This chapter explores the changing role of supreme audit institutions (SAIs) or national audit offices in the institutionalisation of performance auditing as a part of democratic accountability. It examines how performance auditing of state and other public institutions has become increasingly important in most OECD countries. Using examples from the public-health sector, the chapter examines how SAIs conduct performance audits and thereby seek to penetrate domains of professional authority. At the most general level, SAIs have three strategies for pursuing an aura of impartiality: rule following, internal quality procedures and external reviews. With the democratisation of sovereignty during the nineteenth century, it seems that SAIs functions increasingly reflect liberal concern with the excesses of state power and abuse of public money. Accordingly, SAIs become a key element in the constitutional and/or parliamentary control of sovereign power, that is executive government.

Women from a range of social backgrounds were important participants in the Australian Church's social reform programmes, and the church was a strong and long-standing supporter of women's rights. This chapter examines the uses of music in the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), thereby taking account of the close interactions that occurred between its New Zealand branches and Maori women. It looks at some Christian missions in detail to consider the place of music and music-making in colonial engagements with the indigenous peoples of New Zealand, Canada and Australia. Missionaries were necessarily among the most peripatetic citizens of the Anglophone world and so gained first-hand experience of many indigenous cultures. British Columbia was a hive of missionary activity for much of the nineteenth century. Music was used, as seen in the Maori–Pakeha concerts and the Cooper–Selby concert, as a way of generating cross-cultural engagement and mediating cultural differences.

In a 1979 interview, John McGahern discussed a difference between his work and Samuel Beckett's work. McGahern's first foray into print, The End or the Beginning of Love, occurred in March 1961 in the magazine X: A Quarterly Review consisting of several extracts from a first novel that he later abandoned. The same issue carried an article on the development of Bacon's painting, together with seven black and white reproductions. A discourse connecting art, reality and the image can be seen at work in how the magazine's editorial introduces McGahern's fiction. Writing to Michael McLaverty, McGahern comments: 'The worst review of The Dark was by a Dublin public house oracle, Anthony Cronin.' McGahern's My Love, My Umbrella explores the Kavanagh persona is juxtaposed with a love that is shortcircuited by the ego. McGahern's story suggests a misdirection or misapplication of James Joyce's materialist approach to knowing the female other.

Old Labour is a rhetorical invention, devised by New Labour strategists who drew selectively from the historical record to weave together a composite whose resemblance to empirical reality was often tenuous. Far from a 'stubborn refusal to modernise', Labour's voyage from 1979 to 1994 was a period of ideological struggle and extensive policy modifications, culminating in a period of major policy revisions. This chapter illustrates this point by a survey of the crucial moment of programmatic innovation, the party's Policy Review at the end of the 1980s. In constructing this Old Labour narrative, the modernisers made extensive use of two rhetorical devices essentialism and stereotyping. The chapter discusses the Policy Review around two pivotal themes: the economic functions of the state and the balance between state regulation and the market; and macro-economic policy and the efficacy of Keynesian demand management.

In this chapter, the two portraits explore how the temporarily united interests and viewpoints that had found a common ground in the proposal for the trial continued to live on and produce new versions of Active Back Sooner. Portrait 5 portrays Active Back Sooneras its methodological requirements put it on collision course with national employment policy, legal principles, and local organizational attempts to ensure the quality of the general casework. In portrait 6 Active Back Sooneris portrayed against the backdrop of the legal controversy that the official trial gave rise to in the spring of 2009. The chapter argues that the recognition of the absurdity of the labor market effort rather than being a mode of ridicule in fact offers a holistic analytical position from which to appreciate the sum total of the labor market effort.

John McGahern generally avoided statements about the afterlife. As Caitriona Clutterbuck observes, he took the view that it was futile to make arrogant assertions about something that is so unknowable and so far beyond human imagining. Melvyn Bragg thinks that McGahern remained, despite his troubles with Mother Church, 'still dyed in the spiritual mystery of things'. McGahern told one interviewer that literature was ultimately a luxury, but religion was not. McGahern was always aware of the limits of realism. The respect that he showed for literary tradition was ultimately a respect for the good manners that went with it. Because of his fidelity to the pressure of felt experience, some critics have taken McGahern for a romantic-realist or naturalistic writer.

