Questions of genre are central to Lynn Meskill’s exploration of the ‘proto-Gothic obsessions’ of Ben Jonson, who is probably one of the least likely Renaissance authors to be associated with such an endeavour. However, as Meskill persuasively argues, the ‘labyrinthine poetics’ of Jonson’s comedies and his masques in particular testify to a ‘seventeenth century Gothic as combination of Jacobean charnel house and the Grotesque’. Meskill reads The Masque of Queenes in terms of the grotesque and hybrid with regard to characters, genres, registers and references. In this context Jonson’s excessive notes on the margins turn into an ‘account of authorial creation of a kind of monster out of fragments and pieces’. Thus his marginal references to witchcraft (drawn from ‘a variety of sources … from antiquity, folktales, modern authorities, personal memories of stories and rumours’) serve both to rationalize and to heighten the effect of terror, which culminates in Jonson’s ‘monstrous mixing of the living and the dead’ in his ‘vision of Queen Anne’, ‘crowned by the dead’ queens of past ages.

This chapter explores whether the ethical perspective on friendship was incompatible with the idea of politics, even politics framed in moral terms. The ethical concept of friendship is never strictly separated from the performance of political roles, for discussions of ethical principles and moral norms always take place within the framework of a particular political regime, societal arrangement and culture. It is therefore essential to contextualise the moralist arguments of Renaissance authors in order to highlight the political rationality of high moral standards of friendship appealing to past and modern publics. The chapter identifies which political norms and moral issues became central to Humanist discourse on friendship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It also explores how these scholars' understanding contributed to the ideological underpinnings of the emerging international system by linking personalised princely friendships to issues of alliances, commercial relations and sovereign authority.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses on how creative boldness in the spy and conspiracy genres has shifted between episodic series and 'novelistic' serial forms, and so the shift away from the series and towards the short-run serial might simply be read as part of this continuing ebb and flow. It may be the case that Spooks had provided such a thorough and definitive instance of the nation-centred spy series that other programmes have had to differentiate themselves simply to establish a separate identity. In this context, Spooks was devised as a new state-of-the-nation drama in the form of a procedural spy series, drawing together the counter-terror approach of Special Branch, the institutional politicking of The Sandbaggers and Tinker Tailor, and even elements of the radical politics and aesthetics of 1980s serials.

Based on ethnographic research conducted at the Manchester Airport Group 2009-2012 this chapter follows some of the actors and practices involved in the making of the Escape Lounge. The chapter shows that the city is being made-over by the loungification. The make-over by loungification begins by assuming the role of a new political actor, but one not yet fully formed or domesticated within the established institutions and parliamentary forums of city politics. Richard Branson's Virgin group has also been developing the concept, re-lounging the high street retail bank through its network of 'Virgin Money lounges'. The chapter traces the use that airport management sought to make of geo-demographic consumer data. To seek a clear demarcation of cause and effect or to isolate and distinguish a source for the 'Manchester vibe' is a problem that finds itself entangled with the problem of identifying a clear separation of State and civil society.

This chapter offers an exegesis of the US foreign policy narrative nested in the political thought of the German jurist Carl Schmitt. According to Schmitt, Thomas Hobbes's poor 'mythological sense' had led him to choose a sea monster over the terrestrial monster Behemoth to capture the symbolic essence of his treatise on the sovereign territorial state. Schmitt's concept of Großraume refers to the geographical delimitation of a state's special 'sphere of interests', or 'zone of security', extending way beyond its legal territorial borders. In his 1941 book Volkerrechtliche Großraumordnung, Schmitt controversially argues that 'the 1823 Monroe Doctrine was in the recent history of international law the first and to date most successful example of a regional international law. Schmitt's Nomos was largely ignored in the Anglo-Saxon world during the entire duration of the Cold War.

This chapter examines the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau. It focuses on how his critical social theory and his normative political theory meet as a conception of childhood that would come into sharper focus during the nineteenth century. The chapter also examines reformatory education and public hygiene, focusing on how the public health strategies were developed and deployed in Ireland. Both in terms of design and strategic objective, the penal reformatory school exemplified biosocial power in that it was deployed as a social technology to refashion life that had been deformed by social circumstances. The chapter looks at how the 'biosocial' apparatus has recently been reconfigured through a policy framework called Healthy Ireland, the purpose of which is to 'reduce health inequalities' by 'empowering people and communities'. It also looks at how the prescriptive thrust of Emile was made practical through a pedagogical form of philanthropy.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book takes up a labour-centred Marxist approach to human-environment relations, place and language, human-machine relations, technique and technology, political economy and violence. The relationship between humans, their labour and their environments is a practical and historical question, 'not an abstract philosophical puzzle'. This should contribute to 'new anthropology of labour' and a 'decolonised anthropology dispenses with the disciplinary emphasis on the "outside" of capitalism and encompasses the dynamism and interconnections of global society'. An understanding of the processes of production and reproduction can provide considerable insight into social organisation, technologies, and environments. The book discusses the situation of structural violence that arose for people who were not able to exert the machine control.

The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was a visible presence across many significant trade unions in the post-war period, largely due to its industrial strategy. The party envisaged that politicising the rank and file of important trade unions and also capturing the leadership of these unions would allow it to influence the Labour Party, as these unions held a significant number of votes at Labour's annual conference. This chapter analyses the success of this strategy in the National Union of Mineworkers, a union that became increasingly emblematic of the difficulties trade unions faced in the late twentieth century, particularly obvious through its 1984 strike. This chapter considers the relationship between Communists in the party and those in the union, exploring the extent to which the party's strategy translated into the union in practice, and understanding if there was any conflict between these two groups who occupied distinctly different roles. Unpicking the concept of 'wage militancy', the way through which the party felt politicisation of the union rank and file would best be achieved, the chapter frames this discussion within the broader context of the increasingly divided CPGB, the political and economic policies of Labour and Conservative governments, and the union's national strikes.

The political dimension of the construction of a Gothic Shakespeare in the eighteenth century is explored on a national scale in Dale Townshend’s historical analysis of the ‘complex relationship’ between the terms Scottish and Gothic. Distinguishing between a political and an aesthetic Gothicism, Townshend reads the construction of Scottish Gothic through a ‘phantasmatic projection’ of Shakespeare ‘as our British rather than English Gothic Bard’ in response to the ‘threat of Scottish nationalism’ embodied in Ossian as Scottish Bard. In this sense the rise of the Gothic novel is aptly linked to the ‘othering of Scotland’ in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

This chapter introduces how Playboy endorsed Sean Connery's Bond as a contemporary role model both on and beyond the screen, and as an iconic embodiment of the playboy fantasy ideal that was being readily imagined. Playboy gave some biographical detail on Connery, including his early life and background. Playboy had made only a few direct mentions of the Bond films, having focused mainly on developing a relationship with Ian Fleming and the literary Bond. Playboy championed the ideology of masculine individualism in all spheres of life, including work. An intertextual aspect of the screen Bond that the 1965 'Playboy Interview' with Connery picked up on is connected to the wider themes of social mobility and leisure. Despite some of its other criticisms, Playboy had praised from the outset Connery's screen portrayal of the Bond character.