This chapter collates some of the existing criticism of Peter Carey's work in relation to the political concerns of his fiction, and it gives a summary of the positions outlined in reviews of the individual volumes of fiction. Much early criticism of Carey concentrated on the fantastic and weird elements in his stories. Brian Edwards's Derridean-influenced article examines Carey's post-modern exploration of construction and bricolage particularly through a focus on language and writing. In his thorough treatment of the storytelling theme in Bliss, A. J. Hassall compares the book with David Malouf's Child's Play, which he sees as an example of a post-modern fiction abandoning the referential, whereas, Carey avoids doing that despite playing 'elegant metafictional games'. In her elliptical and condensed manner, Karen Lamb takes the responses to Illywhacker as symptomatic of the contradictions in Carey's literary ascendancy.

This chapter portrays Clarke's ‘voice’ as a filmmaker, and reveals the ‘voices’ that his productions articulated. It discusses Clarke's interrogations relating to the state and media discourses within the discursive framework of academic writing, and acknowledges the extent to which these voices have been expressed latently. The way that Clarke articulates the ‘political dilemma’ is also discussed. The Thatcherite discourses, which Clarke documented, ultimately silenced the kind of drama with which he was associated. Eventually, directors gained more influence than writers, as drama shifted to a more visual form of storytelling. Finally, the chapter uses analytical tools to unpick Clarke's contribution to their style and form, and to attempt to understand their effects. Clarke died on 24 July 1990. Many of his collaborators and admirers have argued that his technique of making radical plays died with him.,

This chapter presents a case study on the European Union's (EU) influence on the intercommunal conflict in Cyprus. It provides an overview of the conflict and maps out integration strategies implemented over the course of the EU–Cyprus relationship. It traces the early stages of Association Agreement in 1973, EU accession in 2004 and the resumption of intercommunal talks in 2008. This chapter argues that the null hypothesis on the EU's involvement in the Cyprus conflict, associating its impacts on conflict resolution with only marginal or random effects can be rejected.

This chapter explores Anglo-Jewish incidents and characters in Jack Rosenthal's television plays. The two plays, The Evacuees and Bar Mitzvah Boy, represent elements of Anglo-Jewish life using different techniques. While The Evacuees presents Jewishness and Englishness separately, Bar Mitzvah Boy derives its comedy from a British–Jewish synthesis, a difference that is partly due to dramatic imperatives. As its title suggests, The Evacuees is about urban Jewish life as it is forced into interaction with a more rural gentile world. The dialogic representation of Jewish life in Britain in Rosenthal's plays arises necessarily from the diasporic nature of the community. Voices are characterised by the accents of at least two cultures. In general, Rosenthal's Anglo-Jewish plays reverse the historian Colin Richmond's remark that Englishness is always equated with non-Jewishness. Instead, Rosenthal shows that Englishness may be expressed as Jewishness.

This chapter focuses on the sea and coast, which appears to defy expression. It notes that descriptions of the sea are usually lacking in the very texts one might expect to find them. It then determines that much of one's view of the sea depends both imaginatively and literally on having a coast from which to view it. It shows that the effects of the sea on writers who live close to it are not always beneficial and studies peoples' highly ambiguous relations with the sea.

As two of the longest-serving prime ministers in Europe, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern had a profound impact on both the national and European stage. Their decade in power coincided with perhaps one of the most tumultuous periods of European integration, with no less than two successful rounds of treaty reform, a stalled Constitutional Treaty process, and two ratification crises. This book explores the way in which both leaders responded to the demands and opportunities of European Union (EU) membership by profoundly reshaping their domestic European policy-making processes in order to further their strategic policy agendas. By employing highly innovative conceptual and analytical frameworks, the book considers what these reforms tell us about the causal impact of European integration on national policy-making processes. It hypothesises that the EU policy process within the UK and Ireland underwent extensive reconfiguration between 1997 and 2007. It also seeks to test the proposition that the reforms to the UK and Irish European policy-making process enhanced the capacity of their respective governments to project national EU policy.

