Explore the vast range of titles available.

This book shows that William Shakespeare was a more personal writer than any of his innumerable commentators have realised. It asserts that numerous characters and events were drawn from the author's life, and puts faces to the names of Jaques, Touchstone, Feste, Jessica, the 'Dark Lady' and others. Steven Sohmer explores aspects of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets that have been hitherto overlooked or misinterpreted in an effort to better understand the man and his work. If you've ever wondered who Pigrogromitus was, or why Jaques spies on Touchstone and Audrey - or what the famous riddle M.O.A.I. stands for - this is the book for you.

Why is the search for democratic renewal so elusive? This book examines both the political and policy implications of efforts by the centre-left to transform democracy. This is a story not only about democratic change, but also the identity crisis of centre-left political parties. The book offers a fresh critique of the Big Society agenda, and analyses why both left and right are searching for democratic renewal. Drawing on high-profile interviews and examining an in-depth series of comparative cases, the book argues that the centre-left’s search for democratic renewal contains a range of policy and political aims, contradictions and tensions. It will be of interest to students, academics, researchers, interest groups and policy analysts interested in consultation, democratic renewal, labour politics, and Australian and British politics.

Utilising a wide range of archival correspondence and diaries, this monograph reconstructs the 1974-79 Labour government's policies in Northern Ireland. It covers the collapse of power-sharing in May 1974, the secret dialogue with the Provisional IRA during the 1975 ceasefire, the acquiescence of Labour ministers in continuing indefinite direct rule from Westminster, efforts to mitigate conflict through industrial investment, a major shift in security policy emphasizing the police over the army, the adaptation of republicans to the threat of these new measures and their own adoption of a 'Long War' strategy. In so doing, it sheds light on the challenges faced by British ministers, civil servants, soldiers and policemen and the reasons why the conflict lasted so long. It will be a key text for researchers and students of both British and Northern Irish politics.

The Scottish Labour Party is at an unprecedented crossroads. Though it had been the leading party in Scotland for fifty years, it has now lost the election and office to the SNP. This book addresses, examines, and analyzes the last thirty years of Scottish Labour, from the arrival of Thatcherism in 1979 to the aftermath of the party's defeat in the 2007 Scottish Parliament elections. It asks fundamental questions about the nature of Scottish Labour, its dominance of Scottish politics, the wider politics of Scotland, and whether its decline is irreversible. Surveying both contemporary events and recent history, the volume draws on extensive research in archival sources and interviews significant members of Scottish Labour.

This major new book provides, for the first time, a detailed evaluation of policies on poverty and social exclusion since 1997, and their effects. Bringing together leading experts in the field, it considers the challenges the government has faced, the policies chosen and the targets set in order to assess results. Drawing on research from the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, and on external evaluations, the book asks how children, older people, poor neighbourhoods, ethnic minorities and other vulnerable groups have fared under New Labour and seeks to assess the government both on its own terms - in meeting its own targets - and according to alternative views of social exclusion.

Does European integration contribute to, or even accelerate, the erosion of intra-party democracy? This book analyses the impact of European Union (EU) membership on power dynamics, focusing on the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party (PS), and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Utilising a principal-agent framework, it investigates who within the parties determines EU policies and selects EU specialists. Drawing on original interviews with EU experts from Labour, the PS, the SPD and the Party of European Socialists (PES), as well as an e-mail questionnaire, this book reveals that European policy has remained in the hands of the party leadership. The study also suggests that the party grassroots are interested in the EU, but that interest rarely translates into influence. As regards the selection of EU specialists, this book highlights that the parties' processes are highly political, often informal, and in some cases, undemocratic.

The Second World War was a watershed moment in foreign policy for the Labour Party in Britain. This book traces how the British democratic left set about the task of defining the principles of a radically new international system for the post-war world. The author shows how the experience of total war fundamentally reshaped the left's attitudes toward national identity and international policy.Breaking with the traditional accounts that place Cold War tensions at the centre of the Attlee government's activities in the immediate postwar years, R. M. Douglas's book provides an entirely new framework for reassessing British foreign policy and left-wing concepts of national identity during the most turbulent mement of Britain's modern history.

*A Guardian Book of the Day* The defeat of socialist firebrand Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Leader in 2019 confirmed Tony Benn's famous retort 'the Labour party has never been a socialist party, although there have always been socialists in it.' For over a hundred years, the British Labour Party has been a bastion for working class organisation and struggle. However, has it ever truly been on the side of the workers? Where do its interests really lie? And can we rely on it to provide a barrier against right-wing forces? Simon Hannah's smart and succinct history of the Labour left guides us through the twists and turns of the party, from the Bevanite movement and the celebrated government of Clement Attlee, through the emergence of a New Left in the 1970s and the Blairism of the 1990s, to Corbyn's defeat and his replacement by Keir Starmer. This new edition is updated throughout, with a new final chapter and conclusion bringing the story up to date.

This study is concerned with the ‘Old’ Labour right at a critical juncture of social democratic and Labour politics. It attempts to understand the complex transition from so-called ‘Old Right’ to ‘New Right’ or ‘New Labour’, and locates at least some of the roots of the latter in the complexity, tensions and fragmentation of the former during the ‘lean’ years of social democracy in the 1970s. The analysis addresses both the short and long-term implications of the emerging ideological, organisational and political complexity and divisions of the parliamentary Labour right and Labour revisionism, previously concealed within the loosely adhesive post-war framework of Keynesian reformist social democracy. It establishes the extent to which ‘New’ Labour is a legatee of at least some elements of the disparate and discordant Labour right and tensions of social democratic revisionism in the 1970s. In so doing, it advances our understanding of a key moment in the development of social democracy and the making of the contemporary British Labour Party.

Shortly after it was founded in 1947, the CIA launched a secret effort to win the Cold War allegiance of the British left. Hugh Wilford traces the story of this campaign from its origins in Washington DC to its impact on Labour Party politicians, trade unionists, and Bloomsbury intellectuals