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This chapter examines David Downes' contribution, through both Contrasts in Tolerance and his earlier paper to comparative criminology, especially in the context of the recent wave of studies. He stated that instructive comparisons of criminal justice policies have a long history. Contrasts offers a model case study despite the author's modesty about his achievement. It is also used as a link to study and evaluate the burgeoning range of work on comparative criminology and criminal justice. Discussion on the creation of taxonomy is provided. It is noted that Downes allowed himself some optimism about the Dutch penal model and its scope for transfer; today that system is seemingly in ruins, but the scope for conducting comparative criminological studies has never been greater.

This chapter explores two recent contributions to the flourishing debate about the history of criminal justice in modern societies so as to develop some ideas about how it can add to the structured, macro-level understanding which comparative studies also promise. It emphasizes James Q. Whitman's Harsh Justice and Markus Dirk Dubber's The Police Power. In line with this, it proposes that historical studies can usefully complement comparative research, can put questions on the agenda of comparative studies, and can fulfil some of the same explanatory and policy-relevant functions as comparative scholarship. A blend of Whitman's degradation hypothesis and of David Downes' interpretation may usefully be combined with the insights of recent political-economic analysis of comparative institutional advantage. It is argued that additional contributions to the genre of comparative scholarship exemplified by David Downes' Contrasts in Tolerance is important. In addition, the legitimacy of criminology or criminal justice studies as autonomous disciplines must be questioned.

This chapter examines the so-called contrast narrative, an unusual but influential historical genre in the early nineteenth century. It discusses the idea that historical thought involves a dialogue between two distinct moments but finds no acknowledgment in history's formal structure and the contradiction between history's conceptual underpinnings and its formal arrangements. The chapter also provides examples of contrasting narrative including Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present and Augustus Pugin's Contrasts which used doubled or ironic narratives for purposes of ideological critique.

This chapter discusses Béla Bartók's concerts and other musical activities during the years 1936–1938. Bartók gave several performances of his Second Piano Concerto in Britain and Holland in early 1936. The first was with Sir Henry Wood at the Queen's Hall in London. As he was appearing in Utrecht the following day, he travelled by air for the first time, flying to Rotterdam in a KLM Fokker XXII twenty-two-seater plane. He returned to England for a duo recital with Zoltán Székely in the Rushworth Hall, Liverpool and the Second Concerto in Birmingham, with the BBC Midland Orchestra conducted by Leslie Heward. He also delivered the inaugural lecture at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. This chapter also considers some of Bartók's compositions during the period, including Music for String Instruments, Percussion and Celesta; the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion; Contrasts; and the Second Violin Concerto.

Chapter 5, ‘Scalar: Pugin, Carlyle, Dickens’, is about scale. It looks in detail at three writers in London who produced very different versions of the ‘modern’ in the late 1830s and early 1840s, but all of whom realized that something very big indeed was happening around them. Across different genres, Augustus Welby Pugin, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens all chose to represent democracy and reform specifically as a problem of scale. This chapter investigates their understanding of the seriality and scalability of market capitalism and the anxieties and opportunities that this revealed to them. Each took a different view, from Carlyle’s apocalyptic denunciation of a massification which soars vertiginously between the gigantic and the tiny; to Pugin’s insistence on a built and material ethics of the human scale; and Dickens’s cautious optimism about this moment of scalar derangement and the redistribution of the sensible.