Manchester University Press

A daring investigation into how women are recruited by the far right online.

As the far right has gained popularity and acceptance around the world, its ranks have swelled with an unlikely category of members: women.

Women play significant roles in far-right movements, acting as propagandists, prizes to be won and mother-warriors of the nation. But up to now their activities have been largely overlooked. In Pink-pilled, journalist Lois Shearing interviews leading experts and infiltrates communities of tradwives and femtrolls to provide a cutting-edge account of how the far right uses the internet to recruit women. Shining a light on women’s experiences within these movements, Shearing reveals horrifying examples of misogyny and violence.

Understanding how and why women join movements that explicitly aim to restrict their autonomy is essential if we want to fight back. Pink-pilled offers key insights for countering women’s radicalisation and building communities resistant to far-right thought.

This is the first comprehensive history of goth music and culture. Across more than 500 pages, John Robb explores the origins and legacy of this enduring scene, which has its roots in the post-punk era.

Drawing on his own experience as a musician and journalist, Robb covers the style, the music and the clubs that spawned the culture, alongside political and social conditions. He also reaches back further to key historic events and movements that frame the ideas of goth, from the fall of Rome to Lord Byron and the romantic poets, European folk tales, Gothic art and the occult. Finally, he considers the current mainstream goth of Instagram influencers, film, literature and music.

The art of darkness features interviews with Andrew Eldritch, Killing Joke, Bauhaus, The Cult, The Banshees, The Damned, Einstürzende Neubauten, Johnny Marr, Trent Reznor, Adam Ant, Laibach, The Cure, Nick Cave and many more. It offers a first-hand account of being there at the gigs and clubs that made the scene happen.

The myth of good AI offers a bold new approach to understanding artificial intelligence and its implications for human security. Dismantling the ‘good AI’ narrative pedalled by tech giants, the book exposes the full extent of AI’s nefarious impact on society.
Drawing on a wide range of literature, the book provides a gripping synthesis of debates in philosophy, medicine, media, psychology, international affairs, economics and politics. It charts the full spectrum of AI-related themes and explores what implications AI has for our future, while equipping the reader with strategies for survival.

The book presents an in-depth and theoretically-grounded analysis of urban gardening practices (re)emerging worldwide as new forms of bottom-up socio-political participation. By complementing the scholarly perspectives through posing real cases, it focuses on how these practices are able to address – together with environmental and planning questions – the most fundamental issues of spatial justice, social cohesion, inclusiveness, social innovations and equity in cities. Through a critical exploration of international case studies, this collection investigates whether, and how, gardeners are willing and able to contrast urban spatial arrangements that produce peculiar forms of social organisation and structures for inclusion and exclusion, by considering pervasive inequalities in the access to space, natural resources and services, as well as considerable disparities in living conditions.
This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16, Peace, justice and strong institutions

The amazing story of the home studio that helped launch some of Britain’s most beloved bands.

The Sheffield space age began in 1961, when local mechanic Ken Patten won a tape-recording competition by recreating the sound of a rocket launch using a pencil and a bicycle pump.

In the decades that followed, the makeshift home studio he constructed became the launch pad for a group of young musicians who would shape the futuristic sound of 1980s pop. The Human League, Heaven 17, Pulp, ABC and others made their early recordings with Ken, whose DIY ethic was the perfect fit for a city facing industrial decline but teeming with ideas.

Studio Electrophonique tells the story of a generation seeking new frontiers in music, using everything they could lay their hands on – from science fiction novels to glam rock, Dada art and cheap electronics – to get there. Drawing on original interviews with Jarvis Cocker, Martyn Ware, Mark White and others, it brings to light a world of humour, charm, creativity and unfounded yet undaunted self-belief.

The second volume of this highly collectable series, covering the pivotal years of 1969–70.

