Search

"In Underneath a Harlem Moon, Iain Cameron Williams takes the reader on a fascinating rollercoaster ride from Adelaide's birth in Brooklyn through her humble childhood in Harlem, from her triumphs on Broadway to the glamour of the Moulin Rouge in Paris, appearances at the most sophisticated and celebrated nightclubs in the world, and across two continents on a ground-breaking eighteen-month RKO tour. By the end of 1932, Adelaide had performed to millions and in the process became one of America's wealthiest black women. Her exile to Paris in 1935 brought new challenges and rewards. By 1938, not content with being dubbed the Queen of Montmartre, she set her sights on conquering Britain. The book concludes with her mysterious disappearance in November 1938, which until now has never been publicly explained."--BOOK JACKET.

Mike, the shrew, was born without a tail. His grandmother was a whiz at sewing and made him a false tail from woven horsehair, which he wears every day. It's the best tail in the land, and all the other shrews are envious of it. When his tail goes missing, presumed stolen, Mike sets off with his skateboard to find it. Along the way, he encounters a sequence of adventures, the outcome of which sees him acquiring the nickname 'Too Bad' and becoming the most celebrated animal in the kingdom of Pembridge ... this is 'The Tail of 'Too Bad' Mike.' 'My inspiration for 'The Tail of 'Too Bad' Mike' came from a visit I made to London's V&A Museum in 2009, where I saw a Beatrix Potter display. I was fascinated by her life, especially her philanthropy. After leaving the museum, as it was a sunny afternoon, I walked up to Hyde Park and lay down for a while on East Albert Lawn. One of Potter's book titles kept going around in my mind and sparked my imagination. The book was 'The Tale of Two Bad Mice.' From it, I devised the title, 'The Tail of 'Too Bad' Mike.' That was my starting point; from there, I concocted the imaginary world of 'Too Bad' Mike. I wrote the story in 2010 then put it to one side, intending to revise and edit it at a later date. In 2020, I rediscovered the manuscript during the Coronavirus lockdown and finally got round to revising it.' Iain Cameron Williams, December 2020.

"In Underneath a Harlem Moon, Iain Cameron Williams takes the reader on a fascinating rollercoaster ride from Adelaide's birth in Brooklyn through her humble childhood in Harlem, from her triumphs on Broadway to the glamour of the Moulin Rouge in Paris, appearances at the most sophisticated and celebrated nightclubs in the world, and across two continents on a ground-breaking eighteen-month RKO tour. By the end of 1932, Adelaide had performed to millions and in the process became one of America's wealthiest black women. Her exile to Paris in 1935 brought new challenges and rewards. By 1938, not content with being dubbed the Queen of Montmartre, she set her sights on conquering Britain. The book concludes with her mysterious disappearance in November 1938, which until now has never been publicly explained."--BOOK JACKET.

BRIGHTON FOLLIES is a two-act musical with an original score. The story is based on a fictionalised account of the penultimate day of King George IV's residency at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton on March 6, 1827. Stage actress Marie Gold and socialite Maria Fitzherbert have one thing in common: they both loved George IV, a man who could never be theirs; Queen Caroline made sure of that. BRIGHTON FOLLIES captures the last encounters of both relationships shown through a historical perspective of Brighton of the day.

The Highlander has never enjoyed a good press, and has been usually characterised as peripheral and barbaric in comparison to his Lowland neighbour, more inclined to fighting than serving God. In Clerics and Clansmen Iain MacDonald examines how the medieval Church in Gaelic Scotland, often regarded as isolated and irrelevant, continued to function in the face of poverty, periodic warfare, and the formidable powers of the clan chiefs. Focusing upon the diocese of Argyll, the study analyses the life of the bishopric, before broadening to consider the parochial clergy – in particular origins, celibacy, education, and pastoral care. Far from being superficial, it reveals a Church deeply embedded within its host society while remaining plugged into the mainstream of Latin Christendom.

