Remember the name Bahman Ghobadi, whose “children's film” Turtles Can Fly (2004) I have finally had the opportunity to see. As I watched this picture, I thought of two of its cinematic relatives, each of which shall frame my discussion of Turtles Can Fly. The first is Roberto Rossellini's neorealist film Germany, Year Zero (1947), in which a twelve-year-old boy, trying to feed his family amidst the destitution of occupied Berlin, poisons his sickly father (played by the only professional in the cast, Franz Kruger) to lessen the burden. Unable to live with the deed, however, he throws himself from the ruins of a tall building – but not before poignantly finding a moment to play (yes, play, not pray) before killing himself.

The second work I recalled, as I screened Turtles Can Fly, is the “new” neorealist West Beirut (1998), a film by Ziad Doueiri about two Muslim boys and a Christian girl (all played by young people who had never before acted) growing up in the war-torn Lebanon of 1975. Here they manage to tease, quarrel, idle, snack, and bicycle like their youthful counterparts everywhere, at the same time as they take risks – amidst bombed-out buildings, rubble-strewn streets, military checkpoints, and frequent sniper fire – that even the most intrepid of schoolchildren would have trouble imagining.

Terrifying monsters and semi-human creatures had traditionally inhabited the imagined underworld of hell throughout centuries of artistic representation in painting, sculpture and scripture. Through long-established mythologies, the undiscovered worlds of the southern hemisphere came to be associated with that underworld. The first examples of imaginary voyages to the antipodes appearing from the start of the seventeenth century deliberately blurred distinctions between Christian beliefs, pure fantasy and tentative facts, reflecting fascination with the idea that there may actually be a hell on earth or, indeed, a heaven on earth, in the unexplored southern regions. Some considered such expressions to be heretical. They were trespassing into the moral and spiritual spaces that had long been claimed by religious iconography. These literary works were not merely whimsical extravaganzas of the imagination; they were arenas for critical comment on politics, the church, social systems and customs of the day and, perhaps initially by chance, they also began to construct a moral framework for colonial expansion into the antipodes. At the same time, these early imaginary voyages laid the foundations for the literary genre's development, closely linked to real exploration but fundamentally a form of fiction.

Over the course of the seventeenth century, geographical discoveries in the region of present-day Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific added a new dimension to the myths and associations attached to the great southern continent of Terra Australis and its antipodean inhabitants.

The worldly life of Yasujiro Ozu (1903–1963) was, like that of many another artist, very worldly. This is especially true of film artists, for no one can live in a movie environment as in a Buddhist monastery. And no film director is likely to get the chance to achieve such “purity” as Ozu's (more on this term later) unless he can deal with the rather less pure circumstances that surround the making of all films.

Ozu entered films as an assistant in 1923, when he was twenty years old, assigned to a director of light comedy. He had been born in Tokyo but moved away with his mother while quite young. His father had remained in Tokyo to manage the family business, so Ozu grew up virtually fatherless – an interesting fact in light of the centrality of father figures in his later films. Sent to a boarding school, he did badly and was expelled. When he was in a prefectural (or public) middle school, he was dispatched to the city of Kobo to apply to a good high school. Instead Ozu went to a movie. He soon saw other films, by Thomas Ince and Rex Ingram, and later he said that, if he had not seen them, he might never have chosen the film profession.

But he did choose it, and, with the help of a friend of his father's, he got his first job. Ozu remained an assistant for four years.

As this book has attempted to demonstrate, in pre-Famine Ireland the average tour could involve two parallel tracks, the combination of which varied for each visitor. One track searched for the picturesque; the other for Ireland, or at least an understanding of Irish society. Curiosity about the people of a host country is, or should be, a proper part of any type of tourism. In the case of British visitors to Ireland, however, their tours contained an implicit imperative, even before the Act of Union. While the picturesque was often a convenient perceptual screen that could blur unpleasant realities, in Ireland reality frequently forced itself upon the traveler. In fact, as suggested several times throughout this study, the picturesque created preconditions whereby Irish problems, especially the country's poverty, were seen as a contradiction to Ireland's natural beauty. As a result, visitors frequently felt that something was “wrong” with Ireland.

Something was, indeed, wrong, and if visitors been willing to look more deeply and honestly into the history and nature of British-Irish relations, the sense of contradiction might have led to useful reforms. However, British blame fell too easily on Irish landlords and peasants. And questions of national character too often pushed aside the recognition of basic economic problems. Once the Famine took hold, both the government and the British public speedily abandoned effective relief and shifted the burden of aiding a starving peasantry onto the shoulders of the already strained Irish property class.

Known colloquially the world over as the land ‘down under’, Australia has a reputation as a place ‘so strangely different’, where the rules of nature are turned upside down. The stretching horizons, the flatness and the particular quality of light mean that, even now, many claim Australian spaces are somehow different. Apparent contradictions show themselves in contrasting stereotypes of Australia as the land of the lucky, of opportunity, of the endless summer, at the same time as being an underdog culture with roots in a penal colony past. In the nineteenth century, the term ‘antipodes’ came to be associated specifically with the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand.

• Vladimir Alpatov is a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Deputy Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow, Russia.

• Craig Brandist is Professor of Cultural Theory and Intellectual History, and the Director of the Bakhtin Centre at the University of Sheffield, UK.

