It has been well noted by a number of scholars that 1953 coincidentally marked both the publication of the first James Bond novel by Ian Fleming in Britain and the launch of Playboy magazine in America by Hugh Hefner. Between 1953 and 1960, before the film franchise with Sean Connery in the role of James Bond, Fleming wrote and had published seven out of a total fourteen Bond books at the rate of one per year, starting with Casino Royale. This chapter draws upon existing scholarship on Playboy and Bond to look beyond chance, to explain that the Playboy-Bond relationship has its origins in the 1950s, setting up the historical and generic contexts. Moving from the spy genre to the genre of men's magazines, most observers agree that Playboy began by updating and repackaging elements of the basic formula of Esquire.

Garrett Sullivan explores connections between Spenser’s Fairie Queene and Gothic readings of Acrasia as vampire, arguing that ‘readings of Spenser’s text that centre on psychic processes such as projection, or denial, or abjection find substantiation in the tripartite soul’, as ‘the tripartite soul introduces into the conception of human vitality a vocabulary for depicting and exploring the nature of self-division’. Thus, while respecting historical differences, ‘the tripartite soul enables the Gothic to recognize itself in Spenser’.

This chapter describes how Dreamfields responds to narratives of failure, the demands of the education market, and anxieties over national decline. Dreamfields is disciplined through a variety of practices to ensure its 'well-oiled machine' routinely fashions its raw materials in accordance with global capital's needs. The chapter describes how space, time and the body are (re)ordered through repetitive routines and surveillance which mesh various modes of discipline, ranging from panoptic surveillance to verbal chastisement to audit systems' measurement to create the neoliberal subject. Drawing on de Certeau's concept of strategies, it describes how Dreamfields as a subject with 'will and power' isolates itself, establishing a 'break between a place appropriated as one's own and its other'. This is a useful way to think through Dreamfields' demarcation of itself as a space apart from Urbanderry from where it can manage exterior threats.

This chapter discusses the role of the European Union in peacemaking. It argues that because it is a Union of shared values, it is uniquely placed to play a stronger role in support of peace and security, human rights and development. It examines the implications of the European Security Strategy, and reflects on the Northern Ireland Peace Process.

This chapter highlights the common ways in which classical literature uses the concept of friendship in the context of relations with foreign powers. As a number of classical texts demonstrate, different perspectives on friendship could have been intertwined or separated when political circumstances and the creative powers of a particular author demanded. For this reason, in the discussion of the overlooked contractual concept of friendship, the chapter focuses on the links between this concept and the ethics of personal and public relations. Friendship understood as an ethical phenomenon was a central theme in ancient discussions of life in the political community. The most elaborate discussion of friendship in the classical period can be found in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. The chapter also demonstrates that the alternative understanding of political friendship and its conceptual means of expression can be identified in early medieval Greek and Latin literature.

In the second week of October 1934, the city of Paris saw the première of two productions of As You Like It. Both had been eagerly anticipated, though for very different reasons. This chapter addresses two productions beyond the English (and English-speaking) theatre context. The first of these, seen at l'Atelier in Paris in 1934, is Jacques Copeau's redaction Rosalinde; the second is Peter Stein's monumental four-hour production for the Schaubühne Berlin in 1977. The latter, described by Dennis Kennedy as 'one of Stein's greatest productions' (Kennedy 261), and was a landmark in the history of European Shakespeare. It is also one deeply embedded in the politics and history of its troubled times. Rosalinde marked the return to the Parisian stage of a figure who had been at the forefront of theatrical reform in the second decade of the twentieth century, and who had directed two acclaimed Shakespeare productions.

The memory of the Holocaust is intensively used, often as a theoretical and practical yardstick, by both Muslim migrant minorities and the European 'white' majority. The fate of European Jewry in World War II is highly discernible in the perceptions and mutual relations between Europe and its Muslim migrants. Several European leaders supported David Cameron's views about the detrimental results of cultural fragmentation. Jewish Holocaust survivors have a perfect justification to hate and act violently against the European state because of past atrocities; they do not, insists Finkielkraut. The school curriculum is one battlefield on which differences between Muslim migrants and the European state are brought to the fore. The situation becomes even more complex and predictions about future Jewish-Muslim relations on the continent become more uncertain when Muslim and Arab immigrants are elected to public and leadership positions in European countries.

The multilingual cinema of contemporary France operates both within the national centre and on its peripheries, both in dominant French spaces and beyond the borders of the Hexagon. In multilingual films, tensions and politics concerning France as a nation and Frenchness as an identity come to the fore, as do the shifting role and importance of the French language. As a result, multilingual cinema not only foregrounds and values languages other than French, but consequently decentres the French language from its once-monopolistic central role in French cinema. France may continue to be a predominantly centralised country in cultural and economic terms, but multilingual cinema envisions a map of multiple linguistic centres. When applied to the place of languages other than French in multilingual cinema, the rhizome thus reveals a non-stratified framework through which to view the links between languages.

Sharon Tighe-Mooney’s chapter sees the divorce, contraception and abortion referenda of the 1980s and 90s as a watershed for Irish women, as these were issues that impacted directly on their lives. Tighe-Mooney examines the events of the past four decades in Irish society in the context of the weakening hegemony of the Catholic Church juxtaposed with the growing realisation by women, especially when the child abuse scandals broke, that their lives had been framed by a celibate male-dominated institution that displayed serious double standards in the area of human sexuality. She argues that in order to survive into the future, the Church will be increasingly dependent on women remaining active within the institution. As Irish women Catholics are demanding a central role in the running of a Church that has shown itself allergic to change, especially when it comes to gender equality, Tighe-Mooney wonders what the future holds for both groups.