Keith Bradley – författare

This book was originally published in 1992. The skills shortage of the late 1980s demonstrated that managers need to support their corporate strategies with coherent policies for recruiting, developing and retaining people. While the recession has slowed the job market and caused some of these pressures to abate, they will reassert themselves with a vengeance when recovery comes: the demographic time bomb continues to tick.

Putting the emphasis on people should not, however, be a reactive process – a skilled and motivated workforce is one of the most important productive assets which companies possess, whether in recession or not.

Companies which are prepared to adopt more imaginative approaches to managing their human resource capital can unlock a major and unexploited source of long-term competitive edge. Recognising the competitive advantage in people – their contribution to productivity, the role of skills in strategic positioning, the opportunities in effective management training – brings human resources into the ambit of strategic management.

This book will help managers and students alike explore beyond the traditional methods of human resource management and focus on leading-edge techniques which successfully incorporate the management of human resources into strategic planning.

This book was originally published in 1992. The skills shortage of the late 1980s demonstrated that managers need to support their corporate strategies with coherent policies for recruiting, developing and retaining people. While the recession has slowed the job market and caused some of these pressures to abate, they will reassert themselves with a vengeance when recovery comes: the demographic time bomb continues to tick.

Putting the emphasis on people should not, however, be a reactive process – a skilled and motivated workforce is one of the most important productive assets which companies possess, whether in recession or not.

Companies which are prepared to adopt more imaginative approaches to managing their human resource capital can unlock a major and unexploited source of long-term competitive edge. Recognising the competitive advantage in people – their contribution to productivity, the role of skills in strategic positioning, the opportunities in effective management training – brings human resources into the ambit of strategic management.

This book will help managers and students alike explore beyond the traditional methods of human resource management and focus on leading-edge techniques which successfully incorporate the management of human resources into strategic planning.

Marguerite Yourcenar is best known as the author of the 1951 novel Mémoires d’Hadrien, her recreation of the life of the Roman emperor Hadrian. The work can be examined from the perspective of the issues raised by writing Roman imperial biography at large and the many ways in which Mémoires has a claim to historical authenticity.

In Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian, Keith Bradley explains how Mémoires d’Hadrien came to be written, gives details of Yourcenar’s own biography, and describes some of the intricate historical problems that her novel’s portrait of Hadrian presents. He draws on Yourcenar’s correspondence, her interviews with journalists, and her literary corpus as a whole, emphasizing Yourcenar’s profound knowledge of the ancient evidence on which her life of Hadrian is based and exploiting a wide range of contemporary Yourcenarian criticism.

The book pays special attention to the methods by which Yourcenar believed Hadrian’s life history to be recoverable, compares examples of modern life-writing, and contrasts the procedures of conventional Roman biographers. Revealing how and why Mémoires d’Hadrien is as it is, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian illustrates how imaginative literary recreation is often little different from historical speculation.