In his three novels, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) and The Wasted Vigil (2008), Nadeem Aslam fuses conventional postcolonial themes and literary techniques with a distinctly British sensibility. Born in Pakistan in 1966, he came with his parents to Britain at the age of fourteen, where the family settled in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, and has described himself as ‘a Pakistani man living in Britain’. Yet, elsewhere, Aslam is described as ‘Pakistani-British’. This personal history embodies his dual positioning as both British Asian and postcolonial migrant author. In many senses, Aslam, rather than embodying the qualities of British Asian literature, is part of the publishing storm surrounding postcolonial writers that developed in the 1990s. He is evidence of how, to consider British Asian authors simply in relation to an ethnic literature (whether defined as British Asian, Black British or postcolonial) is to neglect wider paradigms in contemporary literary fiction: not just British, but also international.

1. Aim of the chapter – The previous chapter demonstrated why the duty of non-assistance is advanced in this book as a potentially adequate legal basis for mandatory home state regulation of potentially harmful private business conduct in or pertaining to illegally occupied territories, as well as how this customary obligation is traditionally shaped in terms of ratio legis, nature, scope and content. Building on these findings, the current chapter turns to the issue of whether this obligation – which is initially conceptualised as a negative obligation – may also include a positive component, obliging states and competent international organisations not only to refrain from certain conduct, but also to take positive action to protect against potentially harmful conduct of private entities, such as businesses. In this context, we recall this book's central research issue, which seeks to examine to what extent the customary duty of non-assistance imposes on home states and competent international organisations a positive obligation to ensure that their private corporate nationals do not render aid or assistance to the maintaining of illegal occupations and, if existing, what such a positive obligation would entail. Before addressing the possible nature, scope and content of such a positive obligation (see infra Chapter 7 and 8), we must, thus, first verify whether a positive component may be read into the duty of non-assistance and, if so, on what legal arguments such contention rests. As such, this chapter aims to give an overview of the different “legal techniques” available under international law to substantiate that the duty of non-assistance, apart from its negative reading, also contains a positive component.

This book provides a discrete analysis of Military Service Tribunals. The Appeals Tribunal files and supplementary material, now held at Northampton Record Office, constituted the principal primary sources for this book. The book explores the character, functions and developing policies of the county's Tribunals generally, and of the Appeals body in particular. It then investigates how the idiosyncrasies impacted upon the consideration of cases, and, in consequence, upon local Tribunals' relationships with the Appeals body, in whose hands laid responsibility for the correction of aberrant decisions. ‘Sovereignty’ is the unifying theme of this book. Its expression within the Tribunal process evaluates the interplay of government intention, the practical application of legislation and the Tribunals' appreciation of their relative responsibilities to nation and community.

This book began with the idea that New Labour's approach to Africa represented something different from foreign policy as usual. It considered the notion that under New Labour, Britain's policy in Africa was ‘different from politics as usual’. It explored what an engagement with Africa might mean, how it is imagined and described by state actors, and how it helps constitute their conceptions of their own political work and their sense of the work and identity of the British state. Emile Durkheim's theory on the role of religion within communities provided a first, useful way to help construct an idea of the ways in which a sacred or pure activity is a vital component of the ethical health of the community. This chapter suggested that Durkheim's ideas have an affinity with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's depiction of the idea of the good state. Throughout, the idea of utopia has constantly arisen—utopia as a representation of unhappiness with political reality and as an aspiration to perfection.

This introductory chapter discusses the objective of this volume, which is to analyse how the United Nations (UN) conceptualise democracy and how far does a UN concept of democracy reach. This volume explores the process of agenda-development and identifies the drivers of the democracy agenda to understand the context in which an idea is shaped. It examines the role of the UN Secretary-General as norm entrepreneur in the conceptualisation of democracy. It also explores the extension of the concept of democracy of UN governance and discusses the concept of developmental democracy.