The Island Book of Records Volume II documents the years 1969–70, during which Island sought to build on its success with the Spencer Davis Group by seeking out new British rock talent. By the end of the period, Island was emerging as a major British label, one that could boast releases from Jethro Tull, Nick Drake, King Crimson, John and Beverley Martyn, Fairport Convention and Cat Stevens.

Featuring material from recent interviews and from media interviews of the time, and including a comprehensive discography of 45s, The Island Book of Records Volume II is lavishly illustrated with gig adverts (very many at venues that no longer exist), concert tickets, flyers, international LP variants, labels, LP and 45 adverts and other ephemera collector’s dream.

The Island Book of Records brings the early years of this iconic record label to life.

A fifteen-year labour of love, the volumes will fully document the analogue era of Island. Offering a comprehensive archive of album cover design and photography, together with the voices of the musicians, designers, photographers, producers, studio engineers and record company personnel that worked on each project, the volumes show in unique depth the workings of the label, covering every LP.

Featuring material from recent interviews and from media interviews of the time, and each including a comprehensive discography of 45s, the books are lavishly illustrated with gig adverts (very many at venues which no longer exist), concert tickets, flyers, international LP variants, labels, LP and 45 adverts and other ephemera.

These LP-sized editions are a collector’s dream, offering a truly unparalleled resource for those interested in music history and a perfect gift for any music lover.

Surrealist women’s writing: A critical exploration is the first sustained critical inquiry into the writing of women associated with surrealism. Featuring original essays by leading scholars of surrealism, the volume demonstrates the extent and the historical, linguistic, and culturally contextual breadth of this writing. It also highlights how the specifically surrealist poetics and politics of these writers’ work intersect with and contribute to contemporary debates on, for example, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, otherness, anthropocentrism, and the environment.

Drawing on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, the essays in the volume focus on the writing of numerous women surrealists, many of whom have hitherto mainly been known for their visual rather than their literary production. These include Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage, Colette Peignot, Suzanne Césaire, Unica Zürn, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, and Rikki Ducornet.

Public understanding of, and outcry over, the dire state of the climate and environment is greater than ever before. Parties across the political spectrum claim to be climate leaders, and overt denial is on the way out. Yet when it comes to slowing the course of the climate and nature crises, despite a growing number of pledges, policies and summits, little ever seems to change. Nature is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate. We remain on course for a catastrophic 3°C of warming. What's holding us back?

In this searing and insightful critique, Adrienne Buller examines the fatal biases that have shaped the response of our governing institutions to climate and environmental breakdown, and asks: are the ‘solutions’ being proposed really solutions? Tracing the intricate connections between financial power, economic injustice and ecological crisis, she exposes the myopic economism and market-centric thinking presently undermining a future where all life can flourish. The book examines what is wrong with mainstream climate and environmental governance, from carbon pricing and offset markets to 'green growth', the commodification of nature and the growing influence of the finance industry on environmental policy. In doing so, it exposes the self-defeating logic of a response to these challenges based on creating new opportunities for profit, and a refusal to grapple with the inequalities and injustices that have created them. Both honest and optimistic, The Value of a Whale asks us – in the face of crisis – what we really value.
This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11, Sustainable cities and communities

Many disenchanted Kashmiris continue to demand independence or freedom from India. Written by a leading authority on Kashmir’s troubled past, this book revisits the topic of independence for the region (also known as Jammu and Kashmir, or J&K), and explores exactly why this aspiration has never been fulfilled. In a rare India-Pakistan agreement, they concur that neither J&K, nor any part of it, can be independent.

Charting a complex history and intense geo-political rivalry from Maharaja Hari Singh’s leadership in the mid-1920s to the present, this book offers an essential insight into the disputes that have shaped the region. As tensions continue to rise following government-imposed COVID-19 lockdowns, Snedden asks a vital question: what might independence look like and just how realistic is this aspiration?

