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Samuel Bamford is best known for his political autobiography, Passages in the Life of a Radical, regarded by the late E. P. Thompson as "essential reading for any Englishman". He was also a journalist, poet, and diarist of distinction, and one of the longest-lived and best-documented working men of his age. Samuel Bamford was born in 1788 in the Lancashire weaving village of Middleton, six miles north of Manchester. His father was an artisan weaver and a Methodist, and sometime Governor of the poorhouse in Salford, where half the family, including Samuel's mother, died of fever; young Samuel himself nearly followed them. He received an intermittent formal education, including spells at the grammar schools in Middleton and Manchester, and then held a succession of jobs ranging from east coast sailor to Manchester warehouseman. He also enlisted for a time in the local Volunteer force. He married his childhood sweetheart, Jemima in 1810, soon after the birth of their only child Ann. He was in Manchester at the time of the Luddite disturbances in Middleton in April 1812, and was back weaving in Middleton as the post-war movement for a radical reform of parliament took off.

Robert Poole revisits the 'Calendar Riots' of 1752 and suggests they are a figment of historians' imagination. The early 1750s are the Sargasso Sea of the eighteenth-century. The ship of state lay becalmed between the last throes of Jacobitism in the 1740s and the first stirrings of radicalism in the 1760s, between the last political aftershocks of the seventeenth century and the first rumblings of the age of reform. Birds, claimed Horace Walpole, might have made their nests in the Speaker's chair safe from any disturbance by political debate. The general election of 1754 was the least widely contested of any in British history. Lewis Namier studied the period, and came to the conclusion that there was no real politics in the eighteenth century, effectively sterilising his subject for decades. More recently, the revisionist J.C.D. Clark first demonstrated his audacity by entitling the result of his exhaustive labours in the dreary politics of the 1750s The Dynamics of Change.

'Just what was William Lilly so good at?' asks Ann Geneva near the start of this interesting book. It is a question well worth the asking, for William Lilly's almanacs were one of the publishing phenomena of the Civil War period, selling in their tens of thousands to a public anxious for signs of what was to come, and supported by a parliament well aware of the value of works which declared that the heavens proclaimed the downfall of the king. In the war for hearts and minds, Lilly was parliament's secret weapon, 'the first astrological republican'. Moreover, not only did he write his predictions in an accessible way, he also explained his methods, breaking the magicians' code. He even issued a manual, Christian Astrology, in 1647. Lilly's combination of evangelicalism and predictive success did more than anything to popularize the arcane craft of astrology.

For generations, there has been no better illustration of the collective idiocy of the crowd than the story of the English calendar riots of 1752. At the trial of Henry Hunt and others for treason in 1820, James Scarlett, the prosecuting counsel, had this to say: 'The ridiculous folly of a mob had been exemplified in a most humorous manner by that eminent painter, Mr. Hogarth. It was found necessary many years ago, in order to prevent a confusion in the reckoning of time, to knock eleven days out of the calendar, and it was supposed by ignorant persons that the legislature had actually deprived them of eleven days of their existence. This ridiculous idea was finely exposed in Mr. Hogarth's picture, where the mob were painted throwing up their hats, and crying out "Give us back our eleven days". Thus it was at the present time; that many individuals, who could not distinguish words from things, were making an outcry for that of which they could not well explain the nature.' Curiously enough, the extensive literature on eighteenth-century riot has yielded not one study of this most famous of episodes. Furthermore, amidst much debate about time-awareness in the same period, the calendar has received little direct attention. This article aims to address both these areas.

Our troubled highway system -- How the private sector is reinventing America's freeways -- Where America's 20th-century highway model came from -- The rediscovery of toll road companies overseas -- Toll concessions return to America -- The benefits of long-term P3 concessions -- Critics and controversy: opposition to tolling and long-term concessions -- Highways as network utilities -- Transforming the interstate highways -- Transforming urban freeways -- Challenges to the new vision -- A new future for US highways

The well-coordinated terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 presented the world with a new aviation security threat: the capture of aircraft in flight to be used as human-guided missiles. The two previous threats - hijacking an aircraft for ransom and putting a bomb aboard an aircraft - had led to varying degrees of screening of baggage and passengers in developed countries, plus some use of on-board security personnel on selected flights in some countries. In the wake of 9/11, governments in the United States, Canada, and Europe (at both national and EU levels) implemented a number of additional aviation security measures, among them: - strengthened (and locked) cockpit doors; - 100% screening of checked baggage; - more thorough screening of passengers and their carry-on baggage; - increased use of on-board security officers; - increased attention to air cargo; - and greater attention to airport access control and perimeter control. (.)