At the end of the 1970s, however, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) would, for arguably the first time, take the initiative in spy genre with a seven-part serialised adaptation of John le Carre's novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In deciding to adapt a le Carre novel as a classic serial, the BBC by implication accepted his literary status albeit in a consciously bold and daring move. This chapter expresses Tinker Tailor as a key moment of intervention in both the television spy genre and British television drama. It provides a close analysis of the serial, adopting what Sarah Cardwell describes as a 'televisual' approach to the classic novel adaptation through considering how features specific to the medium shape textual characteristics. Whilst Callan and The Sandbaggers have been relatively marginalised in the history of British television drama as somewhat ephemeral texts, Tinker Tailor is a far more iconic programme.

As You Like It reappeared in 1920 and at regular intervals thereafter, but the stag did not, and Playfair's theatrical modernism became part of the mainstream of staging practice at Stratford, as it did elsewhere. The Stratford-upon-Avon Herald insisted that 'it has been said a thousand times before: we know exactly where we are with As You Like It. For all its thin veneer of disguise, the Forest of Arden is rural Warwickshire, and the snake and hungry lioness but escapees from a passing circus. Once in the forest we are in Shakespeare's own country, where the purest of love reigns' (7 July). For some, though, this was an Arden in which the prospect of picnics was not untouched by the more troubling aspects of rural life, manifested most obviously in a staging of 4.2.

In 1847 the American Medical Association introduced its Code of Ethics, which deemed it ‘derogatory to professional character … for a physician to hold a patent for any surgical instrument, or medicine’. This chapter examines how the American patent system and the AMA’s ethics influenced B.F. Palmer, who in 1846 received the first patent for an artificial limb in the United States. While Palmer’s extra-medical position helped him avoid ethical controversy, the patent system also reinforced his aspirations to professional stature as a ‘surgeon-artist’. In arguing for a patent extension in 1860, Palmer and his attorney framed the patent as a kind of social contract, asserting the surgeon-artist’s exclusive, expert, and philanthropic character and depicting a benevolent professionalism in close parallel with that of the AMA. Palmer appealed to the moral economies of patenting and medicine alike, yet his argument also cast the sentimental work of resolving impairment in the hard fiscal terms legible to the Commissioner of Patents. The surgeon-artist’s professionalism depended on an ethic of beneficent contribution to the public good, underwritten by the authority of medicine, protected by the patent, and measured against the costs of charity.

Modern traditions of activist media grow out of the increased opportunities for intervention into the public sphere created by the Internet and modern technology. In recent years online media activism has been said to have been at the centre of uprisings during the Arab Spring, the development of countercultural movements like Occupy and the populist right. In Northern Ireland, this form of activism emerged but it failed to diminish much older, deeply historic tradition of activist journalism and writing in Irish republicanism. Journals, pamphlets, newspapers and free sheets all persisted in the years after the signing of the Good Friday peace agreement providing a challenge to the narratives of digital utopianism and its claims for a public sphere dynamically and completely restructured by the Internet.

Decades before the rhetoric of the 'responsibility to protect' entered into international discourse during the 1990s, Dag Hammarskjöld responded to the Congolese request by immediately declaring that the UN had an obligation to protect the sovereignty of the Congo from Belgian incursion. Hammarskjöld's main objective was to contain the crisis by ensuring that all aid and support for the Congo came through the UN, thereby preventing the superpowers from drawing the conflict into the Cold War. The troika proposal, which arose in the context of the Congo debate, raised the dimensions of the problem such as the ongoing broader discussions about the nature of the UN environment and the anti-colonial crusade. In parallel to the controversy surrounding the credentials debate, the position of Britain and the US was further complicated by two other issues; the Soviet troika proposal and the campaign to declare a formal end to colonialism.

This chapter outlines how early Chartism grew out of the traditions, which profoundly informed its intellectual and popular print cultures. Rather than elitist moralists as historians have held them, or demagogic sell-outs as William Thackeray contended, these men repackaged popular culture and the radical enlightenment to produce a moral populism for an understanding of the characteristics of Chartism. One of the environments from which this moral populism would emerge was the Freethought culture of the 1820s. Although politics was an important part of this plebeian intellectual culture, political reform was not seen as realistic throughout the 1820s, and energy was largely channelled into Freethought, debating societies, Owenism, and trade unionism. The irreverent style of sceptical philosophy and the strategic importance of undercutting the moral hegemony of the Anglican Church both informed a deeply heterodox and satirical culture surrounding the development of working-class Radicalism in the early 1830s.

Alongside the 1984-5 British miners’ strike developed a large and diverse support campaign. This chapter focuses on the role of London’s radical left in that movement, emphasising how activists constructed solidarity networks between the coalfields and the capital. Alongside the activity of members of the Communist Party and Trotskyist groups, it discusses feminist, black, and lesbian and gay support groups, highlighting how the miners’ industrial struggle resonated and was politicised in diverse ways. The chapter shows how radical left Labour members and local councils sought to blur the distinction between institutional and extra-parliamentary activism through their support for the strike. This complex support movement therefore challenged the boundaries of the radical left and class politics, reflecting a broader period of flux and realignment

In the early 2000s, the Internet, the blogosphere and new online medias were said to have recreated and expanded the countercultural political uprisings of the late 1960s. The radicalism of the underground press, equality, anti-war and anti-colonial movements never quite managed the translate their counter-hegemonic activism into a dynamic restructuring of politics in the West. However, academics and activists saw potential in the Internet to offer a space with which to counter the narratives of political elites, capitalism, globalisation and the domination of western corporations. In Ireland, a group of writers, led by former republican prisoners, developed an activist media space that was critical of Sinn Féin, dissidents and the dominant narratives of the Peace Process. The print magazine Fourthwrite and the online magazine The Blanket, harnessed old and new technology to provide a sustained countercultural critique of their times. That they sustained themselves for much of the 2000s without a specific political vehicle or purpose while producing some of the most compelling and inclusive writing about the times is testament to the opportunities that technology provides for committed modern activists.