The Reinvention of Britain 1960-2016

The Reinvention of Britain 1960-2016
Author: Scott Newton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2017-08-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351666525

The Reinvention of Britain 1960–2016 explores the transformation of contemporary Britain, tracing its evolution from the welfare state of the post-1945 era to social democracy in the 1960s and 1970s and the liberal market society of 1979 onwards. Focusing primarily on political and economic change, it aims to identify which elements of State policy led to the crucial strategy changes that shaped British history over the past six decades. This book argues that since 1960 there have been two reinventions of the political economy of the United Kingdom: a social-democratic shift initiated by the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan and developed by Labour under Harold Wilson, and a subsequent change of direction towards a free market model attempted by the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher. Structured around these two key policy reinventions of the late twentieth century, chapters are organized chronologically, from the development of social democracy in the early 1960s to the coalition government of the early 2010s, the Conservative election win that followed and the ‘Brexit’ referendum of 2016. Providing a comprehensive yet accessible introduction to the political and economic history of this period, The Reinvention of Britain 1960–2016 is essential reading for all students of contemporary British history.

The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain

The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain
Author: Paul R. Deslandes
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2021-12-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 022677161X

Setting the Stage: The Foundations of Modern Male Beauty -- Physiognomists and Photographers -- Beauty Experts and Hairdressing Entrepreneurs -- Artists, Athletes, and Celebrities -- Poets, Soldiers, and Monuments -- Men on Display in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries -- Brylcreem Men, Cinema Idols, and Uniforms -- Teenagers, Bodybuilders, and Models -- Youthful Rebels, Gender-Benders, and Gay Men -- Insecure Men, Metrosexuals, and Spornosexuals.

The British Labour Party in Opposition and Power 1979-2019

The British Labour Party in Opposition and Power 1979-2019
Author: Patrick Diamond
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2021-01-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317595378

This book provides a novel account of the Labour Party’s years in opposition and power since 1979, examining how New Labour fought to reinvent post-war social democracy, reshaping its core political ideas. It charts Labour’s sporadic recovery from political disaster in the 1980s, successfully making the arduous journey from opposition to power with the rise (and ultimately fall) of the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Forty years on from the 1979 debacle, Labour has found itself on the edge of oblivion once again. Defeated in 2010, it entered a further cycle of degeneration and decline. Like social democratic parties across Europe, Labour failed to identify a fresh ideological rationale in the aftermath of the great financial crisis. Drawing on a wealth of sources including interviews and unpublished papers, the book focuses on decisive points of transformational change in the party’s development raising a perennial concern of present-day debate – namely whether Labour is a party capable of transforming the ideological weather, shaping a new paradigm in British politics, or whether it is a party that should be content to govern within parameters established by its Conservative opponents. This text will be of interest to the general reader as well as scholars and students of British politics, British political party history, and the history of the British Labour Party since 1918.

The Neoliberal Age?

The Neoliberal Age?
Author: Aled Davies
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2021-12-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 178735685X

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are commonly characterised as an age of ‘neoliberalism’ in which individualism, competition, free markets and privatisation came to dominate Britain’s politics, economy and society. This historical framing has proven highly controversial, within both academia and contemporary political and public debate. Standard accounts of neoliberalism generally focus on the influence of political ideas in reshaping British politics; according to this narrative, neoliberalism was a right-wing ideology, peddled by political economists, think-tanks and politicians from the 1930s onwards, which finally triumphed in the 1970s and 1980s. The Neoliberal Age? suggests this narrative is too simplistic. Where the standard story sees neoliberalism as right-wing, this book points to some left-wing origins, too; where the standard story emphasises the agency of think-tanks and politicians, this book shows that other actors from the business world were also highly significant. Where the standard story can suggest that neoliberalism transformed subjectivities and social lives, this book illuminates other forces which helped make Britain more individualistic in the late twentieth century. The analysis thus takes neoliberalism seriously but also shows that it cannot be the only explanatory framework for understanding contemporary Britain. The book showcases cutting-edge research, making it useful to researchers and students, as well as to those interested in understanding the forces that have shaped our recent past.

Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical

Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical
Author: Robert L. McLaughlin
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2016-08-11
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1496808568

From West Side Story in 1957 to Road Show in 2008, the musicals of Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021) and his collaborators have challenged the conventions of American musical theater and expanded the possibilities of what musical plays can do, how they work, and what they mean. Sondheim's brilliant array of work, including such musicals as Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods, established him as the preeminent composer/lyricist of his, if not all, time. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical places Sondheim's work in two contexts: the exhaustion of the musical play and the postmodernism that, by the 1960s, deeply influenced all the American arts. Sondheim's musicals are central to the transition from the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musical that had dominated Broadway stages for twenty years to a new postmodern musical. This new style reclaimed many of the self-aware, performative techniques of the 1930s musical comedy to develop its themes of the breakdown of narrative knowledge and the fragmentation of identity. In his most recent work, Sondheim, who was famously mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II, stretches toward a twenty-first-century musical that seeks to break out of the self-referring web of language. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical offers close readings of all of Sondheim's musicals and finds in them critiques of the operation of power, questioning of conventional systems of knowledge, and explorations of contemporary identity.

