Liverpool Univ Press

This is the first such study of Operation Banner, the British Army's campaign in Northern Ireland. Drawing upon extensive interviews (read more)

This is the first such study of Operation Banner, the British Army's campaign in Northern Ireland. Drawing upon extensive interviews with former soldiers, primary archival sources including unpublished diaries and unit log-books, this book closely examines soldiers' behaviour at the small infantry-unit level (Battalion downwards), including the leadership, cohesion and training that sustained, restrained and occasionally misdirected soldiers during the most violent period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It contends that there are aspects of wider scholarly literatures - including from sociology, anthropology, criminology, and psychology - that can throw new light on our understanding of the British Army in Northern Ireland.

It also offers fresh insights and analysis of incidents involving the British Army during the early years of Operation Banner, including the 1972 `Pitchfork murders' of Michael Naan and Andrew Murray in County Fermanagh, and that of Warrenpoint hotel owner Edmund Woolsey in South Armagh. The central argument of this book is that British Army small infantry units enjoyed considerable autonomy during the early years of Operation Banner and could behave in a vengeful, highly aggressive or benign and conciliatory way as their local commanders saw fit. The strain of civil-military relations at a senior level was replicated operationally as soldiers came to resent the limitations of waging war in the UK. (hide)

Over the last twenty years there has been a growing international interest in the city of Barcelona. This has been reflected in the (read more)

Over the last twenty years there has been a growing international interest in the city of Barcelona. This has been reflected in the academic world through a series of studies, courses, seminars, and publications. The Barcelona Reader hinges together a selection of the best academic articles, written in English, about the city, and its main elements of identity and interest: art, urban planning, history and social movements.

The book includes scholarly essays about Barcelona that can be of interest to the student and the general public alike. It focuses on cultural representations of the city: the arts (including literature) provide a complex yet discontinuous portrait of the city, similar to a patchwork. The authors selected create a kaleidoscope of views and voices thus presenting a diverse yet inclusive Barcelona portrait. (hide)

Alice Hiller's debut performs an act of witness and restitution. Working with her childhood and adolescent medical notes, bird of (read more)

Alice Hiller's debut performs an act of witness and restitution. Working with her childhood and adolescent medical notes, bird of winter creates a redemptive language to speak the darkness of being sexually abused by a family member. Through the excavated histories of Pompeii and Herculaneum, these poems additionally document the grooming that prepares a child for sexual abuse, and the vulnerability which remains afterwards.

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2021

PBS Special Commendation Summer 2021 (hide)

The Birds of Shropshire provides the most comprehensive record of the County's avifauna ever published. Produced by Shropshire Ornithological (read more)

The Birds of Shropshire provides the most comprehensive record of the County's avifauna ever published. Produced by Shropshire Ornithological Society, the book is based on the results of six years fieldwork by over 650 different observers who submitted over 333,400 records. These records have been used to produce maps showing the current distribution of almost 200 different species.

Stunning images of 220 species have been contributed by 21 local photographers. The book includes an account for each species, describing its distribution and relative abundance, and the breeding status where relevant. The current breeding and winter maps will be compared with those shown in An Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Shropshire (1992) and with the Shropshire part of the national An Atlas of the Wintering Birds in Britain and Ireland (1986). (hide)

'Have you looked / have you looked deeply?' ask these poems, rooted in the human body and its movement through an interconnected (read more)

'Have you looked / have you looked deeply?' ask these poems, rooted in the human body and its movement through an interconnected living world. Bloom, Sarah Westcott's second collection, approaches the cultural and physical spaces where human and non-human lives co-exist. These poems are attuned to a tender, bleeding world in which 'all flesh is grass' and language is matter.
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Juana of Castile (commonly referred to as Juana la Loca - Joanna the Mad) was a sixteenth-century Queen of Spain, daughter of the (read more)

Juana of Castile (commonly referred to as Juana la Loca - Joanna the Mad) was a sixteenth-century Queen of Spain, daughter of the instigators of the Inquisition. Conspired against, betrayed, imprisoned and usurped by her father, husband and son in turn, she lived much of her life confined at Tordesillas, and left almost nothing by way of a written record. The poems in Citadel are written by a composite 'I' - part Reformation-era monarch, part twenty-first century poet - brought together by a rupture in time as the result of ambiguous, traumatic events in the lives of two women separated by almost five hundred years. (hide)

Following on from her Forward prize-winning collection, Small Hands, Mona Arshi's new book continues its lyrical and exact exploration (read more)

Following on from her Forward prize-winning collection, Small Hands, Mona Arshi's new book continues its lyrical and exact exploration of the aftershocks of grief. These extraordinary poems, which see Arshi continuing with her experiments with form, relocate experience in past, present and future feeling, in both the intimacies of ordinariness and the collective experience of myth. Moving and discomfiting in their acute emotional awareness of individual pain these poems tune in to the cruelty and unsettling violence of our contemporary world. (hide)

This book examines the grass-roots relationship between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the civilian population during the Irish (read more)

This book examines the grass-roots relationship between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the civilian population during the Irish Revolution. It is primarily concerned with the attempts of the militant revolutionaries to discourage, stifle, and punish dissent among the local populations in which they operated, and the actions or inactions by which dissent was expressed or implied.

Focusing on the period of guerilla war against British rule from c. 1917 to 1922, it uncovers the acts of 'everyday' violence, threat, and harm that characterized much of the revolutionary activity of this period. Moving away from the ambushes and assassinations that have dominated much of the discourse on the revolution, the book explores low-level violent and non-violent agitation in the Irish town or parish.
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This book draws on a lengthy experience of teaching graduates how to approach medieval books. It leads the reader through the stages (read more)

This book draws on a lengthy experience of teaching graduates how to approach medieval books. It leads the reader through the stages of the editorial process, using part of Richard Rolle's Commentary on the Song of Songs as the working exemplar. In the humane sciences, the need for texts is ubiquitous; they provide the regular objects of study.

But far less prevalent than editions is any discussion of the premises underlying these objects, or the mechanisms by which they have been constructed. This volume takes up both challenges. First, in a preliminary chapter, it discusses what is at stake in any edition one might read; the persistent argument is that these represent products of modern scholarly decision-making, the imposition of various kinds of unity on the extremely diverse evidence medieval books offer for any literary work. (hide)

Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2020. Poetry Book Society Choice, Summer 2020. Bhanu Kapil's extraordinary and original work has (read more)

Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2020.

Poetry Book Society Choice, Summer 2020. Bhanu Kapil's extraordinary and original work has been published in the US over the last two decades. During that time Kapil has established herself as one of our most important and ethical writers.

Her books often defy categorisation as she fearlessly engages with colonialism and its ongoing and devastating aftermath, creating what she calls in Ban en Banlieue (2015) a 'Literature that is not made from literature'. Always at the centre of her books and performances are the experiences of the body, and, whether she is exploring racism, violence, the experiences of diaspora communities in India, England or America, what emerges is a heart-stopping, life-affirming way of telling the near impossible-to-be-told. How To Wash A Heart, Kapil's first full-length collection published in the UK, depicts the complex relations that emerge between an immigrant guest and a citizen host. (hide)