Stockport was in many ways typical of the many Lancashire and Cheshire towns which during the 1930s were emerging from the years of depression, as dynamic centres of industry with competitive aspirations for modern structures of health-care, education, housing and leisure. Slum clearance, municipal housing estates, a purer water supply and improved leisure facilities were all part of an agenda which Stockport's councillors shared with their urban peers throughout the northwest. It must have been around this time that the idea of providing homes for children gave way to that of providing a refugee hostel. A combination of municipal policy and private enterprise sought also to strengthen Stockport's role as a major market place for the population of rural Cheshire and Derbyshire. Of all these changes, the leading families of Stockport's tiny Jewish community, said to comprise only 350 individuals in 1939, were amongst both the promoters and the beneficiaries.

Democracy', as a description of the institutions and processes required for an appropriate degree of accountability to be maintained over time, has been successful largely. The success is because of its ability to accommodate a wide range of interests within a relatively stable political environment. Identity politics can be viewed both as an outgrowth of liberal thought and as a critical response to it. This chapter discusses current controversies within the field of democratic theory. An ambiguity of democracy concerns the extent to which the undesirable outcomes ought to be addressed and mitigated or tolerated and accepted. The function of democracy is to ensure the diffusion of power by stipulating that each citizen has the ability to influence the outcome of political decision-making. As Richard Tuck has shown, the modern account of 'human rights' is firmly grounded in a narrower base of property rights.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the origins of Ulster Unionist militancy from 1885-1912. It considers the social composition and political ideology of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). The book also considers the command structures of the UVF and the force's military efficiency. It then looks at the public face of the UVF. In terms of command and control, discussion is required of the extent to which the UVF remained under the political direction of Ulster Unionist politicians and, indeed, the Conservative leadership in Britain. The book also looks at the related issues of finance, arms and equipment. It deals with the contribution of the UVF to the 36th Division. The book presents the brief revival of the UVF in 1920 and its amalgamation into the Ulster Special Constabulary.

In order to hold someone liable for the tort of negligence, it is not enough for the plaintiff to establish that, first, the defendant owed them a duty of care and, second, the defendant breached that duty by failing to meet the requisite standard of care. A further requirement for the imposition of negligent liability is that the plaintiff suffered legally recognised damage as a result of the defendant’s breach of their duty. This is the third necessary requirement of a successful claim in negligence. Once it is proved, the plaintiff’s cause of action is complete. It therefore comprises the third and final stage of a negligence inquiry.This chapter focuses on this requirement. It breaks it down into three distinct questions: (1) Has the plaintiff suffered damage that is actionable in negligence, or has the law yet to recognise such damage? (2) Is the plaintiff’s (legally recognised) damage causally related to the defendant’s breach of their duty of care? And (3) Ought the full extent of the plaintiff’s damage be within the scope of the defendant’s liability to compensate for it?

‘The Poverty of Theory’ could not avoid being an exercise in Marxology. Edward Palmer Thompson makes it abundantly clear throughout ‘The Poverty of Theory’ that he does not accept Louis Althusser and his followers' claims to be ‘completing’ Marx's thought. Perry Anderson believes that the Marxological sections of ‘The Poverty of Theory’ represent the ‘most novel’ part of the whole essay. He also perceives that Thompson is afraid of the prospect of economic reductionism. It is shown that Thompson's invocation of Marx's late work has an important place in his account of Marx's career. The reading of Marx that Anderson and many others considered eccentric and obviously mistaken has proved remarkably resilient. The ambivalence in Whigs and Hunters about the role and value of the law reflects a wider ambivalence in Thompson's thought about the status of Britain's traditional legal and political institutions.

The Maronite college, founded by Pope Gregory XIII in 1584, was one of a number of 'national' colleges created in Rome in the early modern period. It was intended to accommodate young Maronite Christians, who were near-eastern Catholics of the ancient patriarchate of Antioch, and lived in Arabic provinces of the Ottoman Empire, under Islamic jurisdictions. After the Council of Trent, and especially during the pontificate of Gregory XIII, the Roman Catholic Church, partly in response to the reformers, mounted a remarkable world-wide missionary operation. In 1622, Pope Gregory XV created the Congregation of Propaganda Fide, a ministry of the Roman curia charged with the jurisdiction of missionary activities in non-Catholic jurisdictions. The educative project of the Maronite college, explained in a memorandum of the eighteenth century, had two objectives: students were to practise Christian piety and learn the soundest human sciences.