This edited collection brings together essays presenting an interdisciplinary dialogue between theatre and performance and the fields of care ethics, care studies, health and social care. The book advances our understanding of performance as a mode of care, challenging existing debates in this area by re-thinking the caring encounter as a performed, embodied experience and interrogating the boundaries between care practice and performance. Through an examination of a wide range of different care performances drawn from interdisciplinary and international settings, the book interrogates how performance might be understood as caring or uncaring, careless or careful, and correlatively how care can be conceptualised as artful, aesthetic, authentic or even ‘fake’ and ‘staged’.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

This volume offers a new interpretation of one of the most innovative directors in the history of cinema. It is the first book to cover the whole of Godard's career, from the French New Wave to the recent triumphs of Histoire(s) du cinéma and Eloge de l’amour.

Drawing on a wide range of literary, filmic and philiosophical texts, the book places Godard's work within its intellectual context, examining how developments in French culture and thought since 1950 have been mirrored in - and sometimes anticipated by - Godard's films.

Numerous sequences from Godard's films are singled out for close analysis, demonstrating how the director's radical approaches to narrative, editing, sound and shot composition have made the cinema into an analytical tool in its own right.

The book will be essential to all students of Godard's films, and of interest to scholars of modern and contemporary French cinema, culture and thought.

This anthology aims to challenge stereotypes of women travellers. Rather than simply presenting writings by Victorian women who travelled bravely around the world disregarding social convention and danger, the editors present a range of writing and possible ways of being a woman traveller.

As well as the ‘eccentric’ woman traveller, the editors have included writings by those who might be seen as failed travellers, cautious and conventional travellers and those who did not conform to the adventurous heroine stereotype. Because travelling as a woman and writing as a woman presents the author with a number of textual problems which must be negotiated, Foster and Mills have chosen to include writings which confronted these problems and which resolved them (or did not resolve them) in different ways.

These textual problems include the depiction of other women, the representation of spatial relations, the negotiations undertaken in relation to the adventure heroine narrative and character and the position taken by the author in relation to the representation of knowledge. These issues are all crucial in relation to travel writing by women , and the women, whose writing has been collected together in this anthology have made bold decisions in relation to them.

This book is premised on the view that the idea of the avant garde has an increased importance in these times of global political crisis. Much cultural production today is shaped by a biopolitics that construes all creative and knowledge production in terms of capital accumulation. A different kind of culture is possible.

This collection of writings, essays, interviews and artworks by many of today’s most radical cultural practitioners and astute commentators on matters avant garde mediates the different strategies and temporalities of avant-garde art and politics. Tracing diverse genealogies and trajectories, the book offers an inter-generational forum of ideas that covers different arts fields, from visual art, art activism, photography, film and architecture, to literature, theatre, performance, intermedia and music.

This is an extraordinarily rich collection and is sure to be a benchmark for many years.

Making contemporary theatre reveals how some of the most significant international contemporary theatre is actually made.

The book opens with an introductory chapter which contextualises recent trends in approaches to theatre-making. In the ensuing eleven chapters, eleven different writer-observers describe, contextualise and analyse the theatre-making practices of eleven different companies and directors, including Japan’s Gekidan Kaitaisha and the Québécois director Robert Lepage. Each chapter is enriched with extensive illustrations as well as boxed-off ‘asides’, giving the reader different perspectives on the work. Chapters usually focus on a single production, such as Complicite’s 2003-04 The Elephant Vanishes, allowing detailed investigations of complex practices to emerge. The book concludes with a brief manifesto for making contemporary theatre by the editors, plus a bibliography suggesting further reading.

Making contemporary theatre is a rich resource for the theatre-making student and the theatre-goer alike, full of diverse examples of how the most exciting theatre is actually made.

This groundbreaking study explores the role of those involved in various aspects of the care, comfort and appearance of the body in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Italy, bringing to light the strong cultural affinities and social ties between barber-surgeons and the apparently distant trades of jeweller, tailor, wigmaker and upholsterer.

