Chapter 1 concentrates on the extent to which the relative fluidity of belief that was tolerated prior to the late 1540s in Italy was manifested visually. It analyses cases of artists who embraced theological ideas that would later be deemed doctrinally unacceptable by the Catholic Church, highlighting the complexities of reading heterodox meanings into their output.

Summarizes the industrial policies of Britain since World War II, especially how Britain failed because it lacked an economic theory of what industrial policy was for, and had weak institutions for implementing such policies.

This chapter presents an up-to-date overview of what we know about contemporary grammatical variation in England, drawing on a range of sources such as traditional and variationist dialectological investigations, as well as those using new technologies such as smartphone apps and Twitter feeds. It begins with an assessment of how common the use of non-standard morphosyntax is vis à vis Standard English, before presenting a well-cited list of the most widespread features that are claimed to be found right across the country. The chapter then describes contemporary non-standard grammatical variation in England, examining, in turn: verbs, negation, adverbs, prepositions, plural marking, pronouns, comparison forms, articles and conjunctions. Beyond an account of contemporary morphosyntactic variability, this survey also helps us to locate those linguistic features and those geographical areas about which we hold very little up-to-date information, and, in the light of reports of widespread traditional dialect levelling, points to those non-standard features whose vitality appears to be precarious.

At the end of 1939, the newly established 18th Infantry Brigade consisted of four battalions: 2/9 Battalion, 2/20 Battalion, 2/11 Battalion and 2/12 Battalion. As part of the 9th Infantry Division, the brigade was scheduled to depart Australia in May 1940 to join the British campaigns in the Middle East. In honour of this impending deployment, the 18th Brigade participated in a parade through the streets of Sydney, minus one battalion because the 2/11 Battalion had been detached to leave early for action in the Middle East.1 With the impending reorganisation of Australian brigades from four to three battalions, the 2/11 Battalion would not return to the 18th Brigade for the duration of the war. The 2/11 Battalion would, however, join the 19th Brigade in North Africa to participate in more than a dozen battles and campaigns across North Africa, the Middle East and the SWPA.

This chapter explores London as a site of sexual pleasure and danger in the nineteenth century, a period during which as an imperial centre it became the world’s largest city. Focused on the complex sexual landscape of this urban environment, it examines sexual activity in both private and public spaces including homes, theatres, public houses, pleasure gardens, royal parks, and toilets, paying particularly attention to the ways in which social class determined the personal experiences of sexuality in the Victorian era. Many of these acts were frequently monitored and policed and could result not only in moral censure but also in arrest, imprisonment, or public humiliation in places such as divorce courts. Most likely to run afoul of the law were those in the British metropolis who transgressed gender and sexual boundaries by working as prostitutes, cross-dressing, or engaging in intimate acts with members of their own sex. The sexual history of nineteenth-century London also involved the proliferation of a thriving and diversified trade in pornographic texts and images, ranging from erotic novels to photographic postcards. Central to this chapter are considerations of the ways in which sex and sexuality figured in economic life, urban geographic configurations, and various forms of self-fashioning.

This chapter concerns Lowell’s years in England and Ireland, his divorce from Elizabeth Hardwick, and third marriage to Lady Caroline Blackwood. It focuses on the controversy around the publication of The Dolphin (1973), which deals with these matters and damaged his reputation. It also concerns Lowell’s state of mind, his health, and his interaction with British university life and British poetry, although these were of less pressing concern to him than his relationships and his fierce commitment to his own poetry. The chapter begins with Lowell as a temporarily jaded public figure leaving America to take creative respite in England. During his time here, he reworks his Notebook to produce History and For Lizzie and Harriet, while newer sonnets appear in The Dolphin. Despite the more warmly received Day by Day (1977), the chaos in his marriage leads him to return to America and Hardwick, where he dies at age sixty.

In 1559/60 the parliaments of England, Ireland and Scotland proscribed the practice of Catholicism in their respective kingdoms and prescribed Reformed religious settlements in its place. By the end of the sixteenth century the English and the Scots had become nations of Protestants, but contemporary estimates of the number of Irish Protestants ranged between 40 and 120 individuals. Protestantism in Ireland was born of conquest and colonisation in the seventeenth century. Yet the remarkable contrast in the outcomes of the Reformation across the Atlantic archipelago was not predestined. England and Ireland shared the same Tudor monarchs and the Pale around Dublin was, in effect, an appendage of England. Nonetheless, while Elizabeth I’s religious settlement was a ‘runaway success’ in England it failed to win any significant support in Ireland. Indeed, because Irish women were particularly loath to embrace the new religion no self-sustaining community of Irish Protestants was spawned in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the Scots created a Reformed Church establishment despite the wishes of their monarch, Mary Stuart, queen of Scots. This chapter adopts a comparative approach to help explain the experiences of Reformation in England, Ireland and Scotland before 1603.

Chapter 6 explores the gradual development of English literary history to trace how the autonomous and performative being of the literary came to be enframed within the nation, and how literary texts were seen as unmistakable expressions of national spirit. Some of these ideas were first expressed as part of the literary sovereign paradigm, and were reinforced through the successive stages of its travel across geographies. After the initial impetus from the colonial administrators, the idea of the literary and the nation as conjoined entities in history received a further elaboration in two publications from 1808 – Friedrich Schlegel’s On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians and Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation. Both Schlegel and Fichte identified unbroken literary tradition as the most organic expression of a nation, and both advocated for a “literature” in vernaculars as the most legitimate ground for a national history. However, the bulk of this chapter traces the new discipline of literary history in England, from Thomas Warton’s The History of English Poetry (1774–81) to Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) and beyond.

The letter from king Edward I to Pope Boniface VIII, dated 1301, is preserved among the Close Rolls in the National Archives. In it Edward gives his version of the history of relations between England and Scotland during a period when this was a thorny issue. Edward believed that the king of England had rights over Scotland while the Pope thought he had jurisdiction over Scotland and repudiated English involvement. The letter gives an account of the early history of Britain reminiscent of that found in Geoffrey of Monmouth.