This chapter offers a utopian reading of the British science fiction subgenre of the cosy catastrophe. Coined by Brian Aldiss in 1973 as a pejorative term, the cosy catastrophe names a distinct group of English fictions written after World War II. Writers such as John Wyndham, John Christpher, Rose Macauley, J. G. Ballard, and Charles Eric Maine imagined apocalyptic disasters in which middle-class male protagonists ‘have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off’, as Aldiss put it. Whilst Aldiss dismissed such fictions as ‘devoid of ideas’, the chapter presents an alternative reading, arguing that cosy catastrophes offer powerful allegories of a distinctively English postwar sensibility. Within this curious narrative pleasure of a masochistic embrace of decline we can identify a paradoxical utopian longing for the dystopian smashing of systems. The chapter concludes that the cosy catastrophe is best understood as a cultural articulation of English declinism at the moment when decolonisation confronts postwar Britain.

This chapter considers the ambiguous utopian impulses of literary, filmic, and television works published and produced in the 1970s. Drawing on the concept of post-imperial melancholy, the chapter traces the utopian contours of these texts’ forceful, often shocking, critique of British imperial nostalgia. It focuses on sub-genres that emerged during this significant decade, including the British alternate history, the dystopia, and reworkings of the classical literary utopia, with reference to writers such as Daphne Du Maurier, Len Deighton, Anthony Burgess, Emma Tennant, Angela Carter, and J. G. Ballard. These three genres, the chapter argues, critically interrogate the utopian impulse in the 1970s and its possible instantiations in national and transnational imagined communities, as well as the built environment in which the modernity of these communities is expressed. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, identifying how this iconic 1970s punk film reframes the classical narrative structure of literary utopias.

Chapter 1 introduces the topic of historical abuses of states and churches. The chapter outlines the existing and related conceptions of justice that may inform a response to historical abuses and positions transitional justice as the dominant but flawed approach to addressing the violent aspects of the past. The third section considers the application of these justice approaches to the context of historical abuses of Western states and Christian churches. The final section previews the remaining chapters of the book.

This book explores how the world’s most powerful court told the story of history’s greatest empire. It traces how in the late fourteenth century the newly established Ming court (1368–1644) in China crafted a narrative of the fallen Mongol empire. The Ming court used this narrative to advance its military, political, and diplomatic objectives by shaping the perceptions and actions of audiences at home and abroad.