Drawing on contemporary understandings of the body, the author shows that shared concerns about health and well-being permeated the professional cultures of these medical and non-medical occupations. At the same time the detailed analysis of the life-course, career patterns and family experience of ‘artisans of the body’ offers unprecedented insight into the world of the urban middling sorts.

The book will represent essential reading for scholars and students of gender, family and urban history in the early modern age, and will equally appeal to historians of the body and of the medical occupations.

Healthy living in the Alps examines the relationship between the search for relief from respiratory diseases, such as tuberculosis, in high alpine resorts and the development in the same places of winter sports tourism.

The first winter visitors to the Swiss Alps began to arrive in the 1860s and were encouraged to take outdoor exercise as part of their cure regime. They also had healthy visitors and companions who sought recreation while the invalids were resting as part of the sanatoria routine. Demonstrating that this is not just part of the history of Switzerland but of Britain too, biographical backgrounds of British visitors to the resorts give depth and context to a history of health and winter sports tourism by looking at the kind of people who would spend months of the year in the Alps. A discussion of the application of modern technologies creates an overall view of the growth of health and sports tourism in Switzerland.

As British South Asians reel from the riots of summer 2025, this book tells the inspirational story of how the community organised against racism in the past and how it continues to fight in the present.

British South Asians have a long tradition of radical political activism. The 1970s and 1980s saw the community grappling with prejudice in the workplace and violence in the streets. But this history is deeper than you might think, from students agitating for independence at the heart of the British Empire to seafarers organising global strikes on the eve of the Second World War.

In Come what may, we’re here to stay, Taj Ali reveals how successive generations fought for rights, dignity and a sense of belonging while actively shaping the country they now call home. He shows that British South Asian political life has often been defined less by religious difference than by shared commitments to anti-imperialism and anti-racism. In pursuit of these goals, alliances have been forged with other movements, from Irish republicanism to Black Power.

As racism rears its ugly head again, Come what may, we’re here to stay asks: are we are doomed to repeat the past or will we learn from our mistakes and build a better world together?

Dave Haslam presents conversations with creative trailblazers.

Over forty years, DJ, writer and broadcaster Dave Haslam has interviewed some of the most fascinating figures in music, literature, film and art. Creative journeys gathers revelatory conversations with creative characters including Neneh Cherry, Maxine Peake, Lemn Sissay, Andrew Weatherall, Raymond Carver and Jeremy Deller.

From politics and performance to art, fame and addiction, Haslam's interviewees speak with honesty about their creative journeys. Viv Albertine discusses ‘Typical Girls’ and Paddy Considine recalls Dead Man’s Shoes. Jarvis Cocker goes deep into ‘This is Hardcore’. Terry Hall and Miki Berenyi speak about childhood trauma. Bernard Sumner recalls the loss of Ian Curtis. Jonathan Franzen talks about torturing his characters. There’s darkness but much humour too.

The interviews provide fascinating stories of unorthodox, creative artists navigating negativity and personal setbacks to become celebrated cultural icons.

As the international order begins to disintegrate, this incisive book asks what the rise of the Asian superstates means for the future.

The Western-dominated world we have known for the past three hundred years is coming to an end. With America abandoning its role as enforcer of the international order, other countries are moving in to fill the void. Among them are two rising Asian ‘superstates’.

Accounting for more than a third of the world’s population, China and India have the potential to wield enormous economic and political power. China is already vying with the US for the top spot in the global economy, and on some measures has surpassed it. By the middle of the century India may be number two. How will these countries navigate their growing roles on the world stage? What are the implications for commerce, international law and the fight against climate change?

Vince Cable has followed China and India for decades, first as a professional economist and later as a senior government minister. In Eclipsing the West he draws on the latest data and a lifetime of political and economic experience to offer a compelling account of what the rise of the Asian superstates means for the future.

A heartfelt case for why the English pub still matters and how we can save it.