In November 1918, the implementation of agrarian change in the Scottish Highlands threatened another wave of unemployment and eviction for the land-working population, which led to widespread and varied social protest. Those who had been away on war service (and their families) faced returning to exactly the same social and economic conditions in the Scottish Highlands they had hoped they had left behind in the struggle to make ’a land fit for heroes’. Widespread and varied social protest rapidly followed. It argues that, previously, there has been a failure to capture fully the geography, chronology typology and rate of occurrence of these events. The book not only offers new insights and a greater understanding of what was happening in the Highlands in this period, but illustrates how a range of forms of protest were used which demand attention, not least for the fact that these events, unlike most of the earlier Land Wars period, were successful. There are functioning townships in the Highlands today that owe their existence to the land invasions of the 1920s. The book innovatively concentrates on formulating explanation and interpretation from within and looks to the crofting landscape as base, means and motive to disturbance and interpretation. It proposes that protest is much more convincingly understood as an expression of environmental ethics from 'the bottom up' coming increasingly into conflict with conservationist views expressed from 'the top down' It focuses on individual case studies in order to engage more convincingly with an important evidential base - that of popular memory of land disturbances - and to adopt a frame and lens through which to explore the fluid and contingent nature of protest performances. Based upon the belief that in the study of landscapes of social protest the old shibboleth of space as solely passive setting and symbolic register is no longer tenable is paid here to nature/culture interactions, to vernacular ecological b

The primary aim of this study as a whole is to examine how useful a safeguard the Convention is, and can be, in the sensitive area of national security law and practice. The first part of the book consists of an examination of the national security concept generally in the Convention and the context of national security concerns in European states. The second part of the book is devoted to detailed studies of secret surveillance and security data registers, both of the court and commission's case law and of national laws in the field. The third part of the book consists of an article-by-article analysis of the case law of the commission and the court dealing with national security. The book is of interest to academics, practising lawyers and legislators interested in human rights and national security issues.

On the eve of the general election, Ed Miliband declared that Labour had won the 'ground war'. He proclaimed that his activists had been in touch with many more voters than his opponents: 'We have had five million conversations. This will go to the wire.' Yet the Conservatives went on to win a majority for the first time in more than two decades - while Labour lost seats in England, and were all but wiped out in Scotland. How could they get it so wrong? Iain Watson followed the Labour campaign around Britain, and now he examines what its senior politicians are now calling the party's 'political and organisational failures.' He exposes the high-level divisions over when to rule out a deal with the SNP, the gulf between perception and reality over Labour's level of support, and looks at the more successful campaigns of the Conservatives and Scottish Nationalists. He sets out the challenges for the next Labour leader, having had his own conversations with voters, activists and senior party figures, and discovers there is no easy solution to the party's problems.

"Constructive engagement" became a catchphrase under the Clinton administration for America's reinvigorated efforts to pull China firmly into the international community as a responsible player, one that abides by widely accepted norms. Skeptics questioned the effectiveness of this policy and those that followed. But how is such socialization supposed to work in the first place? This has never been all that clear, whether practiced by the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), Japan, or the United States. Social States is the first book to systematically test the effects of socialization in international relations--to help explain why players on the world stage may be moved to cooperate when doing so is not in their material power interests. Alastair Iain Johnston carries out his groundbreaking theoretical task through a richly detailed look at China's participation in international security institutions during two crucial decades of the "rise of China," from 1980 to 2000. Drawing on sociology and social psychology, this book examines three microprocesses of socialization--mimicking, social influence, and persuasion--as they have played out in the attitudes of Chinese diplomats active in the Conference on Disarmament, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban, the Convention on Conventional Weapons, and the ASEAN Regional Forum. Among the key conclusions: Chinese officials in the post-Mao era adopted more cooperative and more self-constraining commitments to arms control and disarmament treaties, thanks to their increasing social interactions in international security institutions.

How is social work shaped by global issues and international problems and how should it address them? Taking a radical perspective, this book reveals what we can learn from different approaches from across the globe.