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 Drawing upon extensive interviews with former soldiers, primary archival sources including unpublished diaries and unit log-books, this book closely examines soldiers' behaviour at the small infantry-unit level (Battalion downwards), including the leadership,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)

A soul's journey through the night, a missing woman: time and narrative bend and interlock across a play of poetic forms and voices (read more)

A soul's journey through the night, a missing woman: time and narrative bend and interlock across a play of poetic forms and voices to make one story of love and loss. In And She Was Corbett combines the fictional spell-making of Haruki Murakami, with the filmic neo-noir of Atom Egoyan (Exotica) and David Lynch (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive), to push the boundaries of poetic genre, asking us to renegotiate the way we encounter and reconfigure ourselves through trauma, in desire, or as we seek to reassemble ourselves and our past. November, 3am, and two young lovers are about to meet on the Heathrow Express.

A side street in an unknown city: Felix Morning wakes with no memory. In his pocket is a membership card for a nightclub, The Bunker. With the help of the beautiful Flick, he must recover what he has lost.

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Are We All Addicts Now? Digital Dependence is an artist-led enquiry by Katriona Beales into digital hyper-connectivity and the normalization (read more)

Are We All Addicts Now? Digital Dependence is an artist-led enquiry by Katriona Beales into digital hyper-connectivity and the normalization of addictive behaviours through our everyday interactions with digital devices. While internet addiction is not yet considered an official psychiatric disorder, it is gaining increased recognition as a behavioral phenomenon in both scientific study and the popular press. This project is the first interdisciplinary exploration of this burgeoning diagnostic territory.

The book combines visual and textual research, including artistic works from Katriona Beales and Fiona MacDonald : Feral Practice, alongside essays from contributors in the fields of anthropology, digital culture, psychology and philosophy. Informed by the latest scientific research, the book acknowledges the increasing difficulty many people experience in controlling their online habits. At the same time, it also thinks beyond the biological model of internet addiction toward the social and political dimensions that shape everyday online activities and habit-forming behaviour.
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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)

Published to mark the four hundredth anniversary of Belfast's charter, Belfast 400 presents a new history of one of the world's most (read more)

Published to mark the four hundredth anniversary of Belfast's charter, Belfast 400 presents a new history of one of the world's most fascinating and most misunderstood cities. The misunderstanding, and the fascination, arise from the same contradictions. Belfast was a significant part of the story of Great Britain's rise to industrial greatness.

But it was a city located, not in Great Britain, but in Ireland. It was one of the main theatres in which the conflicts of identity that have created modern Ireland were fought out. Yet both its politics and its industrial character set it wholly apart from other Irish towns.

A central part of the history of both societies, it has never fitted neatly into the accepted narrative of either. Against this background Belfast 400 seeks to recapture the true history of Ireland's second city in all its complexity. In doing so it asks many questions. (hide)

Birmingham is a city with an extraordinarily diverse achievement in fields as varied as science, industry, politics, education, medicine, (read more)

Birmingham is a city with an extraordinarily diverse achievement in fields as varied as science, industry, politics, education, medicine, printing and the arts. Labels such as the 'first industrial city', 'city of a thousand trades', 'the best-governed city in the world' and 'the youngest city in Europe' have been applied to the town. This new publication, the first major history of Birmingham since the 1970s, is published to commemorate the 850th anniversary of Birmingham's market charter in 1166, an event which marked the first step in the rise of Birmingham as a commercial and industrial powerhouse.

Authored by scholars, but written for a general readership, this detailed, accessible and richly illustrated book is both a definitive reference work and a readable account of a diverse, culturally rich and high-achieving city. Many aspects of the history of Birmingham are presented for the first time outside academic publications: its diverse people's history, a rich prehistoric and Roman past, the rise of Birmingham in medieval and early modern times, the evolution of an innovative system of education, a varied experience in art and design and an extraordinary printing history. The book covers economic and political themes and new approaches to the history of society and culture.
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The carved wooden Torah arks found in eastern Europe from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries were magnificent structures, unparalleled (read more)

The carved wooden Torah arks found in eastern Europe from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries were magnificent structures, unparalleled in their beauty and mystical significance. The work of Jewish artisans, they dominated the synagogues of numerous towns both large and small throughout the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, inspiring worshippers with their monumental scale and intricate motifs. Virtually none of these superb pieces survived the devastation of the two world wars.

Bracha Yaniv's pioneering work therefore breathes new life into a lost genre, making it accessible to scholars and students of Jewish art, Jewish heritage, and religious art more generally. Making use of hundreds of pre-war photographs housed in local archives, she develops a vivid portrait of the history and artistic development of these arks, the scope and depth of her meticulous research successfully compensating for the absence of physical remains. In this way she has succeeded in producing a richly illustrated and comprehensive overview of a classic Jewish religious art form.
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Liverpool was a burgeoning trading centre and rapidly growing town in the early 18th century, developing into a thriving mercantile (read more)

Liverpool was a burgeoning trading centre and rapidly growing town in the early 18th century, developing into a thriving mercantile metropolis by the 19th century. The demand for new housing was high, and court housing largely filled that need. Court housing was a form of high-density back-to-back housing around courtyards.

It provided homes to nearly half of Liverpool's working-class people by the mid 19th century. Contemporary descriptions highlight the cramped, dark and often damp conditions in these houses. This book uses a range of historical and archaeological evidence about courts to consider their development, life within them, and the measures eventually taken to rid Liverpool of them. (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 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)