In Pubs for the people, Amit Singh and Sivamohan Valluvan offer a daring defence of the humble public house, waging battle against those who see the pub only as a poignant symbol of a bygone England.

Making a journey into the nation’s living room, they blend tales of Singh’s father – the founder of London’s first ‘Desi pub’ – with a lively travelogue that carries them from a hipster nightmare in Shoreditch to an izakaya-inspired Eccles pub run by migrants from Hong Kong. Along the way, they take on private equity, yuppie gentrifiers and culture-war blowhards who use the pub as a prop for their rage-baiting patriotism.

Life today can seem lonelier, angrier and poorer than it did before. But as Singh and Valluvan show, the pub offers the inviting prospect of a more equal, sociable and comfortably multiracial England.

A gripping guide to the weird yet everyday world of British folklore.

In this unique, deeply researched book, two leading experts provide the definitive guide to British folklore past and present.

Owen Davies and Ceri Houlbrook explore folklore in all its remarkable variations, from village rituals and fairy tales to UFO legends and internet fanfiction. Travelling through a landscape of witches, wizards and wicker men, they reveal how folklore has been researched and written about in the past and show how it continues to be lived in the present. At the same time, they provide the reader with a valuable toolkit for understanding how to interpret the diverse examples given.

The book’s key message is that folklore is much more than the fossilised remains of a distant, rural past. Folklore is and always has been ubiquitous, dynamic and political. It is a living tradition that draws from many sources, including migrant communities, and is forever being renewed and updated.

An exciting new history of modernism that re-examines the movement through some of its most brilliant female artists.

Pioneering women were at the heart of the movement known as modernism. In What the dresses know, Sophie Oliver offers a new account of their radical experiments and extraordinary lives, told through the clothes they made and wore.

From a dress Vanessa Bell rescued from the London Blitz to Frida Kahlo’s huipiles and a waistcoat embroidered for Gertrude Stein by Alice B. Toklas, these special objects tell a story of artists seeking transformation. But getting dressed is rarely straightforward. Modernist women used clothes to think through the contradictions of the modern world: the inequalities of industrialisation, the terrible conformities demanded by fascism and racism and the call of feminists, socialists and avant-gardists to act differently and take up new forms of art.

What the dresses know is an exhilarating account of women’s bold attempts to make history during years of tumultuous change. A distinctive new voice in cultural criticism, Sophie Oliver uses clothes to explore the challenges modernist women faced – and to understand her own impulses in writing about them.

The acclaimed author of Sins of My Father shares the secrets of writing a new, transformative kind of memoir.

Into being is an essential guide to writing radical and empowering memoir. Drawing on her experience as a memoirist and a teacher of creative writing, Lily Dunn presents the ground-breaking idea that the craft of memoir itself can offer a form of transformation.

Dunn demystifies the memoirist’s art, helping readers to find meaning in raw experience and elevate the personal to the universal. She considers compelling questions, from why our memories give greater significance to certain events to how we can write honestly without intruding too far into the lives of our loved ones. She also explores how writers are extending the memoir form to create something hybrid, playful and subversive.

In an age of social media, filled with confessions, re-inventions and distortions of the self, the question of what it means to be an individual is more urgent than ever. Into being shows readers how to turn writing memoir into a journey of discovery – one that can be shared with the whole world.

The third in the acclaimed Island Book of Records series chronicles 1971–72, two years that saw the label secure a position at the forefront of contemporary music around the world.

Major albums from Cat Stevens, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Jethro Tull brought international success. Traffic released their era-defining The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys and Island returned to its roots with the soundtrack to the most important Jamaican film of all time, The Harder They Come. Nick Drake’s masterpieces Bryter Layter and Pink Moon were yet to find their audience, but a new sensation emerged as Roxy Music released their first LP. Meanwhile, Bob Marley & The Wailers were beginning to record Catch A Fire – the album that will be the first to be detailed in IBoR IV.