Reification and Representation

Reification and Representation
Author: Graham Cairns
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2018-08-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 131740372X

The relationship between politics and the public relations industry is controversial and, at times, polemic. However, one component of this relationship that has yet to be investigated is the role of architecture. Arguing for a fundamental reconfiguration of our understanding of ‘political architecture’, this book suggests it is not only a question of constructed buildings, but equally a case of mediated imagery. Considered through examples of architecture as a backdrop for photo shoots by politicians in the democracies of the United States and the United Kingdom, this book suggests these images give us both a better understanding of recent developments in the Western political economy and the architectural and urban developments of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Using case studies of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, this book represents a ground-breaking triangular analysis that will be essential reading for scholars in architecture, politics, media and communication studies.

Cold, hard steel

Cold, hard steel
Author: Agnes Arnold-Forster
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2023-06-27
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1526156636

Brilliant, volatile and invariably male, the surgeon stereotype is a widespread and instantly recognisable part of western culture. Setting out to anatomise this stereotype, Cold, hard steel offers an exciting new history of modern and contemporary British surgery. The book draws on archival materials and original interviews with surgeons, analysing them alongside a range of fictional depictions, from the Doctor in the House novels to Mills & Boon romances and the pioneering soap opera Emergency Ward 10. Presenting a unique social, cultural and emotional history, it sheds light on the development and maintenance of the surgical stereotype and explains why it has proved so enduring. At the same time, the book explores the more candid and compassionate image of the surgeon that has begun to emerge in recent years, revealing how a series of high-profile memoirs both challenge the surgical stereotype and simultaneously confirm it.

Art, Cybernetics and Pedagogy in Post-War Britain

Art, Cybernetics and Pedagogy in Post-War Britain
Author: Kate Sloan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2019-02-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0429886357

This is the first full-length study about the British artist Roy Ascott, one of the first cybernetic artists, with a career spanning seven decades to date. The book focuses on his early career, exploring the evolution of his early interests in communication in the context of the rich overlaps between art, science and engineering in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s. The first part of the book looks at Ascott’s training and early work. The second park looks solely at Groundcourse, Ascott’s extraordinary pedagogical model for visual arts and cybernetics which used an integrative and systems-based model, drawing in behaviourism, analogue machines, performance and games. Using hitherto unpublished photographs and documents, this book will establish a more prominent place for cybernetics in post-war British art.

Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene

Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene
Author: David Chandler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2018-01-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 135133591X

The Anthropocene captures more than a debate over how to address the problems of climate change and global warming. Increasingly, it is seen to signify the end of the modern condition itself and potentially to open up a new era of political possibilities. This is the first book to look at the new forms of governance emerging in the epoch of the Anthropocene. Forms of rule, which seek to govern without the handrails of modernist assumptions of ‘command and control’ from the top-down; taking on board new ontopolitical understandings of the need to govern on the grounds of non-linearity, complexity and entanglement. The book is divided into three parts, each focusing on a distinct mode or understanding of governance: Mapping, Sensing and Hacking. Mapping looks at attempts to govern through designing adaptive interventions into processes of interaction. Sensing considers ways of developing greater real time sensitivity to changes in relations, often deploying new technologies of Big Data and the Internet of Things. Hacking analyses the development of ways of ‘becoming with’, working to recomposition and reassemble relations in new and creative forms. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of international politics, international security and international relations theory and those interested in critical theory and the way this is impacted by contemporary developments.

Why America Needs a Left

Why America Needs a Left
Author: Eli Zaretsky
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2013-04-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0745656560

The United States today cries out for a robust, self-respecting, intellectually sophisticated left, yet the very idea of a left appears to have been discredited. In this brilliant new book, Eli Zaretsky rethinks the idea by examining three key moments in American history: the Civil War, the New Deal and the range of New Left movements in the 1960s and after including the civil rights movement, the women's movement and gay liberation.In each period, he argues, the active involvement of the left - especially its critical interaction with mainstream liberalism - proved indispensable. American liberalism, as represented by the Democratic Party, is necessarily spineless and ineffective without a left. Correspondingly, without a strong liberal center, the left becomes sectarian, authoritarian, and worse. Written in an accessible way for the general reader and the undergraduate student, this book provides a fresh perspective on American politics and political history. It has often been said that the idea of a left originated in the French Revolution and is distinctively European; Zaretsky argues, by contrast, that America has always had a vibrant and powerful left. And he shows that in those critical moments when the country returns to itself, it is on its left/liberal bases that it comes to feel most at home.