James McAuley – författare

An absorbing portrait of Edmond de Rothschild, who defied his class to help build a nation—and found his identity in the processEdmond de Rothschild (1845–1934) was born into one of the wealthiest families in history, but his legacy lies beyond banking, art, and aristocratic privilege. In this compelling biography, award-winning historian and journalist James McAuley tells the story of a man who defied his elite world to support a radical cause: the creation of a Jewish homeland.Drawing on rare access to archives—including Rothschild’s own long-lost memoir—McAuley reveals how and why this reserved French aesthete became a driving force in the early Zionist settlement of Palestine. Rothschild’s journey from the salons of Paris to the fields of Eretz Israel is a tale of emotional awakening, political conviction, and personal transformation—of a man’s search for a cause and discovery of himself.

A powerful history of Jewish art collectors in France, and how an embrace of art and beauty was met with hatred and destruction  “The depths of French anti-Semitism is the stunning subject that Mr. McAuley lays bare. . . . [He] tells this haunting saga in eloquent detail. As French anti-Semitism rises once again today, the effect is nothing less than chilling.”—Diane Cole, Wall Street Journal  “Elegantly written and deeply moving. . . . [A] haunting book.”—David Bell, New York Review of Books  In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews—pillars of an embattled community—invested their fortunes in France’s cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country’s army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps.  In this rich, evocative account, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin de siècle. Weaving together narratives of various figures, some familiar from the works of Marcel Proust and the diaries of Jules and Edmond Goncourt—the Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahens d’Anvers—McAuley shows how Jewish art collectors contended with a powerful strain of anti-Semitism: they were often accused of “invading” France’s cultural patrimony. The collections these families left behind—many ultimately donated to the French state—were their response, tragic attempts to celebrate a nation that later betrayed them.

Drawing on over 150 interviews with former IRA, INLA, UVF and UFF prisoners, this is a major analysis of why Northern Ireland has seen a transition from war to peace. Most accounts of the peace process are ‘top-down’, relying upon the views of political elites. This book is ‘bottom-up’, analysing the voices of those who actually ‘fought the war’. What made them fight, why did they stop and what are the lessons for other conflict zones?Based on a Leverhulme Trust project and written by an expert team, the book offers a new analysis, based on subtle interplays of military, political, economic and personal changes and experiences. Combined, these allowed combatants to move from violence to peace whilst retaining core ideological beliefs and maintaining long-term constitutional visions.

Drawing on over 150 interviews with former IRA, INLA, UVF and UFF prisoners, this is a major analysis of why Northern Ireland has seen a transition from war to peace. Most accounts of the peace process are ‘top-down’, relying upon the views of political elites. This book is ‘bottom-up’, analysing the voices of those who actually ‘fought the war’. What made them fight, why did they stop and what are the lessons for other conflict zones?Using unrivalled access to members of the armed groups, the book, available for the first time in paperback, offers a critical appraisal of one-dimensional accounts of the onset of peace, grounded in ‘mutually hurting stalemate’ and ‘ripeness’, which downgrade the political and economic aspects of conflict. Military stalemate had been evident since the early 1970s and offers little in explaining the timing of the peace process. Moreover, republicans and loyalists based their ceasefires upon very different perceptions of transformation or victory.Based on a Leverhulme Trust project and written by an expert team, Abandoning Conflict offers a new analysis, based on subtle interplays of military, political, economic and personal changes and experiences.

This major new textbook will equip students with a complete understanding of contemporary politics, state and society in the United Kingdom today.

Key underlying themes include:

- the differences between traditional and alternative `sites of power' and what we mean by `political'

- the relationships between politics, society and how individuals become and remain engaged with politics

- the rapid transformations in contemporary social structures and their impact on social and political life

- the role of human agency and its significance to social and political action and movements

- contemporary cultural and social dislocations and their impact on some of the major contested areas of political life today.

Key features include:

- key concepts and issues

- key theorists and writers

- discussion questions

Comprehensive and accessible, An Introduction to Politics, State & Society is an essential text for all undergraduate students of politics, the contemporary state, power and political sociology.