In the 1980s and 1990s, at the height of the so-called 'theory wars' between traditional and theoretical approaches to literature, the notion of close reading was treated with great suspicion. It is perfectly possible to read poetry without reference to any specified literary theory. The use of theory can help us to appreciate and enjoy poetry and see unfamiliar aspects of it. To illustrate this, this chapter discusses three poems about women. The three poems show women working in 'extreme' occupations, raising issues about 'gender roles', among other things. The three poems are 'The Peepshow Girl', 'The Interview with the Knife-Thrower's Assistant' and Gun Girl Chicago 1929. As a way of reading this poem with theory, the chapter draws upon works of art history, art theory, literary theory, film theory or feminist theory.

This chapter establishes the extent to which the four sets of explanations of electoral fortunes may account for the performance of right-wing extremist parties in Western Europe. It is suggested that the type of ideology right-wing extremist parties embrace, the organization and leadership of the parties, and the different patterns of party competition at work in the various political systems under investigation are all likely to be important factors in an overall explanation for the variation in the right-wing extremist party vote. Party ideology is also significant in an overall explanation for the variation in the right-wing extremist party vote. The electoral laws governing access to the ballot, the broadcast media and state subventions play no role in an overall account of the uneven electoral fortunes of the West European parties of the extreme right. A substantial factor in the success of extreme right-wing parties is beyond the influence of established politics.

The fight for national independence between 1919 and 1921, followed by a civil war from 1922 to 1923, threw the Irish public health system into chaos. A constant theme throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s was how the standard of maternity and child welfare services varied throughout the country. Dublin was exceptional for its highly advanced maternity services centred on the three voluntary maternity hospitals: the Rotunda, the Coombe and the National Maternity Hospital. During the 1920s there was a growing conviction that maternal mortality could be reduced with more efficient prenatal care. The issue of birth control or family limitation was consciously avoided in relation to maternity care in Ireland. While maternal mortality remained a major issue throughout the 1920s and 1930s, infant mortality began to supersede it in the hierarchy of official concern.

This chapter considers how time and place are represented in poetry. It presents two well known Victorian elegiac poems, one by Tennyson, and one by Matthew Arnold. The chapter investigates the precise nature of certain poetic effects. Tennyson's In Memoriam sequence, comprising 133 poems, was written over a period of 17 years following the death of his university friend Arthur Hallam. Matthew Arnold's poem 'Thyrsis' was written in memory of his friend and fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough, with whom he had shared his undergraduate years at Oxford. The elegy is in many ways a puzzling form of poetry, but a key motif is always to seem to want to suspend time and circumstance. The unsettling of notions of time and place in poetry is particularly marked in the case of elegiac poems, for the dichotomy between absence and presence is also deconstructed as a consequence of the chronotopic disturbance.

In the face of an increasing number of refugees reaching Manchester, the Quaker ISC could not justify any more than the Jewish community, what was at best a haphazard response to their needs. On 20 October 1938, the ISC declared itself ‘seriously concerned with the need to help the increasing number of refugees in this country’. The sense of a ‘refugee crisis’ had been developing since the Anschluss in March 1938. The most likely explanation, as it had been earlier in the case of the Jewish response, was pressure exerted from London. In the European capitals from which Kindertransports set out, Quakers helped families find places for their children, took part in organisational work, saw off children whose parents were barred from platforms, accompanied transports to Harwich, and arranged for the children to be met and befriended in London and Manchester.

From detailed study of a number of Burley’s texts ranging from William Browne’s epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke to Overbury’s prose ’Characters’, the proposition that many such texts were inscribed from memory is developed. Memorised texts have hitherto normally been mistrusted as sources of authority, but it is shown here how they may indeed be closer to the original than some scribal copies. The implications of this possibility for the establishment of ‘best’ texts for some literary works are discussed, and it is concluded that Burley has something to offer in this regard, particularly for several of the works of John Donne. A discussion of the role of memorisation in Renaissance education shows that to memorise with reasonable accuracy even long prose texts would have required neither prodigious skill nor abnormal behaviour on the part of either the scribe or the person providing the copy-text for or dictating what the scribe wrote.

Towards the end of 1973 republicans were forecasting that 1974 would be the ‘Year of Liberty’ and mark the defeat of British imperialism. In a little over a year the Provisionals agreed a truce with the British. This chapter will examine the strategy of the republican movement in this period . It will consider the thesis put forward by Ed Moloney in history of the IRA that this period was characterised by the organisation being on the military defensive while it was deeply divided over the possibility of negotiations with the British. It will argue that by this time although the IRA was on the defensive in Belfast, its position in rural and border areas, sustained by a developed infrastructure of support in the rest of Ireland made it a more formidable threat than the Moloney thesis allows.