Alexander Murray has long had an intellectual interest in the history of religion - struggling between his inbuilt anti-clericism and his pronounced monastic leanings. The five essays in Conscience and Authority in the Medieval Church take on this dialectic, addressing the difficult relationship between private conscience and public authority in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In any organization, political, military, commercial, or religious, the relationship of conscience...

In Egypt's Thousand Days of Revolution, author Alexander Murray provides a vivid and fascinating eyewitness account of Egyptian life in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. A Scotsman and confirmed Egyptophile, Murray first arrived in Cairo just weeks before the assassination of President Anwar Sadat and has returned to the country for many extended visits since the fall of Hosni Mubarak. In his remarkable book - part travel guide, part personal memoir, part sociopolitical commentary - the au...

Georgius Florentius Gregorius, better known to posterity as Gregory, Bishop of Tours, was born about 538 to a highly distinguished Gallo-Roman family in Clermont in the region of Auvergne. Best known for his 10-book Histories (often called the History of the Franks), Gregory left us detailed accounts of his own times as well as those of the early Merovingian kings, known as the "long-haired kings," who united the Franks and took control of most of Gaul in the late fifth a...

‘the Light’ explores a world where you wake up and know this is the day you die. How would such a world shape the way we think, our views on each other and society, how we conduct our personal and financial affairs; how we live and how we will die?On a daily basis, people are required to take the Light; a device that ascertains whether this will be their last day. Between investigating this new world order and the story of one ordinary person forced to cope in extraordinary circums...

THE UNTOLD, INSIDE STORY OF MY LIFE AT RANGERS FC AND IN BUSINESSSir David Murray’s life story is a truly remarkable tale of never-say-die triumph over unimaginable adversity.For 50 years he has been a towering figure in Scottish business, sport and philanthropy. His family name is synonymous with steel but his rise to power owes as much to mettle as it does to metal.At the age of 24 he was involved in a horrific car crash in which he lost both of his legs. As his l...

On July 17th 1939, Eileen Alexander, a bright young woman recently graduated from Girton College, Cambridge, begins a brilliant correspondence with fellow Cambridge student Gershon Ellenbogen that lasts five years and spans many hundreds of letters.But as Eileen and Gershon’s relationship flourishes from friendship and admiration into passion and love, the tensions between Germany, Russia, and the rest of Europe reach a crescendo. When war is declared, Gershon heads for Cairo and E...

A comprehensive and accessible guide to learning and successfully applying QCASocial phenomena can rarely be attributed to single causes—instead, they typically stem from a myriad of interwoven factors that are often difficult to untangle. Drawing on set theory and the language of necessary and sufficient conditions, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) is ideally suited to capturing this causal complexity. A case-based research method, QCA regards cases as combi...

Recently, there has been an increased interest in research on personality, temperament, and behavioral syndromes (henceforth to be referred to as personality) in nonhuman primates and other animals. This follows, in part, from a general interest in the subject matter and the realization that individual differences, once consigned to ‘error’ terms in statistical analyses, are potentially important predictors, moderators, and mediators of a wide variety of outcomes ranging from the results o...

Winter tourism has seen increased levels of investment in recent times, in an effort to reduce economic risk, address environmental concerns and adapt to the effects of global warming. New ski destinations are developing and merging with traditional ones to increase spatial distribution, while many established leading resorts are adapting their management models. Climate change adaptation processes are supported by the reduction of CO2 emissions and energy consumption in ski resorts. Curre...

A group of men dig a tunnel under the threshold of a house. Then they go and fetch a heavy, sagging object from inside the house, pull it out through the tunnel, and put it on a cow-hide to be dragged off and thrown into the offal-pit. Why should the corpse of a suicide – for that is what it is– have earned this unusual treatment? In The Curse on Self-Murder, the second volume of his three-part Suicide in the Middle Ages, Alexander Murray explores the origin of the condem...

The studies collected here cover a period of about 33 years, from 1986 to 2019, and represent a sustained effort to understand the institutions of the Merovingian kingdom and its history. There has long been a predisposition to cast the Merovingian period in the dark colours of barbarism or to treat it with reference to personal relationships and archaic institutions. The present volume, instead, recognizes the Merovingian world not as an archaic, primitive intrusion on the Mediterranean c...

The brainchild of Daniel Alexander Payne Murray, Banneker: The Afro-American Astronomer was first conceived after Murray discovered what he found to be a beautifully written letter to Thomas Jefferson by a then unknown writer of color. Aided in his research by Will A. Allen, the pair discovered the man to be one Benjamin Banneker, a mathematician and astronomer.An extraordinary mind in a time where most people of African descent in the United States were denied the right t...