Your Search Results

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2024

        Plagues of the heart

        Crisis and covenanting in a seventeenth-century Scottish town

        by Michelle D. Brock

        Using a wide range of archival material, Plagues of the heart provides a fresh understanding of religion and identity not only in seventeenth-century Scotland, but in protestant communities across the early modern world grappling with a range of interrelated crises. By examining the 'culture of covenanting' in the southwestern port-city of Ayr between the British civil wars and the Revolution of 1688, this book reveals how adherence to the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 informed the identities and lived experiences of a generation of Scots. This is the compelling story of one Scottish town and its remarkable minister, but it demonstrates how in the early modern period, especially when it came to matters of faith, the local was imbedded rather than isolated, engaged rather than insular.

      • Trusted Partner
        Crime & mystery
        2017

        Echo of Someone Else’s War

        by Juan Miramar

        The works of Juan Miramar presented in this book, as always, are distinguished by refined language, subtle humor and a peculiar philosophical view of life, as well as a bright oriental flavor. The story "Echo of Someone Else’s War" impresses with its fascinating dynamic plot. A scientist and writer, a former translator of international peacekeeping forces, suddenly finds himself in the thick of events of a modern secret war. The distant past extends its tentacles into the present, not only forcing the main character to remember his military experience, but also prompting him to choose a side in Arab and non-Arab conflicts that are foreign to him.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Memoirs

        The Self: Between Existence and Creation

        by Bensalem Himmich

        Far more than a straightforward autobiography, celebrated Moroccan writer and former minister of culture Bensalem Himmich diffuses life with literary and intellectual dimensions.   Himmich opens his book with a discussion on autobiographical writing, followed by chapters on the author’s early life, starting with his childhood in Meknes. In Paris, he completes a doctorate degree and there marries a Greek woman, Paneyota. The heroic figures of his “rebellious youth” are Marx and Sartre, and the challenges of these and other radical thinkers, in both Arabic and European languages, find their way into his doctoral thesis, Ideological Patterns in Islam: Ijtihad and History (in Arabic, 1990). Subsequent chapters move into the domain of creation, with four categories reflecting the author’s literary, intellectual, linguistic, and cultural interests. Starting with an epigraph of Italo Calvino, the “literary” chapter focuses on the novel, its history, and its complexities. The chapter on the “intellectual” dimension turns on the author’s lifelong interest in the two pillars of philosophy and history. For Himmich, philosophical thought is “the creative and innovative force through which truths and meanings are sought.” The two-part “linguistic” chapter opens with a discussion of identity as “a constantly developing entity”. In the second part he expresses disapproval of the worldwide prevalence of “Anglo-American English” and the weakening effects that a lack of language authority has on the sense of national identity. The “cultural” chapter includes Himmich’s observations from his career, including the poor state of public education and a decline in reading in Morocco. He also considers his time as the Moroccan Minister of Culture and the inevitable complexities of the political system within which he had to operate. The penultimate chapter entitled “My Polemics” offers four of his own polemical stands: on fundamentalist trends—specifically Islam and “Islamism”; on the prevalence in Moroccan publications of the Latin alphabet; and specific issues with the well-known littérateurs Adonis and Youssef Ziedan. The work closes with the author’s reflection on the emergence of a new and negative kind of cultural “hegemony”, the awareness of which he attributes with gratitude to Edward Said and the latter’s interpretation of the work of Franz Fanon.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2023

        Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature

        Emotions, ethics, dreams

        by Megan Leitch

        Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        May 2016

        Scottish cinema

        by Christopher Meir

      • Trusted Partner
        Historical fiction
        2016

        Time of scattered stones

        by Volodymyr Samoylenko

        How difficult it is sometimes to separate the present from the days of the past... Who knows how the meeting of former friends will go, and whether it will happen at all?... Who knows... Has it come time to collect stones?... And if so, where to look for those stones? On the territory of the Motherland or in hot Africa? Or maybe in your own future? Questions, questions... Where will you find the answers and are they necessary?... No, the scientist-historian has not reached a final conclusion about this - the main character of the surprisingly subtle novel "The Time of Scattered Stones", a novel that will immerse you in the past, in stormy nineties, and will push out the cynical 2000s. In one day, our hero will cross at least two paths that sometimes run parallel, sometimes cross, and sometimes diverge, never to converge again. Friends, classmates, enemies. Funny modern realities, no less funny, and sometimes tragic events of the past. Crazy adventures, passions, betrayals. Stones, stones, stones... Has it come time to collect it, or maybe that time is still ahead?...

