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The Rub al-Khali desert, the largest contiguous sand desert in the World, occupies over 700,000 km2, most of the central and south Arabian Peninsula.

Opening with an anecdote of the author’s first encounter with a coin-tree, this chapter details why this book was written and the methodology of data collection. It places the book within a wider corpus of material and research, exploring the variety of scholars who have deemed trees ‘good to think’. Following this is an outline of how the book draws on sources and methodologies from history, folklore and material culture studies in order to employ the coin-tree as a microhistoric exemplar for investigating the longue duree of ritual landscapes in Britain and Ireland from 1700 to the present. This chapter sets out the book’s primary aim of contributing to the important debate on the historic relationships between landscape, religion, ritual and popular magic.

When the last witchcraft trial was held at Leicester, England, in 1717,1 around 500 people, mainly women, had been executed during the previous 150 years. This figure represents just over 1% of the estimated 40,000 people put to death for witchcraft in Europe between 1400 and 1800, a period when England held 5% of the total European population.2 Taking into consideration that early modern Scotland held roughly a quarter of the population of England, Scottish witch-hunting was 12 times more intense: of the 3,837 people tried for witchcraft, around two-thirds were convicted and executed.3 Put another way, and if we take historian Julian Goodare’s slightly higher figure of 2,500 executions, Scottish witch-hunting was five times more intense than the European average.4 Recent academic studies suggest that prosecution and execution rates in Ireland failed to reach double figures.5

Via examination of three performance projects marking Great War anniversaries and on which Newall worked, she interrogates commemoration as a phenomenon in which the sacred is experienced by creators and audiences, in process and product. This is compared to a phenomenological epoche, and positioned as ostranenie or de-familiarisation. The first discussion concerns connection and community consensus in Chester theatre company, Theatre in the Quarter’s production Silent Night. The second discussion concerns re-enactment and authenticity in the company’s Over By Christmas. The third discussion concerns the missing and unknown via Newall’s own multi-media installation, Remember Me. The chapter concludes with reflection on the emotional impact that occurs in such connection.

In 2013 NuPECC celebrated its 25th birthday. A quarter of a century of continuous and successful work of this expert board clearly deserves special attention and a moment of reflection. On this occasion, a ceremony was organiszd in Kraków on 11 October 2013 in the presence of a number of NuPECC chairs—Juha Äystö, Angela Bracco, Brian Fulton, Sydney Galès, Muhsin Harakeh, Günther Rosner—the present NuPECC members (see http://www.nupecc.org/index.php?display=staff/list), and our permanent scientific secretary Gabriele-Elisabeth (Sissy) Körner (Figure 1). Sissy Körner, who has been connected with NuPECC from the very beginning, deserves special thanks for her dedication and efforts over the years that have been essential to carry out the mission and activities of NuPECC with success.

During the long nineteenth century new paradigms of organised and professional crime were framed through the changing prosecution of fraud and forgery, coining and other forms of financial crime. As previous chapters have argued, the records provide only fragmentary evidence of criminal networks and confederacies, suggesting that the existence of organised criminal gangs is far from clear-cut. However, from this period, in the records of the police, the press and the writings of social investigators, a language evolved that described gangs of swindlers, coiners and fraudsters through the rhetoric of criminal organisation, perpetuating an increasingly dramatic shadow world of professional criminals. From the later eighteenth century, financial crimes were seen as increasing in pace with the growth of commerce and banking in the metropolis. Thus, in 1796 Patrick Colquhoun lamented, ‘It is not to be wondered at in a country where commerce and manufactures have arrived at such a height, and where from the opulence of the people the interchange of property is so extensive, that forgeries and frauds should prevail in a certain degree.’2

This chapter examines the genetic imaginary of computer-generated imagery depicting microscopic entities or interior bodily spaces. Bull shows that this type of digital animation has a particularly long and prominent history on television, tracing its use in science documentaries such as Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Ascent of Man, and The Human Body, and across the forensic crime drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and the hospital procedural House M.D. Coining the term ‘microscopic CGI’, Bull analyses the play with size and scale in such visual effects, arguing that the accentuation of smallness contributes to a cultural process of geneticisation. Finally, she considers what impact TV’s oppositional tendencies towards pedagogic simplicity and spectacular televisuality has had on microscopic CGI and its figuration of the DNA molecule.

At the close of the nineteenth century and during the first quarter of the twentieth century the advocacy of Rufus Isaacs, Edward Carson, F. E. Smith and Edward Marshall Hall, who frequently opposed each other in court in greatly publicized cases, was an important influence on other barristers of that period and beyond. The first three were heirs of Giffard, Holker, Russell and Clarke, but who advanced further the art of their ancestors, employing a deceptively conversational or low-key approach and conducting carefully planned, often deadly, cross-examinations. They also eschewed long and emotive closing speeches. Marshall Hall’s advocacy, on the other hand, with its blatant appeal to emotion, sometimes sprinkled in tears, fell within the tradition of nineteenth century histrionic advocacy.