicitly promote multilingualism through their multinationality. The first period of French cinema history to produce a noteworthy selection of multilingual films is the prolific inter-war period of the 1930s. While le cinema du look was a key moment in the development of twentieth-century French cinema in general, it remains one of the less diverse and experimental periods for multilingual filmmaking. Beur and banlieue films of the mid 1980s and 1990s rarely, if ever, represent a multiplicity of languages in the same way as contemporary multilingual films.

The 1960s and 1970s in the West were a time of great civic protest and challenging of the status quo. In Eastern Europe, there was generally no art market to speak of. In the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, the main patron of the arts was the state. Some form of a market economy did exist in Yugoslavia, but still none comparable to that experienced by artists in Western Europe and North America. One can observe numerous examples of Yugoslav artists engaging in institutional critique in performance art of the 1960s and 1970s. In the post-communist era, the need for institutional critique has perhaps become more vital as artists work to navigate both the Western art market and the local art infrastructure. Institutional critique is just one method by which artists in Central and Eastern Europe have been closely tied to developments in the West.

This chapter explores the coded dimension of large public artworks (sculptures or installations in particular). Public space is dotted with such artworks, many on a monumental scale. The focus of the chapter is on the normative codes that are embedded in both the material structure and the aura of the works. When authorities decide to commission public artworks the brief to artists will often include specifications that pertain not just to the desired visual and expressive effect of the work (the artwork is then supposed to express a particular idea or content) but also to a more normative intention. The artwork is then required to tap into or mobilise an existing set of cultural, social or political codes, or indeed consolidate, propagate or even generate them. An element in the normative coding of public artworks, which this chapter deals with relates to notions of public order that the works are assumed to radiate and project. The chapter shows how the intended codes embedded in the artwork are bound to be subjected to continuous de-coding and re-coding.

Throughout most of the 1960s Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe (CARE) and the American voluntary agencies had enjoyed predominantly friendly relations with both Democrat administrations. The Kennedy years had augmented their visibility as private players in food aid, relief, and development assistance, despite growing competition from United States Agency for International Development (USAID) experts and agencies such as the Peace Corps. The World Food Conference had a catalytic effect on CARE and the American voluntary agencies, which had learned from their experience in Rome that they needed to step up their efforts at coordination on the international level. In the interim, CARE would linger somewhere between being a multinational organization and being a transnational enterprise, with largely independent entities without an identifiable national center, spread around the globe.