• Katya Chown is Lecturer in Russian at Leeds University and Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Sheffield, UK.

• Kapitolina Fedorova is Assistant Professor at the Department of Ethnology of the European University at St. Petersburg, Russia.

• Michael Gorham is Associate Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Florida, USA.

• Viktoria Gulida is a Docent in the Philology Faculty of St. Petersburg State University, Russia.

• Mika Lähteenmäki is Senior Researcher in the Department of Languages at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

• Vladislava Reznik has worked as lecturer in Russian at Durham University and collaborated on a number of research projects at the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

• Michael Smith is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Purdue University, USA.

Some ‘mysterious transformation’ is said to have affected Westerners once they proceeded East of Suez. The view that experience of life in an alien Eastern country set travellers and expatriates apart from their fellow countrymen was common amongst those who reflected upon the effect on generations of Europeans of life in the Orient. So much was the East—West encounter perceived as leaving its mark on people's personality that those who had lived in the Orient for some time were regarded as a ‘distinct species’. Their peculiar views, attitudes and behaviour were both excused and explained by reference to life abroad and on return to Europe they were treated ‘either with awed bewilderment or humorous ridicule’. What sparked off this ‘mysterious transformation’ has since the eighteenth century been subject to speculation. Some assumed that it was the alien environment that was to blame, in that polite manners and sociable behaviour were ‘jungled out’ of those exposed to prolonged life in the tropical forests and arid plains of the Indian peninsula. Others were inclined to see the lack of ‘restraint of parents, relatives and friends’ as upsetting the mental balance and emotional inhibition of a number of those young, predominantly male, griffins, or green newcomers who, being ‘thrown together’ with others of their age, became ‘violent and intractable’.

‘Highly Irregular Conduct’ and ‘Neglect of Duty’

In early spring 1845, a young Indian Navy officer by the name of Edward Charles Z. was embarked on the Imam of Muscat on account of his deranged state of mind. Lieutenant Z. had been granted a sick certificate that entitled him to three years furlough in England. He had served on several of the Company's vessels in India since April 1830 and was put on the sicklist in July 1844 on return from a naval mission to the Persian Gulf. At that stage of his career the then 28 year-old was keen to see the last of duty in India and yearned to be allowed to proceed to Europe on sick leave. However, he was thwarted in this by Company authorities anxious not to worsen the navy's pressing manpower needs. Z. developed symptoms of ‘mania’ or, as the certifying doctor in Bombay put it, on the refusal of sick-leave ‘his mental symptoms seem to have supervened’.

Further investigation by a medical committee on the authenticity and severity of Z.'s mental symptoms revealed several earlier instances of odd behaviour recollected by fellow-officers. While on duty on one of the Company's receiving ships, for example, ‘his Conduct had attracted the notice of every one on board’. Not only did he walk ‘the deck night, and day successively’, but he also one morning ‘fancied that he was to be hanged at eight o'clock’ and ‘attended punctually for the purpose and behaved in the most extravagant manner, when the hour passed and his anticipation had not been realized’. It emerged that Z.

Now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, Some Like It Hot (1959) is still significant in four ways in American film history. It is the best film by the last European director to flourish in the United States. (Hollywood has seen two principal “waves” of European directors. The first group, including such men as Ernst Lubitsch and F. W. Murnau, were imported in the 1920s by an American industry that was jealous of European artistic advances and worried about commercial competition. The second group consisted of the political refugees of the 1930s.) It is the best film of the last great sex star created by Hollywood. It is the last of the carefree American comedies that sprang up when sound came in, bloomed through the thirties, and had a revival after World War II. And it is the last really good film farce produced in the United States to date. There have been new imitations of old farces, there have been new farces, but all are inferior to Some Like It Hot, in part because, unlike Billy Wilder's picture and all other great farces, cinematic or theatrical, they lack conviction in the moving body – running, sliding, hurtling, wheeling, bicycling, jumping, climbing, and falling – as a source of wonders.

The plot concerns Joe (played by Tony Curtis), a saxophone player, and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), a bass fiddler, both young and broke, who accidentally witness the Saint Valentine's Day massacre of one gang by another in Chicago in 1929.

Although modern tourism did not begin there, Ireland was among the first countries to be defined, at least in part, in terms of its scenic attractions. Between 1750 and 1800 the Lakes of Killarney, the Giant's Causeway and the Glens of Wicklow became internationally recognized tourist sites. By 1850, with the beginnings of the country's rail system, Ireland had developed a basic infrastructure required to support tourism. In fact, during the century following 1750, some 570 travel accounts about Ireland had been published, most of them produced by British and Anglo-Irish writers.

While these works take a variety of forms and reflect a multiplicity of interests on the part of their authors, many of them were shaped by the growing enthusiasm for sublime and picturesque scenery. While the already established British “Home Tour” influenced expectations among those who crossed the Irish Sea, the Irish Tour had its own attractions and challenges, providing a unique set of experiences for the British visitors. This study focuses on the emergence of tourism in Ireland and on the nature of the Irish tourist experience.

Irish tourism emerged on the cusp of significant changes in British travel and travel writing. These changes had already manifested themselves by the middle of the eighteenth century, as the Grand Tour was gradually overtaken by the picturesque “pleasure tour.” Not that the Grand Tour had lacked potential for pleasures—of almost every possible variety. However, pleasure was not supposed to have been its primary purpose.