Featuring material from recent interviews and comment of the time, and including a comprehensive discography of 45s, The Island Book of Records Volume III is lavishly illustrated with album art, gig adverts, tickets, flyers, international LP variants, rare photos, LP and 45 adverts and exclusive ephemera.

A gripping account of the scientists and architects who changed the shape of sound in twentieth-century Britain.

On a winter’s night in 1951, shortly after Evensong, the interior of St Paul’s Cathedral echoed with gunfire. This was no act of violence but a scientific demonstration of new techniques in acoustic measurement. It aimed to address a surprising question: could a building be a musical instrument?

Pistols in St Paul’s tells the fascinating story of the scientists, architects and musicians who set out to answer this question. Beginning at the turn of the century, their innovative experiments, which took place at sites ranging from Herbert Baker’s Assembly Chamber in Delhi to Abbey Road Studios and a disused munitions factory near Perivale, would come to define the field of ‘architectural acoustics’. They culminated in 1951 with the opening of the Royal Festival Hall – the first building to be designed for musical tone.

Deeply researched and richly illustrated, Pistols in St Paul’s brings to light a scientific quest spanning half a century, one that demonstrates the power of international cooperation in the darkest of times.

Longlisted for The Inner Temple Book Prize 2025

While espionage between states is a practice dating back centuries, the emergence of the internet revolutionised the types and scale of intelligence activities, creating drastic new challenges for the traditional legal frameworks governing them.

This book argues that cyber-espionage has come to have an uneasy status in law: it is not prohibited, because spying does not result in an internationally wrongful act, but neither is it authorised or permitted, because states are free to resist foreign cyber-espionage activities. Rather than seeking further regulation, however, governments have remained purposefully silent, leaving them free to pursue cyber-espionage themselves at the same time as they adopt measures to prevent falling victim to it.

Drawing on detailed analysis of state practice and examples from sovereignty, diplomacy, human rights and economic law, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the current legal status of cyber-espionage, as well as future directions for research and policy. It is an essential resource for scholars and practitioners in international law, as well as anyone interested in the future of cyber-security.

Depleting democracies provides an analysis of the radical right’s interactions with mainstream parties and the effect they have on setting political agendas in sensitive areas such as minority policies and asylum regulations. It asks to what extent the radical right has changed the quality of democracy in Eastern Europe: does its electoral strength, its capacity for political blackmail and its coalition potential actually translate into impact?

The book compares three groups of countries that are distinct in terms of the relevance of radical right parties: Bulgaria and Slovakia; Hungary, Poland and Romania; and the Czech Republic and Estonia. It follows a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative analysis of survey data with qualitative, comparative analysis of archival material and other texts to determine the causal role radical right parties play in influencing parties, policies and ultimately democratic quality in the seven countries.

Depleting democracies advances theory on radical right actors in the political process and contributes to empirical research across the region. Its results are particularly relevant to the debate on democratic transformation and the effects of radical right parties.

Streaming Privilege examines how today’s serial television plays a powerful role in legitimating the ‘new Gilded Age’ of extreme inequality. Through a sharp cultural analysis, the book reveals popular culture’s obsession with wealth and dynastic families — and how it helps to sustain economic divides.

Focusing on four major series — Downton Abbey, The Crown, Succession and Yellowstone — the book explores what today’s most-watched television dramas reveal about contemporary attitudes toward wealth.

At the heart of the book is a concern with the intersection of family, wealth and morality. As dynastic structures once again dominate economy, stories of wealthy families offer a cultural lens through which audiences make sense of economic disparities. The book shows how television does not merely reflect inequality but actively shapes our understandings of it.

Streaming Privilege is essential reading for scholars and students in media studies, cultural studies and economic sociology — as well as for general readers interested in how popular culture influences our perceptions of inequality.

This volume presents the first systematic account of Japanese international legal theory; edited by Japanese scholars, the volume traces thirteen influential scholars and spans over a century. It examines how theorists positioned outside international law's Western centre developed sophisticated frameworks to address tensions between Western modernity and their own experiences.

