This introductory chapter examines the diversity revolution, which occurred when individuals were influenced by the pull of the rich world, thus causing an increase in immigration over the years, and studies the themes of race and immigration in the United States and Britain, presenting an outline of the following chapters. It also looks at Barack Obama's election as President of the United States, which possibly reflects a larger change in the treatment of America's minorities and immigrants.

This chapter emphasizes the views of Irigaray and Mary Daly, who allude to a future-perfect attainment of women. Future/past involves a form of recuperation and anticipation of an Archi/Archaic time whose movement of becoming is unceasing. This movement involves a refiguration of the status of otherness to which women have been consigned by what both specify as the patriarchal tradition. This reversal, or transvaluation of otherness, signals an attainment of a social independence and personal fulfillment for women in ways that reject a male God figure and his legitimation of women's inferiority as well as the sacrificial demands of patriarchal religions. For both Daly and Irigaray, God is no longer a noun, an object of masculine projections, stagnating in transcendent categories, nor is he aligned with the metaphysical category of being. They present imaginative evocations of an alternative mode of existence for women, including an amended mother/daughter relationship. Daly advocates that women, in ending their unconscious conscription into the ranks of patriarchy, claim an original wholeness and become consciously sufficient unto themselves. In contrast, Irigaray, while concerned with reforming women's affiliations in her early work, supports a revolution of the male/female bond, in a renegotiated form of heterosexual relationship.

This chapter describes the patterns of war in ancient Greece. Most ancient military campaigns were of relatively short duration because of the undeveloped nature of ancient supply procurement and the limitations of ancient transportation. Opposing parties often engaged in pitched battle where attackers went to the plains because it provided the most abundant sources of forage, while defenders often marched out to save their farms and livelihoods from devastation. This chapter also considers the claim that the farmers of the phalanx ensured that ideological constraints were placed on hoplite warfare.

The central argument of this book is that British foreign policy has been decisively shaped by the worldview and leadership style of Tony Blair during his time in office. Simply put, it argues that a convincing explanation of British foreign policy from 1997 to 2007 must take full account of the personality of Tony Blair. The book seeks to answer three crucial questions: What was Blair's foreign policy style and worldview? What difference did the Blair style make to British foreign policy choices during this period? What difference did Blair make to the outcome of events and the policies of others, especially the United States? An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter contains the text of The Annals of Fulda in full, translated and annotated by Timothy Reuter.

This chapter discusses Kelman's 1994 novel, How late it was, how late, which is voiced from Sammy Samuels' perspective and features the Hardie Street police station. It notes that this novel features Kelman's complex of resistances to the first person. The chapter describes Sammy as the first character through which Kelman celebrates the musicality of the Glasgow voice, one who shows an enriching evolution of Kelman's study of the relationship between sound and site, identity and speech, and locality and accent. It also takes a look at Sammy's poor literacy and the dynamics of the narrative, which are controlled by an active interpretation of space and sound, and examines the gap between textuality and orality.

This chapter presents a comparative reading of Dickens, Sheridan Le Fanu and Rudyard Kipling. It argues that the representations of mimicry challenge the notions of colonial authority. It shows that Dickens's American Notes uses a ghost in the account of solitary confinement at the Philadelphian state penitentiary to explain the feelings of isolation endured by a prisoner. The ghost stories of Le Fanu and Kipling, on the other hand, uses images of mimicry and laughter that problematise any attempt to give them a coherent colonial perspective.

Tony Blair's response to the September 11, 2001 attacks was one of unequivocal support for the United States, a framing of the situation in stark terms of good and evil, and elucidation of an ambitiously proactive foreign policy programme to prevent the re-occurrence of attacks of such magnitude. It was therefore quite consistent with the policy style rooted in Blair's personality traits that had crystallized during the Kosovo war. The period following September 11 saw the prime minister, with his foreign policy approach set, fully engaged on the world stage. He sought simultaneously to rally international support for the US whilst ensuring that the American response was a judicious one. The results did not, however, match his aims, and international support ebbed as concern over the scope and aggression of the US response mounted. Blair's basic strategy was in many ways a rational one of supporting the most powerful state in the system after it had been attacked, yet his instinct to be close to the US during this period sowed the seeds of the disastrous Iraq decisions.

This chapter features an analysis of the flaws of truth commissions based on a detailed theoretical examination of the contested notions of ‘truth’, and the moral and political justification for the creation and implementation of the machinery of state-sponsored historical enquiry, in order that instructive lessons for critically interpreting the past in Northern Ireland might be learned. It also seeks to outline the ways in which ostensibly ‘objective’ legal discourse has colonised the truth and justice project in transitional societies. This supposedly impartial template is in some cases the product of subjective and calculated political reflection, and it has often been imposed and used in a cynical fashion by governments and policymakers to obscure the ways in which post-violence partisan political dynamics manipulate and distort the possibilities for the recovery of inclusive and diverse truth.

The Cordeliers Club, which was established in the spring of 1790, grew out of the Cordeliers District—one of the sixty electoral districts of Paris that had been created to facilitate the elections to the Estates-General. It was one of the most radical of the revolutionary political clubs. Certain members of the Cordeliers Club were calling for a French Republic from as early as 1789, and in 1791, the Club was directly involved in the republican movement that emerged in the aftermath of the King's flight to Varennes. Moreover, the particular version of republicanism favoured by Club members was unusually democratic. In their pamphlets and speeches, they combined Rousseau's political theory with ideas drawn from the English republican tradition in order to create one of the first theories of modern democratic government in the Western world.

The origins of the Nordic welfare state were traced to the recessionary 1930s and 'historic compromises' between organisations representing the conflicting interests of capital and labour. This chapter examines the origins of the Nordic model and the process of welfare state-building in the region. It presents an ideal-type Nordic welfare model, which incorporates three analytically distinct components. First was the core welfare principles constituting the normative foundations of the model; second was the main features of the practical operation of the welfare state and third was the identification of desired policy outcomes. The chapter concentrates on the performance of the Nordic welfare model and the extent to which desired policy outcomes have been realised. It considers the challenges facing the Nordic welfare model in the years ahead, with particular reference to the exogenous forces of Europeanisation and globalisation and the internal pressures generated by demographic change.

The case of the comte de Mirabeau is typical of the more general picture of the influence of British models and ideas during the French Revolution. Mirabeau's attempt to impose a British-style constitutional monarchy in France, and to introduce other British practices, may not have been well received by his compatriots, but the intention itself was still significant. Moreover, he also drew a parallel between the events of 1640–60 and those of 1789, and oversaw the translation of several English republican works into French, drawing on the works of Milton and Macaulay to support his claims. It would seem that contrary to Fryer's assertion, British political and constitutional ideas played a fundamental role in shaping Mirabeau's revolutionary politics.