This chapter of the New History, co-ordinated with considerable skill and diligence by Fenella Bazin and Martin Faragher, not only addresses the gamut of cultural behaviour on the Island but also stresses the interactive flow between various forms of cultural expression – cosmopolitan, popular, indigenous and ethnic. Taken together, the individual expert contributions add much to our understanding of the complex cultural and social history of the Island, as embodied not only in art and learning but also in attitudes, beliefs, associations and ordinary behaviour – the ways of being, speaking, thinking and acting that guide and shape life. In accordance with the major theme of the volume, particular attention is accorded to the representational: forms of consciousness, images, myths and conceptual schemes – the cultural idioms through which Manxness was constructed, expressed and contested. As this chapter attests, there were bewildering cultural choices and trajectories for the Manx, particularly when confronted with the tourist influx at its height. Without abandoning ‘high’ and polite cosmopolitan norms, the gentlemanly antiquarians of the ‘Manx renaissance’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries girded themselves against cultural anglicisation through assertion of ethnic Celticism, a project which tended to downgrade Norse contributions to the Island's past. Others retreated into an indigenous culture of frugality and abstinence, the Manx ‘way of life’ sustained through Methodist fellowship and rural self-sufficiency. Some, however, openly joined the visitors from ‘across’ in common enjoyment of the latest delights of commercial popular culture.