This book presents a history of the factory gardens and parks movement in Britain and the United States, from its origins in the early Industrial Revolution, to its zenith in the years preceding the Second World War and concludes with an overview of the evolution of corporate landscapes from the second half of the twentieth century to the present. Industrialists attempted to assuage the effects of mass production by embracing the historical, cultural and metaphorical meanings of gardens to refine corporate culture and to redefine industry as progressive and responsible. Industry contributed distinctively and significantly to gardening culture and to opportunities for outdoor recreation in the first half of the twentieth century. Analysing factories from the point of view of landscape has produced a significant new interpretation of factory design, society and culture, which draws out the meanings of time and space in the factory that are not related to the production line.The discussion draws on empirical evidence underpinned by sources from a broad disciplinary base, including areas of research within architectural, art, photographic, landscape and garden histories; cultural geography, social history, philosophy, gender studies and social science.

2.1 Motivations and Objectives

We have argued in Chapter 1 that a more uniform distribution of income in a population makes individuals better off economically in respect of income. Since high income inequality is likely to generate financial hardship for the lower-income sections of the population and social discontentment and political instability, any society should reduce its high inequality to a reasonably low level.

For determining the level of equality we need a yardstick that summarizes the closeness of incomes of different individuals. Such an indicator gives us a concrete idea about the deviation of the actual distribution from the norm, the distribution of perfectly equal incomes. An adequate indicator of income equality should incorporate interpersonal comparisons so that a redistribution of income from a better-off individual to a worse-off individual, such that the donor does not become poorer than the recipient, generates a better state of incomes, as desired from a social welfare standpoint. Equivalently, we say that equality increases under a progressive transfer of income, a Robin Hood operation. In the literature this notion of value judgment is known as the Pigou–Dalton transfer principle. It represents the egalitarian ethic that higher equality of incomes among individuals is socially preferred. A second value judgment involved in equality evaluation is anonymity; any reordering of incomes does not change the degree of equality – reflecting irrelevance of all characteristics other than income.

Much has been written about Maltese and its transformation into a language in its own right, both through external contact with other languages and due to internal factors. Less has been said about the English of Malta. In spite of regular criticism from purists, Maltese English has started to be regarded as a variety, distinct from others. This chapter examines the complex plurilinguistic context within which the variety has emerged and continues to flourish. It demonstrates how the socio-political context provided perfect conditions for the establishment of English as the de facto second language of Malta. Extensive use of English in different domains has also contributed to shaping the local variety in distinct ways to reflect the needs of the community (or subsets thereof) it serves. The chapter also outlines some of the more salient characteristics of the variety, in terms of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, meaning and discourse.

This chapter completes the analysis of Achebe's writing, emphasising the centrality of balance and dialogue over orthodoxy or political commitment in his work. Referencing Nwando Achebe's stalwart defence of her father's fiction and her work on the female warrant chief Ahebi Ugbabe, it considers the changing gender consciousness that runs through the author's work as a whole. Never uni-vocal, never content to succumb to ‘The One Way, One Truth, One Life menace’, it concludes by characterizing Achebe's fiction, in his own words, as an ongoing campaign of resistance to ‘The Terror that lives completely alone.’

The American title for David Lean's romance The Passionate Friends and One Woman's Story could have been applied to several of the films the director made during the course of his career. In re-examining three of Lean's films and bracketing them together as women's pictures, this chapter aims to foreground the absolute centrality of women and women-centred narratives to much of Lean's filmmaking. Brief Encounter was the first of Lean's films to provide a sustained focus on the inner life of a heroine, detailing an ordinary middle-class woman's experience of unexpectedly falling in love. The Passionate Friends provided a more psychologically opaque and socially upscale variation on the theme of illicit romance with a compelling central performance from Ann Todd. The trilogy was completed by Summer Madness, Lean's first Hollywood co-production, first film to be shot entirely on location overseas and the director's favourite among his own films.

