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A review essay on a book by Christopher Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton U Press, 2009).

A recent NAPO Newsletter note by South West London's Welfare Rights Group led to nearly 200 requests for copies of their form to help those in low paid work to obtain assisted prison visit payments. This example of sharing pertinent information on the increasing complexities of Welfare Rights affecting clients shows the possibilities in what will be an increasing demand on the Service following the Fowler Review.

This paper interrogates the concept of place-branding and celebrity. It uses Liverpool Football Club striker Robbie Fowler and his roots in Toxteth as a way to contest the unidirectional relationship between celebrity and place. Where 'traditional' place-branding sees a celebrity's positive symbolic capital transferred to place, this paper shows how the direction of transfer may be reversed with the symbolic capital of a place flowing towards the celebrity. It takes the stigmatized area of Toxteth and shows what happens when the negative symbolic capital of place is entered into the discourse of celebrity. In the case of Fowler, this paper highlights how a territorially stigmatised Toxteth is used as both a symbolic millstone that drags him down and an illustration of his achievements 'against the odds'. Using a Critical Discourse Analysis and drawing on a Chomskyian framing of the political economy of the media, this paper suggests that the linking of Fowler and Toxteth is illustrative of a broader neoliberal ideology that sees symbolic violence as the means of ensuring a distinct social stratification.

The article is devoted to the peculiarities and evolution of John Fowles' essayistic style on the material of his essays devoted to Thomas Hardy, the great English novelist of the late Victorian age.