They complement and elaborate themes developed in Keith Robbins' books

Vols. 277-230, no. 2 include Stuff and nonsense, v. 5-6, no. 8, Jan. 1929-Aug. 1930.

Encompassing interviews with managing directors and CEOs, this book explores the role of business outsiders as leaders. Viewing the term ‘outsider’ in a broad sense, the book considers leader background, perspective, gender, training and family membership and examines the implications, challenges and benefits brought by outsider leaders to their respective business environments. The authors explore questions and themes such as how outsider leaders can enrich an organisation, the importance of relationships and adopting a ‘hybrid’ approach, illuminated by interviewee perspectives. Introducing discussion and analysis through these narratives, Outsider Leadership distils commonalities to frame understanding of their experiences.

In Uniting the Kingdom? a group of the most distinguished historians from Britain and Ireland assemble to consider the question of British identity spanning the period from the Middle Ages to the present. Traditional chronological and regional frontiers are broken down as medievalists, early modernists and modernists debate the key issues of the British state: the conflicting historiographies, the nature of political tensions and the themes of expansion and contraction. This outstanding collection of essays forms an illuminating introduction to the most up-to-date thinking about the problems of British histories and identities.

Samuel Kasumu was the most senior black advisor in Boris Johnson's government, until he left in April 2021. Throughout his time in Whitehall, Samuel became increasingly aware that he was an outsider - that his own experiences, assumptions and language were so different to many of those he found himself surrounded by in Downing Street. In this book Samuel considers who outsiders are, why they are not talked about enough and how it can be a source of strength that leads them to become high achievers. He argues that the success of many great people can be explained by their outsider status. Drawing on his own experiences in government, growing up and beyond, as well as the stories of other outsiders, famous and lesser known, Samuel shows how outsiders are more likely to be trailblazers and break barriers, how they have a greater sense of perspective and progress and how our differences can be a force for good - in politics and beyond.

The use of filibusters in the U.S. Senate by small numbers of members to prevent legislative action apparently desired by a majority of the members--as evidenced by the battles over civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s--is legendary. Similar situations have existed in other legislative bodies over time. The fear that they will at some time be in the minority has inhibited actions by the majority groups to control the right of minority groups to block legislative action. And yet from time to time the majority in a legislative body has forced a change in the rules to control the rights of the minority. When does the majority seek to limit minority rights to obstruct legislation? Douglas Dion, in a unique study, develops a formal model to set out the conditions under which majorities will limit minority rights. He finds that when majorities are small, they will be more cohesive. This majority cohesion leads to minority obstruction, which in turn leads to majority efforts to force procedural change to control the ability of the minority to obstruct legislation. Dion then tests his findings in a rich consideration of historical cases from the nineteenth-century U.S. House of Representatives, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. Senate, the British House of Commons, and an account of the Austro-Hungarian Parliament written by Mark Twain. Turning the Legislative Thumbscrew is a work that combines formal analysis with extensive historical evidence to address an important problem in democratic theory. Specialists in legislative politics and American political development, as well as those more broadly interested in the relationship between democratic theory and institutional structure, will find the work of great interest. Douglas Dion is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan.

Salvaging Spenser is a major new work of literary revision which places Edmund Spenser's corpus, from The Shepheardes Calender to A View of the Present State of Ireland, within an elaborate cultural and political context. The author refuses to engage in the sterile opposition between apology and attack that has marred studies of Spenser and Ireland, seeking neither to savage nor to save, but rather, in a project of critical recovery, to salvage Spenser from the wreckage of Irish history.