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2010

        Voting for a Scottish government

        The Scottish Parliament election of 2007

        by Robert Johns, David Denver, James Mitchell, Charles Pattie

        In 2007 Labour lost an election in Scotland for the first time in half a century and the SNP went on to form the Scottish Government. This book explains why. Based on a unique three-wave survey of the Scottish electorate, it can truly be described as the first full-scale Scottish national election study. As such, it is notable not only for its innovative methodology but also because theories and concepts are taken from the recent electoral studies literature and applied to Scotland. Other questions investigated include the impact of campaigning and of the party leaders (at both Scottish and British level) on the election outcome. In addition, for the first time in the UK context, a special study is made of the causes and consequences of rejected ballots - the large number of which at this election caused a media outcry. This book will be required reading for anyone interested in, involved in, teaching or studying Scottish politics. It will also be an important text for those concerned with UK politics in general and attract particular interest among students of elections, both in the UK and internationally. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2002

        The Scottish witch-hunt in context

        by Julian Goodare

        A collection of essays on Scottish witchcraft and witch-hunting, which covers the whole period of the Scottish witch-hunt, from the mid-sixteenth century to the early eighteenth. Includes studies of particular witchcraft panics such as a reassessment of the role of King James VI. Covers a wide range of topics concerned with Scottish witch-hunting and places it in the context of other topics such as gender relations, folklore, magic and healing, and moral regulation by the church and state. Provides a comparative dimension of witch-hunting beyond Scotland - one on the global context, and one comparing Scotland with England. It is a showcase for the latest thinking on the subject and will be of interest to all scholars studying witchcraft in early modern Europe, as well as the general reader wanting to move beyond shallow and sensational accounts of a subject of compelling in. ;

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Children's & YA
        2009

        Broken Heart

        by Alexander Asatiani

        Cracked Heart tells the entire life story of a heart-shaped jewel box that becomes more and more precious for the reader, the older it gets. Even though it breaks and loses some of its external beauty, it gains a different kind of aesthetic when it’s put back together.

      • Trusted Partner
        Fiction
        2021

        Composition Biography: Thoughts and Confusion Carry Me

        by Said Bengrad

        The book is a story that combines childhood living in the 1960s deserts, before current forms of technology and virtualization. In this narrative text, it was not a matter of resurrecting a moment in a fleeting life in a non-stop chronology, but of shaping it into concepts that reconstruct it in an abstract way. The text does not present an individual story, but rather redraws the boundaries of an entire generation’s experience, a generation that saw the light after Morocco’s independence, with all of its subsequent achievements, failures, victories, and tragedies. The narrator in the text does not present ready-made theories; instead, he captures life in its events and facts and elevates it to an abstract level pending contemplation. The event in the text is an excuse for restoring life in the form of a “human experience,” and that is the outlet for returning academic knowledge to its role as an incubator for people’s concerns as depicted by their narratives, stories, and beliefs. What people experience by instinct; the story turns into another story constructed in the abstract. We do not simply live, we also contemplate our own living, and this is the sublime function of narration.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2024

        A neoliberal revolution?

        Thatcherism and the reform of British pensions

        by Hugh Pemberton, James Freeman, Aled Davies

        This book examines the Thatcher government's attempt to revolutionise Britain's pensions system in the 1980s and create a nation of risk-taking savers with an individual stake in capitalism. Drawing upon recently-released archival records, it shows how the ideas motivating these reforms journeyed from the writings of neoliberal intellectuals into government and became the centrepiece of a plan to abolish significant parts of the UK's welfare state and replace these with privatised personal pensions. Revealing a government that veered between political caution and radicalism, the book explains why this revolution failed and charts the malign legacy left by the evolutionary changes that ministers salvaged from the wreckage of their reforms. The book contributes to understanding of policy change, Thatcherism, and international neoliberalism by showing how major reforms to social security could reflect neoliberal thought and yet profoundly disappoint their architects.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2021

        De-centering queer theory

        Communist sexuality in the flow during and after the Cold War

        by Bogdan Popa, Gurminder Bhambra

        De-centering queer theory seeks to reorient queer theory to a different conception of bodies and sexuality derived from Eastern European Marxism. The book articulates a contrast between the concept of the productive body, which draws its epistemology from Soviet and avant-garde theorists, and Cold War gender, which is defined as the social construction of the body. The first part of the book concentrates on the theoretical and visual production of Eastern European Marxism, which proposed an alternative version of sexuality to that of western liberalism. In doing so it offers a historical angle to understand the emergence not only of an alternative epistemology, but also of queer theory's vocabulary. The second part of the book provides a Marxist, anti-capitalist archive for queer studies, which often neglects to engage critically with its liberal and Cold War underpinnings.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2022

        The narrative grotesque in medieval Scottish poetry

        by Caitlin Flynn

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Economic history
        July 2000

        Scottish society 1707–1830

        Beyond Jacobitism, t

        by Christopher A. Whatley

        Scottish Society, 1707-1830 challenges much conventional wisdom and provides readers with many new insights into Scottish social and economic history.. Argues that the Union of 1707 was vital for Scottish success, but in ways which have hitherto been overlooked.. Contests received wisdom on issues such as the role of the Kirk and other agencies for inculcating order, and argues that the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Scotland were years of upheaval and deep social conflict in both the Highlands and Lowlands, where commercialism and later the market economy revolutionised social relationships.. The period surrounding the Radical War in 1820 is identified as a watershed in Scottish history, almost making but also breaking the Scottish working class.. Not only on an exhaustive reading of secondary material but also incorporates a wealth of new evidence from previously little-used or unused primary sources.

      Subscribe to our

      newsletter