The rise to power and eventual fall from grace of the Oxbridge intellectualAfter World War II, the academics of Oxford and Cambridge—the dons—formed an unusual kind of university-based, establishment-connected intelligentsia. Unlike intellectuals in other countries, often anti-establishment outsiders, the dons of Oxbridge enjoyed secure and even cosy connections with those in power. In Twilight of the Dons, Colin Kidd examines the golden age of Britain’s O...

Although the dominant political ideology in Scotland between 1707 and the present, unionism has suffered serious neglect. One of the most distinguished Scottish historians of our time looks afresh at this central theme in Britain's history, politics and law, and traces the history of Scottish unionist ideas from the early sixteenth century to the present day. Colin Kidd demonstrates that unionism had impeccably indigenous origins long predating the Union of 1707, and that it emerged in rea...

The continuing churn of political advisers in Donald Trump's White House serve as a reminder of the salience and relevance of political advice. Political Advice: Past, Present and Future brings several very different voices to bear on the problem of advice and influence; the distinction in so far as it is valid between political and policy advice; the two-way parasitism of adviser and advised; the nature and idioms of political advice literature; the changing (and sometimes unchan...

Literature and Union opens up a new front in interdisciplinary literary studies. There has been a great deal of academic work--both in the Scottish context and more broadly--on the relationship between literature and nationhood, yet almost none on the relationship between literature and unions. This volume introduces the insights of the new British history into mainstream Scottish literary scholarship. The contributors, who are from all shades of the political spectrum, will inter...

This collection of essays explores the role played by imaginative writing in the Scottish Enlightenment and its interaction with the values and activities of that movement. Across a broad range of areas via specially commissioned essays by experts in each field, the volume examines the reciprocal traffic between the groundbreaking intellectual project of eighteenth-century Scotland and the imaginative literature of the period, demonstrating that the innovations made by the Scottish literat...

The World of Mr Casaubon takes as its point of departure a fictional character - Mr Casaubon in George Eliot's classic novel, Middlemarch. The author of an unfinished 'Key to All Mythologies', Casaubon has become an icon of obscurantism, irrelevance and futility. Crossing conventional disciplinary boundaries, Colin Kidd excavates Casaubon's hinterland, and illuminates the fierce ideological war which raged over the use of pagan myths to defend Christianity from the existential threat posed...

Adam Smith (1723-1790) is perceived, through his best-known book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, as the founder of economics as a science. His thought has shaped modern ideas about the market economy and the role of the state in relation to it. Yet Smith needs to be recognized as more than this, as a man of letters, moralist, historian, and critic, as well as an economist, if we are to get full value for his ideas and perspectives in contemporary applications....

In this groundbreaking history of Ireland, Neil Hegarty presents a fresh perspective on Ireland's past. Comprehensive and engaging, The Story of Ireland is an eye-opening account of a nation that has long been shaped by forces beyond its coasts.The Story of Ireland re-examines Irish history, challenging the accepted stories and long-held myths associated with Ireland. Transporting readers to the Ireland of the past, beginning with the first settlement in A.D. 433,...

The United Kingdom; Great Britain; the British Isles; the Home Nations: such a wealth of different names implies uncertainty and contention - and an ability to invent and adjust. In a year that sees a Scottish referendum on independence, Linda Colley analyses some of the forces that have unified Britain in the past.She examines the mythology of Britishness, and how far - and why - it has faded. She discusses the Acts of Union with Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and their limitations,...

Explore the history of original sin—and how it shapes our view of human nature—in “one of the best books on the history of the evolution of Christianity and its ideology” (Washington Book Review).Original sin is the Western world’s creation story.According to the Christian doctrine of original sin, humans are born inherently bad, and only through God’s grace can they achieve salvation. In this captivating and controversial book, acclaimed ...

First published as part of the best-selling The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, John Morrill's Very Short Introduction to Stuart Britain sets the Revolution into its political, religious, social, economic, intellectual, and cultural contexts. It thus seeks to integrate what most other surveys pull apart. It gives a graphic account of the effects of a century-long period during which population was growing inexorably and faster than both the food supply and the empl...

How should we live? That question was no less urgent for English men and women who lived between the early sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries than for this book's readers. Keith Thomas's masterly exploration of the ways in which people sought to lead fulfilling lives in those centuries between the beginning of the Reformation and the heyday of the Enlightenment illuminates the central values of the period, while casting incidental light on some of the perennial problems of human exist...