This book—an extensive and daring linguistic investigation into the languages underlying the undeciphered Bronze Age Aegean scripts—is unlike any other book that has ever been written on these scripts. The author tackles not just one of them, but all of them: Linear A, Cretan Hieroglyphic, the script on the Phaistos Disk, Cypro-Minoan, and Eteocypriot. The arguments and analyses are meticulously designed and highly credible. Best of all, the book is written in wonderfully clear English that virtually anyone can understand, and there is a substantial glossary of linguistic terms at the back of the book for readers to consult. The author formulates no fewer than fifty separate hypotheses about the nature of the languages underlying these scripts, and as identification of the language behind an undeciphered script is the most important key to its decipherment, this book constitutes a significant advance along the road to the decipherment of all five of these scripts. This book will be of the greatest interest not just to linguists, philologists, archaeologists, and ancient historians who specialize in these scripts, but also to all novices and aficionados of decipherment.

The importance of the Scottish landscape to Scottish cinema is underlined by the role given to locations by Scottish Screen, the body set up in 1997 to 'develop, encourage and promote every aspect of film, television and new media in Scotland'. The films of Bill Forsyth in general and Local Hero in particular formed a significant contribution to the meaning of Scottish cinema during the early 1980s. The representation of the rural in Local Hero reveals a place that outsiders are drawn to, and provides the possibilities for a loosening of the identity they arrived with. The relation between the cultural politics of the national and the environmental politics of conservation evident in the international reception of Local Hero appear to be mutually exclusive at the time of the release of the film in 1983. The reception of Local Hero in Scotland positions the film in an exclusively national context.

The chapter explores the ‘linguistic turn’ in critical and social theory of which Habermas was a central proponent and which has considerably influenced constructivist and critical theorists in International Relations. By exploring the work of scholars in both critical and constructivist IR camps who bring together the tripartite themes of the legitimacy of the use of force, a communicative-theoretic approach, and the intervention in Kosovo, the chapter argues that the underlying purposes of the critical and constructivist projects in IR remain somewhat different. Moreover, neither, as they have been articulated to date, fully captures the potential offered by a Habermasian-informed analysis of the role of justifications for the use of force.

This chapter incorporates the accounts of those who made both temporary and multiple return visits, as well as the permanent return of migrants. It assesses the impulses for return and examines the contrasts that returnees encountered between their places of origin and settlement. In their study of return migrants from Australia to Britain after the Second World War, A. James Hammerton and Alistair Thomson show that few returned because of deficiencies in their character. While one quarter returned for economic reasons and a third because of homesickness, half of Hammerton and Thomson's sample returned to Britain because of family relationships. The most extensive reflections among migrants concerned the state of their mindset had they remained in their homelands. In a venture in counterfactual history, several migrants were asked to imagine how their lives might have differed had they remained in Ireland or Scotland instead of choosing to live abroad.

A vibrant lesbian bar culture emerged alongside gay male subcultures in London and other British towns and cities before the Second World War and played an important role in the development of collective lesbian identities in the post-war period. This chapter focuses on the metropolitan lesbian scene in London and the Gateways nightclub. Particularly, where the collective identity of a lesbian subculture is apparent and through which the intergenerational conflicts with the lesbian and gay political groups can be clearly traced. The Gateways was a members-only club throughout the 1950s and 1960s and prospective patrons had to apply for membership, in writing, forty-eight hours in advance of their visit. Historiographical accounts of the US lesbian bar culture have focused on class as the important distinguishing feature of different lesbian communities, constructing the bar community as working class, in contrast to a more discreet middle-class lesbian community.

Mexico City was America’s largest city in the seventeenth century – a genuine metropolis. In this deeply researched book, Tatiana Seijas reveals a rich tapestry of stories about essential workers who remade and transformed the city during this period. Her narrative style carries readers to a unique place and time with residents from around the world who sold food, facilitated transportation, provided care, and valued the city’s silver. Free and enslaved people from Africa and Asia, immigrants, and Native Americans pursued opportunities in a wealthy, yet deeply unequal environment, where working people claimed parts of the city for themselves. They carved out spaces to create new businesses and protect their livelihoods, altering the cityscape itself in the process. American Metropolis brings Mexico City to life from the perspective of the working people who transformed this early modern metropolis.

Like any genre that dates back nearly to the beginning of narrative cinema, the biopic has gone through developmental stages, emerging from each of its historical cycles with certain modes that continue to be available to filmmakers working in the form. This chapter focuses on three categories of biopic performance: embodied impersonation, stylised suggestion and the star performance. Stylised performances that rely more on suggestion and less on full impersonation include Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis in American Splendor, as well as Anthony Hopkins in Nixon, Johnny Depp in Ed Wood and Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry. Two rightly celebrated performances by Cate Blanchett, as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator and as the 1966-model Bob Dylan in I'm Not There, are of a different sort, and they differ from each other as well.

The introduction sets the stage by close reading two mid-century works by the poet Edward Young. Contrasting microscopy-inspired metaphors of the soul in Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-1745) against organicist descriptions of artistic genius in Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), it shows how eighteenth-century biology (and, accordingly, aesthetics) might be characterised by a shift from images of permanence to narratives of development. This leads into the book's main subject, William Blake, who illustrated Young's works and presented a complicated response to this emergent evolutionist paradigm in his own writings. Situating the book against recent scholarship, the introduction establishes the book's central thesis, giving an account of the stakes of the matter, and provides an overview of how each chapter advances the book's argument.