The book's central contribution proposes 'conversation'—continuous engagement that respects differences between legal traditions—as an alternative to 'dialogue', which often reproduces existing hierarchies by assuming all perspectives can be reconciled. Through detailed intellectual biographies across six historical periods, contributors reveal how Japanese scholars strategically employed legal positivism, articulated transcivilizational perspectives, and developed concepts of normative multilateralism.

Addressed at scholars of international law, legal theory, and comparative legal traditions, this volume demonstrates that the discipline's future requires genuinely reciprocal exchange where diverse perspectives can coexist productively.

The John Rylands Library houses one of the finest collections of rare books, manuscripts and archives in the world. The collections span five millennia, have a global reach and cover a wide range of subjects, including art and archaeology; economic, social, political, religious and military history; literature, drama and music; science and medicine; theology and philosophy; travel and exploration. For over a century, the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library has published research that complements the Library’s special collections.

An electronic edition of this issue is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

What happens when a president convinces the world he might just do the unthinkable?

US Grand Strategy and the Madman Theory argues that projecting calculated irrationality can terrify adversaries into submission, but at enormous risk.

From Nixon’s secret Cold War gambit to Trump’s chaotic, tweet-driven diplomacy, this book explores how these two leaders weaponized unpredictability to keep allies guessing and enemies off balance. Where does strategy end and madness begin?

In an era where perception can dictate power, unpredictability becomes a weapon and fear its sharpest edge. This book reveals how calculated chaos reshapes diplomacy, destabilizes norms, and forces nations to question whether the next move is genius or catastrophe.

Essential reading for anyone wanting to understand U.S. politics under Trump, and the dangerous allure of strategic madness.

Knowledge Diplomacy examines particular and cultural antecedents to the development of the field; and its predominance in western thinking and critiques. Crucially, it does so not just from the perspective of scholars but also by consciously drawing on the perspectives of practitioners.

The development of Knowledge Diplomacy allows for increased understanding of the role of research, innovation and higher education institutions as actors in international relations; shaping knowledge as they do.

As such Knowledge Diplomacy presents a meaningful means of understanding how understanding knowledge impacts scholars, students and decisions makers as those who use knowledge in their practice.

What happens when a president convinces the world he might just do the unthinkable?

US Grand Strategy and the Madman Theory argues that projecting calculated irrationality can terrify adversaries into submission, but at enormous risk.

From Nixon’s secret Cold War gambit to Trump’s chaotic, tweet-driven diplomacy, this book explores how these two leaders weaponized unpredictability to keep allies guessing and enemies off balance. Where does strategy end and madness begin?

In an era where perception can dictate power, unpredictability becomes a weapon and fear its sharpest edge. This book reveals how calculated chaos reshapes diplomacy, destabilizes norms, and forces nations to question whether the next move is genius or catastrophe.

Essential reading for anyone wanting to understand U.S. politics under Trump, and the dangerous allure of strategic madness.

Zadie Smith’s fiction reimagines subjectivity, relationality, and the conditions of contemporary life.

This book offers a timely reassessment of her work, addressing identity, urban experience, and the category of the human. Moving beyond postcolonial and multiculturalist readings, it brings psychoanalytic, historical, symptomatic, and cultural materialist perspectives to bear across her novels, stories, essays, and plays. The collection explores how Smith’s characters, shaped by diverse backgrounds and settings, challenge fixed ideas of Britishness and personhood. It argues that her writing opens up a new ontological space—defined by fluid identities, shifting subjectivities, and evolving forms of relationality.

By reconsidering both the human and the spatial in Smith’s work, the book makes a valuable contribution to contemporary literary criticism and to current thinking on narrative, identity, and urban life.

