Suchergebnisse

This book is a reappraisal of English politics in the first decade of George III's reign. It sets out to explain how party politics changed, and what problems that created for the parliamentary elite. The issues of party, of patriotism as it manifested itself in the elder Pitt's political career, and of the relations between the notions of ministerial responsibility and the powers of the Crown are all used to illuminate the nature of political conflict. Special emphasis is placed on Burke's notions of party. The schisms created by this reconfiguration of party politics, Dr Brewer argues, had effects beyond Westminster. He discusses extra-parliamentary forms of political expression, notably the press, and goes on to show how the career of John Wilkes and the critique of British politics developed by American radicals gave focus to a variety of political discontents, and produced new arguments in favour of parliamentary reform. Throughout his study he emphasises the interplay between popular and parliamentary politics. His work is designed to show that the 'political nation' included many other than the parliamentary classes, and that the political conflicts of the period cannot be properly understood without a full examination of political ideology

Dr John Moore's four-volume account of his Grand Tour in the company of the Duke of Hamilton was one of the most successful European travel books of the late eighteenth century. Moore's text, I argue, is a philosophical travel narrative, an examination of manners, customs and characters, analogous to the philosophical histories of the Scottish Enlightenment. Intended as a critique of the superficial observations of much travel literature, it argues for a greater degree of closeness between the traveler and the native, one based on sympathetic conversation rather than observation, but accompanied by a more distanced analysis, based on conjectural history, of the hidden processes that explain manners and character. Difference should be understood through a combination of sympathy and analysis that makes travel and its accounting valuable.

Sexuality is an obsession of the Christian Church. It is one of the social behaviours that it has tried most to control amongst its flock and yet the Christian Church has failed to prevent the encroachment of modern attitudes towards sex and sexuality into the Church as an institution. The furore over the proposed appointment of an openly gay bishop in the Church of England is but the latest expression of this tension. However, this paper argues that this debate needs to be placed in a much broader context, namely, the hermeneutical problem of the authority of the Bible, which is itself only one part of a wider sociology of the Bible. The current debate on sexuality in the Church highlights the need for sociology to begin to apply its way of thinking to the Bible.