Colin Wells – författare

This history of the Roman Empire, from 44 BC to AD 235, has three purposes: to describe what was happening in the central administration of the Empire; to indicate how life went on in Italy and the provinces, in the towns, in the countryside, and in the army camps; and to show how these two different worlds impinged on each other. The book comprises a vivid account of the most intriguing period in ancient history.

The fourth edition of Abuse of Process is a practical guide for barristers and solicitors, advising on and litigating abuse of process applications within criminal proceedings. Written by practitioners for practitioners, the judiciary, and students, this book provides the tools for understanding and developing abuse of process arguments. It offers authoritative and comprehensive coverage of abuse of process arguments at all stages of criminal litigation from pre-charge to appellant level, both domestically and internationally including; the pre-charge investigation stage, forums, disclosure, entrapment, delay, loss of evidence, abuse of executive power, adverse publicity, the ability to participate, extradition, and regulatory proceedings.The fourth edition covers all recent important caselaw decisions, including updates on these specific topic areas;· Confiscation (R (Kambou) v WGCC [2020] 2 Cr.App.R.28)· Disclosure (E [2018] EWCA Crim 2426, Hewitt [2020] EWCA Crim 1247, Hamilton [2021] EWCA Crim 577 and Ambrose [2021] EWCA Crim 1443, · Entrapment (R v TL [2019] 1 Cr.App.R. 1)· Human trafficking (R v DS [2020] EWCA Crim 285 and R v A [2020] EWCA Crim 1408)· Jurisdiction (Mansfield v DPP [2021] EWHC 2938 Admin)· Legitimate expectation (Wokingham BC v Scott [2019] EWCA Crim 205 and R v Walters [2020] EWCA Crim 894)· Loss of evidence (PK [2019] EWCA Crim 1225, PR v R [2019] EWCA Crim 1225 and R v Bater-James [2020] EWCA Crim 790)· Private prosecutions (D Limited v A and others [2017] EWCA Crim 1172)· Unfair conduct (R v Soldier A and C (2020) NICC 6)

At the close of the eighteenth century, Timothy Dwight - poet, clergyman, and, later, president of Yale College - waged a literary and intellectual war against the forces of ""infidelity."" The Devil and Doctor Dwight reexamines this episode by focusing on The Triumph of Infidelity (1788), the verse satire that launched Dwight's campaign and, Colin Wells argues, the key to recovering the deeper meaning of the threat of infidelity in the early years of the American republic. Modeled after Alexander Pope's satiric masterpiece, the Dunciad, Dwight's poem took aim at a number of his contemporaries, but its principal target was Congregationalist Charles Chauncy, author of a controversial treatise asserting ""the salvation of all men."" To Dwight's mind, a belief in universal salvation issued from the same naive faith in innate human virtue and inevitable progress that governed all forms of Enlightenment thought, political as well as religious. Indeed, in subsequent works he traced with increasing dismay a shift in the idea of universal salvation from a theological doctrine to a political belief and symbol of American national identity. In this light, Dwight's campaign against infidelity must also be seen as an early and prescient critique of the ideological underpinnings of Jeffersonian democracy.

During America's founding period, poets and balladeers engaged in a series of literary "wars" against political leaders, journalists, and each other, all in the name of determining the political course of the new nation. Political poems and songs appeared regularly in newspapers (and as pamphlets and broadsides), commenting on political issues and controversies and satirizing leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Drawing on hundreds of individual poems-including many that are frequently overlooked-Poetry Wars reconstructs the world of literary-political struggle as it unfolded between the Stamp Act crisis and the War of 1812.Colin Wells argues that political verse from this period was a unique literary form that derived its cultural importance from its capacity to respond to, and contest the meaning of, other printed texts-from official documents and political speeches to newspaper articles and rival political poems. First arising during the Revolution as a strategy for subverting the authority of royal proclamations and congressional declarations, poetic warfare became a ubiquitous part of early national print culture. Poets representing the emerging Federalist and Republican parties sought to wrest control of political narratives unfolding in the press by engaging in literary battles.Tracing the parallel histories of the first party system and the rise and eventual decline of political verse, Poetry Wars shows how poetic warfare lent urgency to policy debates and contributed to a dynamic in which partisans came to regard each other as threats to the republic's survival. Breathing new life into this episode of literary-political history, Wells offers detailed interpretations of scores of individual poems, references hundreds of others, and identifies numerous terms and tactics of the period's verse warfare.

What Daniel Boorstin did for science in The Discoverers, Timothy Ferris for cosmology in Coming of Age in the Milky Way, and Robert Heilbroner for economics in The Worldly Philosophers, Colin Wells now does for history in A Brief History of History. The most accessible, concise, and clear-sighted biography ever of history as a living idea, this book brings together evocative sketches of the great historians with concise summaries of their key works. From its humble origins as a minor literary genre in ancient Greece, to its modern-day status as perhaps the most successful monument to the global spread of Western civilization, Wells traces the remarkable evolution of this branch of knowledge, and shows how it has long been the turf on which we fight our culture wars. A riveting blend of readability, vibrant humor, and penetrating insight, A Brief History of History is a must for anyone for whom living in the present, and looking to the future, is unimaginable without serious reflection on the past.