Border enclaves examines the Spanish enclave of Melilla as a prism for understanding Europe’s contemporary dislocations. Based on over a decade of ethnographic research, it explores how borders are enforced, contested and inhabited in a city suspended between Africa and Europe, colonial legacies and modern regimes. Through a polyphonic narrative following smugglers, migrants, teachers and politicians, it reveals how everyday practices and symbolic performances shape life in the enclave. Selective visibility—who is seen or erased—structures authority and exclusion.
Situating Melilla within broader processes like Spain’s colonial history and Europe’s border restructuring, the book argues that its fragmented sovereignties and external dependencies make it a paradigmatic site for grasping Europe’s precarious margins. It calls for an ethnographic lens attuned to dislocation as both lived experience and analytic tool.

Massacres in Early Modern Drama analyses the dynamically ambivalent meanings constructed by the language and action of massacre on the early modern stage. Informed by theories drawn from massacre studies, the monograph challenges orthodoxies about senseless violence, illuminates archaic forms of massacres, and attests to their brutally diverse stage representations.

Anchored by the contention that the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris (1572) was instrumental to early modern understandings of massacre, the book uses this atrocity, and its most famous dramatic depiction – Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris – as a hook to explore larger concerns about massacre in plays by Robert Greene, George Chapman, John Fletcher, and William Shakespeare.

Thus, Massacres in Early Modern Drama considers how early modern drama forms part of a continual cultural process of trying to piece together the contentious and traumatic phenomenon of massacre.

Borderline bodies offers original interpretations of visual representations of human bodies as bounded and unbounded, fortified and permeable, mobile and static—subject to borders and able to traverse and challenge them. It also takes as its focus images and objects that might be considered ‘borderline’ because they sit at the intersection of disciplines or sit outside accepted notions of what constitutes serious ‘art.’

By mapping the ways human bodies traverse borders and straddle—even dismantle—categories, this volume’s essays approach afresh the relationship of bodies to traditional modes of representation, especially in art and medicine, and encourage us to think anew about how we understand the relationship between human corporeality, identity and place. Critical transdisciplinary and transnational analyses of objects and images from a range of geographies shed new light on the themes of: bodies and identity; typologies of the body; racialised bodies; ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ bodies; encounters between bodies; bodies in transition; bodies and mobility; and the bounded and unbounded human body. The outcome is a fresh approach to depictions of the human body produced for the purposes of artistic and medical education, aesthetic edification, and scientific and professional advancement, which disrupts assumptions about the normative human body perpetuated through Western image-making traditions.

People’s ordinary, everyday lives – and more specifically, their leisure activities – are often obscured within existing academic research on 1920s-30s Ireland. This book seeks to redress that neglect by exploring the relationship between identity, recreation, and culture both North and South of the border, with particular attention to women’s lived experiences.

Leisurely pursuits during this period were commonly overshadowed by religious influence and the nation-building projects in post-partition Ireland. Nevertheless, there existed alternative spaces, where people enjoyed dancing, singing, listening to music, shopping, glamour, reading magazines, swimming, travelling, and going to the cinema. Such activities reflected international trends beyond national borders.

This book documents those activities and spaces through a feminist lens and intersectional analysis of gender, class, religion and rural/urban identities. It brings together multi-disciplinary perspectives including cultural studies, architecture, geography, fashion, and musicology. In so doing, we present new insights and advance understanding of this under-researched aspect of Irish history.

Little Wars of Empire is a group biography of British veterans who experienced multiple wars across the British empire. Throughout the nineteenth century, Britain was constantly at war in its colonies, defending against anti-colonial resistance or trying to expand its influence. The veterans of these wars did not disappear once they were over, and many of them went on to later experience World War I.

By using personal sources such as letters, diaries, and photograph albums, this book works to show how colonial violence and British military history depend upon one another, and argues that colonial war fundamentally shaped the British experience of empire. This was true for all kinds of British veterans, from British Army soldiers and officers to nurses and military families, whose experiences demonstrate the central place of colonial violence to British life.