Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden both saw action and survived into the late twentieth century as successful men of letters whose styles were quite different. This chapter looks at their literary friendship and compares their work, clarifying where they stand in relation to the Georgians and other war poets, while putting them in a broader cultural perspective. It shows how experience of the trenches led them to twist traditional forms, and examines the stylistic and personal challenges they faced as survivors, their writings ever more retrospective. It argues that Blunden’s complexpoetry may feel archaic but has Modernist elements and has been unjustly neglected by comparison with Sassoon’s more accessible but less subtle verse. With close analysis and comparison, and some redefining of key texts, the chapter emphasises their contrasting approaches: Blunden the troubled pastoralist, exploring profounder shades of meaning; Sassoon deliberately ‘anti-poetic’, but with satirical designs on us.

No play of the period is more preoccupied with memorial artifice than John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi: especially striking are three episodes involving the Duchess herself. In the opening scene her wooing of Antonio is coloured by oddly disturbing references to ‘a winding sheet’ and to ‘the figure cut in alabaster / Kneels at my husband’s tomb’; while in Act 4, her murder is prefaced by a piece of macabre theatre, when Bosola enters in the guise of an old man, announcing himself a ‘tomb-maker’ whose ‘trade is to flatter the dead’. Advising the Duchess that ‘I am come to make thy tomb’, he proceeds to discourse on the iconographic niceties of ‘fashion in the grave’, before bringing her ‘By degrees to mortification’. But the tomb he promises never appears, becoming instead a conspicuous absence at the centre of the action. Focusing on the haunted graveyard of the Echo scene (5.3), the essay argues that this absence is closely bound up with the outpouring of grief that followed the death of the idolized Protestant hero, Prince Henry, and thus with the dissident politics on which Webster's great tragedy is grounded.

Death has traditionally been regarded in China as something to be prepared for, not as something to be feared, a taboo subject. As age came on grandmothers prepared for their end. If the family did not have a graveyard they arranged a grave site. They had a coffin made, of the most expensive wood they could afford. They ordered a set of grave clothes. The set aside money for the funeral. The division of property was done by customs; wills were not legal documents but moral exhortations to descedents.

In the Mao Era most of these practices were considered feudal and outlawed, in favour of cremation without ceremony. In the Reform Era many have come back, though cremation is encouraged. The dead live on. In the past they joined the ancestors. Now the focus is on commemorating individuals. At the Qingming Festival families remember the dead and provide them with paper replicas of what they may need in the afterlife.

In a breach with tradition, neither of China’s twentieth-century leaders has been buried. Mao Zedong lies in the centre of Tiananmen Square. Chiang Kai-shek is in a coffin in Taoyuan (Taiwan), waiting to be buried in his home town.

The author reflects upon graveyards and physical memorials to the dead as place markers for individuals, families and communities. Syncretic Indian culture in medieval and modern times, has revolved around graves as Muslim Sufi saints were venerated by all communities, and their attitude to power influenced the masses. However, there is a new political discourse where graveyards are set against up cremation grounds, as if the two were incompatible, suggesting that Hindus and Muslims/Christians were incompatible. This chapter is about the divisive discourse and its impact on memory and attachment for communities who count upon a physical, emotional and spiritual attachment to the land

Evidence for violence and organised warfare in Iron Age Europe is varied and abundant, but it is not clear how frequently large-scale conflict occurred. Weapons, including especially swords, spears and lances, are common in graves and deposits. Defensive weapons, such as shields, helmets and body armour, also occur but are less common. The fortification of hilltops for defensive purposes is characteristic in much of Iron Age Europe. Representations of warriors, including stone statues bearing arms and scenes of marching troops, show how the weapons were deployed by soldiers. Only a few actual battlefields have been investigated. Weapons and landscape defences surely played important symbolic roles in the Iron Age, but the extent of armed conflict is not yet fully clear.

Warrior graves or “burials with weapons” are a persistent feature of funerary archaeology in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, typically associated with the burials of prestigious men. However, their relationship with the heroic burials of epic is more complex, as these men are rarely buried with their weapons.

In this chapter discusses the relevant perioperative anesthetic concerns related to thyroidectomy surgery. Reviewed is Graves’ disease, electrolyte and anatomic considerations of thyroid surgery as well as the timeframe and pathophysiology in relation to surgery.

Material culture is the focus of the chapter 5. After a brief methodological discussion of the “archaeology of class,” where class is a subjective sociocultural category, this chapter examines material and literary evidence for class distinctions in tableware, oil lamps, dress, and burial customs. Each of these case studies shows that elites stimulated supraregional trade and local production by seeking out imported luxury items and new types of local products. At the same time that Judaean elites developed a distinctive class culture that incorporated Graeco-Roman influences, Judaean nonelites produced new forms of utilitarian items. The agency of nonelites in generating a distinctive class culture was generally inhibited, however, by their limited economic resources. These dramatic changes in the use of material culture, which began around 20 BCE and continued into the first century CE, were at least partially a function of Herod’s building projects and urban development.