The Shetland Islands are the northernmost landmass of the British Isles. Shetland's sense of otherness and distance from mainstream and mainland Scotland is accentuated by its Norse heritage. Geographical isolation and Norse influences were widely credited with influencing Shetland's 'otherness'. The otherness of Shetland was primarily an outsider's perspective, one of educated visitors whose standpoint was located somewhere else. This chapter analyses the extent to which demographic and economic factors influenced women's experience. In the late twentieth century Shetland experienced an economic and demographic resurgence which made it unlike many other parts of Scotland, where economic decline, incorporating the collapse of traditional heavy industries and the crisis of community, was a common theme. The Scottish east coast has witnessed the gradual decline and more recent collapse of the fishing industry.

This chapter takes a look at the most sustained work on the intertextual relationships between Beckett's television drama and other work by him and by others. It examines the association between authored television drama with discourses of ‘quality’, and discusses some matters of visual design, music and literary reference in television plays. It discusses the relationship between uses of visual space in Beckett's television plays and Film and his theatrical works. It also addresses some questions of performance related to ‘theatricality’ and the prevalent motif identified by Beckett critics of increasing formal simplicity or minimalism in his theatre.

The relationship between party autonomy and market regulation has been analysed extensively for consumer law and regulated industries. It seems to be a common understanding that European contract law in this area is predominantly characterised by a regulatory approach and consequently contains a regulated construction of party autonomy.1 In his chapter, Stefan Grundmann traces this relationship between party autonomy and regulation conceptually and he does so in a historically thoughtful and ambitious manner.2 He identifies three core regulatory phases, which are black-, red-, and green-box regulation, which, in other publications, he saw equally occurring in European company law.3 The black box refers to regulation to foster the functioning of the internal market, the red box to that for the internal empowerment of actors, and the green box to that for the pursuit of broader societal goals, such as sustainability.

European contract law has now followed a trajectory of 40 years at least, assuming its true beginnings are to be traced back to the directives of the mid-1980s, perhaps the most powerful being the Consumer Credit Directive (1985). One could see it as being even longer, for instance including Dassonville (1974) and Cassis de Dijon (1979) too, or shorter, but certainly and powerfully beginning in the 1990s at the latest, with the Unfair Contract Terms and the (Consumer) Sales Directives (1993/1999). Over this period, up until the present day, it has solidified as a reality impacting significantly on the legal systems of the Member States, profoundly transforming them. Some of contract law's provisions, starting with the 1993 Directive on Unfair Contract Terms, can undoubtedly be considered the frontier of the most significant change in private law since World War II.

Consumer transactions are ubiquitous and highly varied. They encompass everyday transactions, like buying groceries or supplies from Amazon.com, occasional commitments such as fitness club memberships and dating app subscriptions, and sporadic, substantial ones like purchasing a car.

As consumers move their lives online, they navigate numerous websites, often agreeing to Terms of Use, Privacy Policies, and Cookie Notices. Regardless of their frequency or magnitude, these transactions share one thing in common: an asymmetry between sellers, or content providers, and consumers.

This asymmetry is concerning, as sellers, equipped with superior information, sophistication, and experience, may engage in exploitation, especially online. Sellers can monitor consumers’ online activities and design their websites in ways that take advantage of this information. This can lead to consumers unknowingly paying hidden fees, signing up for unwanted services, or buying less valuable products. Unfortunately, some websites are designed to confuse or tempt consumers instead of helping them to understand these complexities. The details of most of these transactions are often buried in the fine print, making them hard for consumers to find and understand.

Geoffrey Hill has frequently drawn attention to Milton's formulation ‘simple sensuous and passionate’ to describe the distinctive character of poetry. Undeniably, for the reader, the drawing together from the uncountable range of possibilities of a number of words that simply present themselves as ‘right’ seems not only a beauty but a mystery beyond the laws of logic or rhetoric. It is in part because Geoffrey Hill's work, in poetry and prose, is in perpetual struggle with ‘plain speaking’ that he is drawn to write so often on seventeenth-century subjects.

The concept of ‘globalisation’ has become ubiquitous in British politics, as in many countries of the world. The main political parties all subscribe to the view that globalisation is happening and that it matters. This book surveys the ideological landscape through the empirical lens of foreign economic policy. This chapter introduces the key aims of the book and the five case studies of actors engaged in making and contesting foreign economic policy in Britain. The cases are: New Labour; International Financial Services, London (IFSL); The Liberal Democrats Oxfam; and The Socialist Workers' Party (SWP).

The Liberal Democrats are the UK's third party at Westminster: they currently have fifty-seven MPs, less than 10 percent of the House of Commons. Despite the fact that they are currently in coalition government with the Conservatives, their third party status is reflected in the relative lack of attention paid to the party, hence less is known about the party's organisation, policies and personnel compared to the Labour and the Conservative parties. This introductory chapter establishes both the national and international context within which the themes of this book — the descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation of women by the Liberal Democrats — are examined. As such, it addresses five key areas: it provides a brief overview of the Liberal Democrats in respect of contemporary electoral politics in the UK; considers inter-party comparisons of women's representation; situates this research within an international context by comparing the number and percentage of Liberal Democrat women MPs with other liberal parties from Europe; outlines the main contentions of the research; and explores the various approaches to the concept of representation that underpin this study.

This chapter describes the mobilisation of Chagos islanders in Mauritius. Chagossian groups have historically been united concerning their desired ends, with a shared focus on compensation and the right to return to the Chagos Archipelago. Competing Chagossian groups have, however, disagreed on whether negotiation or litigation is the best means to achieve these aims. The chapter outlines these tensions before focusing on the ideological and pragmatic disagreements within and beyond the community concerning two key issues. The first is debates about whether Chagos should be under British or Mauritian sovereignty. The second is debates about the legitimacy or otherwise of the US military base on Diego Garcia, which is seen by some as a necessary opportunity for employment and by others as conflicting with their visions for the resettlement of Chagos.