James W McAuley is Professor of Political Sociology and Irish Studies in the School of Human and Health Sciences at the University of Huddersfield

Versification: A Short Introduction is written by one of Australia's most distinguished poets. The book discusses poetic meter, and may be the only source you need. McAuley devotes a short chapter to versification based on accent, syllable count, free verse and "classical" meters, but the book as a whole focuses on metrical verse and its constant reference back to stress in normal speech—it suceeds in showing meterical verse as a natural outgrowth of what we do naturally. This dispels quickly any sense of the esoteric—poetry is of and for people in general not for a special literati. After establishing meter in the normal sphere of speech, McAuley then discusses how abstract meterical patterns are actually applied and how variety is added to avoid a sing-song effect.

This collection brings together academics and practitioners to consider the increasingly central role that memory and recalling the past plays in determining contemporary politics and the future direction of Northern Irish society. Using theoretical, comparative and case-study approaches, it considers not only how narratives of the past are constructed, reconstructed, understood and commemorated, but also the ways in which the key themes that emerge are harnessed and mobilised to political and social effect in the present. The book draws deeply on a wide range of expert opinion and viewpoints to add significantly to existing knowledge surrounding the debates over memory and the ways it is used in Northern Irish society.

This collection brings together academics and practitioners to consider the increasingly central role that memory and recalling the past plays in determining contemporary politics and the future direction of Northern Irish society. Using theoretical, comparative and case-study approaches, it considers not only how narratives of the past are constructed, reconstructed, understood and commemorated, but also the ways in which the key themes that emerge are harnessed and mobilised to political and social effect in the present. The book draws deeply on a wide range of expert opinion and viewpoints to add significantly to existing knowledge surrounding the debates over memory and the ways it is used in Northern Irish society.

At the center of James McAuley’s new collection—the work of over a decade since his previous book, Coming & Going, New & Selected—is the sequence, “God’s Pattern,” meditations on the Stations of the Cross, an old devotional form of pilgrimage or “pattern” still practiced in rural parishes of the poet’s native country, Ireland. Theme and treatment vary throughout the collection, from somber reflection on the fate of a drunk in a cheap hotel room, “Cantata for the Feast of St. Anonymous,” to the scathing Celtic-style satire, “The Gingriad.” McAuley is well regarded for his experiments with traditional forms and rhythms: examples included are blank-verse narratives and elegies, a Haiku sequence, sonnets, a variation on the topographical poetry of the seventeenth century, even a carmen figurata.

Meditations, With Distractions has the qualities that all good poetry should possess: depth, erudition, accessibility, a joy in the practice of language. Combine these qualities with McAuley’s humanity and humor, and the result is a collection that readers will come to enjoy and appreciate more and more with each successive reading.

This edited collection on the politics and society of Northern Ireland includes original material on the background to, and patterns of, conflict; its main protagonists; the social structure of Northern Irish society; popular culture and representations of the conflict; the memory and legacy of political violence, and discussions and debates concerning the future of Northern Ireland. It presents theoretically informed real-life case studies and charts the conflict’s many dimensions, tracing its trajectory from partition to the pressing challenges of reconciliation, coexistence, and envisioning Northern Ireland’s tomorrow.

The Shadow and the Flame is the sweeping and definitive history of the fight for Holocaust memory and the larger intellectual debates that raged around its memorial from the end of World War II to the present day.In 1945, the end of World War II and the liberation of the Nazi camps ended the catastrophe that we now know as the Holocaust. Stunned by grief, survivors faced the task of not only forging new lives but also shaping how this cataclysm might be remembered by generations to come.The Shadow and the Flame takes as its subject the fierce intellectual battle that ensued – the first of its kind, and one that spanned decades and continents. Acclaimed historian James McAuley takes us into the minds and hearts of the individuals – many well-known, others largely forgotten – who waged that dispute in Europe, the United States, and Israel: from Hannah Arendt, whose reporting from the Eichmann trial enraged her fellow Jews; to Sol Baron, the era’s preeminent Jewish historian who battled to protect the story of his people from the burden of tragedy; to Elie Wiesel, whose account of life at Auschwitz became the one the world chose to embrace, even as it alienated many of his peers.McAuley transports us from Paris to New York, from the desecrated ghettos of Poland to the newly established state of Israel, as the event we now call the Holocaust made an uneasy transition into memory – one that, far from being neatly resolved, weighs heavily upon the present. Bold, learned, monumental in its scope and infused with the energy and emotion of its principals, The Shadow and the Flames tells the dramatic account of the contentious process – at once painful and shot through with urgency and consequence – of crafting history in real time.