Someone was trying to kill him. After the second assassination attempt, Sheik Kasim el Fotima of Alistar, found a place to hide out until he could get more information. In a BARN! That’s how he discovered the lovely owner of the barn, Rosalee Sedmund, and knew that his life would never be the same. Somehow he learned to sleep with cats on his chest, chinchillas around his head, and a donkey who thought he was in charge of the world! But how could he keep Rosalee safe from the people trying to hurt him? And how would he convince her that, while he was trying to discover the traitor, he’d fallen in love with her?

Literary and sociological studies have long been fascinated by the seemingly innocuous substance of sugar, not least because of its direct link with the histories of slavery in the New World. Unlike previous texts, Slaves to Sweetness examines not only traditional, classic studies of the history of sugar, but also explores the previously ignored work produced by expatriate Caribbean authors from the 1980s onward. As a result, this volume provides the most comprehensive account to date of the historical transformations undergone by our representations of sugar, making it a rich resource for scholars in numerous fields.

Late nineteenth-century France was a nation undergoing an identity crisis: the uncertain infancy of the Third Republic and shifting alliances in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War forced France to interrogate the fundamental values and characteristics at the heart of its own national identity. Music was central to this national self-scrutiny. It comes as little surprise to us that Oriental fears, desires, and anxieties should be a fundamental part of this, but what has been overlooked to date is that Britain, too, provided a thinking space in the French musical world; it was often – surprisingly and paradoxically – represented through many of the same racialist terms and musical tropes as the Orient. However, at the same time, its shared history with France and the explosions of colonial rivalry between the two nations introduced an ever-present tension into this musical relationship. This book sheds light on this forgotten musical sphere through a rich variety of contemporary sources. It visits the café-concert and its tradition of ‘Englishing up’ with fake hair, mocking accents, and unflattering dances; it explores the reactions, both musical and physical, to British evangelical bands as they arrived in the streets of France and the colonies; it considers the French reception of, and fascination with, folk music from Ireland and Scotland; and it confronts the culture shock felt by French visitors to Britain as they witnessed British music-making for the first time. Throughout, it examines the ways in which this music allowed French society to grapple with the uncertainty of late nineteenth-century life, providing ordinary French citizens with a means of understanding and interrogating both the Franco-British relationship and French identity itself.