From Amores perros, to 21 Grams, to Babel, to Biutiful (2010), Alejandro González Iñárritu and his team have travelled from Mexico, to the USA, to multinational landscapes, and to the immigrant world of Barcelona. This chapter considers Amores perros within the context of Iñárritu's trajectory as a filmmaker. It demonstrates the ways in which Amores perros establishes signature traits that will be developed in the subsequent films that he directs despite the shifts in national contexts and production modes. Amores perros is divided into three stories or chapters, Octavio and Susana, Valeria and Daniel, and el Chivo and Maru, with each focusing on a key character. Several critics have focused on the Hispanic and specifically Mexican elements of the film. The chapter considers the allegorical implications of the parallels made between absent fathers and the failing state under the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.

This chapter explores some of the distinctive characteristics of English in Tyneside in relation to the socio-historical and sociolinguistic contexts in which they have emerged, evolved and in some cases declined. The main focus is on features of phonetics and phonology, but some consideration is also given to lexis, as a useful introduction to many of the historical influences that have played a part in moulding the dialect, and to aspects of grammar and discourse, which will be seen to reflect some of the same factors that have shaped the accent. In all of these areas, there is some loss of older, traditional forms, but the story is not just one of the increasing prevalence of supraregional variants; there are also more recent developments and current changes which are themselves distinctive and therefore help to maintain the individual character of Tyneside English.

The Introduction offers the reader a way into the 1810s through Anna Letitia Barbauld’s bleak, prophetic satire, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem (1812). A poem written amidst the tensions of war, famine, unemployment, food shortages, and economic decline, it also serves as a record of the peculiarity of this decade as one caught amidst a flurry of new ideas, beliefs, and concepts, but without a clear sense of how such newness might be understood, interpreted, or even accepted. The chapter reads Barbauld’s poem as a framing device to introduce the twelve chapters that comprise the volume and their shared concerns with sexuality and identity, religion and politics, race and gender, disability and the environment, aesthetics and philanthropy, communication and confusion, and social and interspecies relations.

This also considers the crossovers between lesbian and spinster identities but focuses on the 1930s, and incorporates debates around the older woman. It examines female professionalism and tracks cross-generational female alliances, seen as essential, if precarious, in the progress of feminism. Novels by Virginia Woolf and Winifred Holtby are used to reflect on the progress of the professional spinster and the new older heroine. The 1930s novels of Vita Sackville-West are read as widows' stories through Terry Castle's concept of the post-marital.

In the wake of the October 2023 escalation of the Israel–Palestine conflict, NYC-based graffiti bomber Miss17 visualized her solidarity with the Palestinian people by filling her tag name with the colors of the Palestinian flag. In 2024, the largest all-woman graffiti crew in the United States – Few & Far – completed a mural with a feminist take on the “Forbidden Fruit” idea, which gave the grrlz the space to publicly claim their opposition to the genocide of the Palestinian people by painting watermelons – a symbol of Palestinian resistance similar in effect and meaning to the flag. In this chapter, visual arts scholar Dr. Pabón-Colón examines these works, the sociopolitical context in which they were made, and their reception on social media to argue that by performing their feminism in their graffiti these grrlz rejected US imperialism in favor of modeling transnational feminist solidarity.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It discusses the various models and methodologies that have been developed to analyse diachronic data concisely and consistently. The new history furthermore examines the trajectories the language has embarked on during its spread worldwide and presents overviews of the varieties of English found throughout the world today.

Data about Earth obtained from space provide vital insights for disaster mitigation, weather prediction, natural resource management, agricultural efficiency, human migration, and climate change. This chapter addresses legal and normative frameworks that exist for sharing such data, including the Outer Space Treaty, the Remote Sensing Principles, the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters, and the World Meteorological Organization’s Resolution 40. It addresses the role of commercial actors, the types of data (raw, processed, analyzed), and provides suggestions to further develop and improve mechanisms for sharing such vital data.