In John McGahern's 'Oldfashioned' he ably demonstrates why a sensitive, bookish, Catholic young man raised in the repressive, anti-intellectual Irish Free State might be attracted to the way of life being led by the country's dwindling Church of Ireland population. Throughout 'Oldfashioned', McGahern suggests that Catholics in the young stateare, in the main, overly fixated on money-making, gossip and a prosaic practicality, and that they are suspicious of anything that smacks of foreign influence. McGahern contends in the story that Catholics cannot cross over to an Anglo-Irish cultural milieu without gravely compromising their ties to their own people. McGahern makes links to Ireland's British past through the story's repeated references to Scotland, a country which, like Ireland, has a dual Gaelic and British heritage.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the relationship of the imperialist artists with conservatism and imperialism, movements that defy easy generalisations in 1899. The vicissitudes of public life for imperialists of this era are well illustrated in the career of Alfred Milner, whose figure became something of a rallying point for most of the characters in the book during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The book focuses on the nature of conservatism and imperialism that won the hearts and minds of Milner's near contemporaries. It also explores the reasons why T. E. Lawrence did not or could not perform the role in which his elder admirers cast him, as creative artist and master statesman of the British Empire.

This chapter examines the evidence-based policy (EP) movement. EP is perhaps the clearest movement away from the neoliberal concern over epistemological finitude. The chapter first traces the critique of excessive planning and the propagation of minor experimental interventions through the works of Karl Popper and Donald T. Campbell in the 1950s and 1960s. The chapter then moves on to account for the spread of randomised controlled trials (RCTs), statistical regression techniques and meta-reviews from medicine, health policies to education, crime prevention and employment policies. The chapter discusses how the epistemological optimism of the contemporary evidence-based policy movement challenges notion of neoliberal political rationality. It also discusses the political implications of this epistemological optimism, both its potential to break with received wisdom and conventions and its risk of favouring technocratic policymaking at the expense of democratic decision-making.

This chapter focuses on two stories: John McGahern's 'The Beginning of an Idea', and Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'. 'The Beginning of an Idea' plays fast and loose with narrative coherence, prompting questions as to how many stories go to make up this ostensibly single work of fiction. The whole of Chekhov's tale 'Oysters' is embedded within McGahern's prose, daring to risk comparison with the Russian master. These two stories betray their authors' unease with any hope of salvation in and for this earth. They appear to be pessimistic in regard to the capacity of any individual to rise above the helpless lot dealt out to them. McGahern and O'Connor find the secrets of life in the warping of good intentions, certainly in these stories, for there is about the women at the centre of each a lethal innocence.

Zygmunt Bauman published Modernity and Ambivalence a mere two years after Modernity and the Holocaust. The book Modernity and Ambivalence reveals all too clearly Bauman's own deeply ambivalent perception of modernity. Bauman identifies modernity with the modern nation-state, and states that its origins lie in the period beginning with the seventeenth century, followed by the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. In Modernity and Ambivalence Bauman argues that the uncertainty and contingency which Jewish intellectuals experienced foreshadowed an existential condition and experience that was to be the lot of large sections of the population in a later, postmodern period. Discourses of liberalism are central to understanding the formation of the West and its governing institutions, although Bauman, despite borrowing extensively from Foucault, fails to incorporate Foucault's more acute understanding of liberalism into his own analysis.

Zygmunt Bauman was well aware of a major pitfall in using analogies for characterising what he saw as a crucial faultline between 'solid' and 'liquid' in the history of modernity. Marx and Engels in a now famous passage in The Communist Manifesto referred to their period of capitalism as one in which change was so rapid that 'all that is solid melts into air'. Bauman's answer is that in Marx's time, and throughout the phase of 'solid modernity', socio-economic change, although rapid and ubiquitous, was always only a temporary state of affairs, with one solid set of social relations soon replaced by another solid social stage. The first stage of melting led to the 'melting' of feudal social relations, the installing of the capitalist economy and the dominance of what Weber called 'instrumental rationality'. However, this soon began to solidify into a particular form of heavy capitalist modernity.