Michael Griffin – författare

This book takes the long-view by analysing Islamic State's beginnings in Iraq to their involvement in the Arab Spring and through to the present day.The world is watching IS's advance through the Middle East. The US risks being drawn into another war in the region despite its experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. IS are creating catastrophic waves across the region, but it is still unclear what lies behind its success. Michael Griffin uncovers the nature of IS through investigating the myriad of regional players engaged in a seemingly endless power game: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Iraq, which have all contributed to the success of IS by supplying arms and funds. He foregrounds the story of the uprising against President Assad of Syria, the role played by the Free Syrian Army, Islamist groups, Iran, Hezbollah and Russia, the chemical weapons attacks in 2013 and the House of Commons vote not to impose a no-fly zone over the country.

This book takes the long-view by analysing Islamic State's beginnings in Iraq to their involvement in the Arab Spring and through to the present day.The world is watching IS's advance through the Middle East. The US risks being drawn into another war in the region despite its experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. IS are creating catastrophic waves across the region, but it is still unclear what lies behind its success. Michael Griffin uncovers the nature of IS through investigating the myriad of regional players engaged in a seemingly endless power game: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Iraq, which have all contributed to the success of IS by supplying arms and funds. He foregrounds the story of the uprising against President Assad of Syria, the role played by the Free Syrian Army, Islamist groups, Iran, Hezbollah and Russia, the chemical weapons attacks in 2013 and the House of Commons vote not to impose a no-fly zone over the country.

From an analysis of the Guinness brand's reflection of Irish identity to an exploration of murals and film portrayals of political prisoners, this pioneering collection of essays seeks to present Ireland's relationship to visual culture as a whole. While other works have explored the imagistic history of Ireland, most have restricted their lens to a single form of visual representation. ""Ireland in Focus"" is the first book to address the diverse range of visual representations of national and communal identity in Ireland. The contributors examine the politics of visual representation from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Drawing from the areas of cultural theory, postcolonial studies, art criticism, documentary and archival history, and gender studies, the essays provide novel insights on a variety of visual-cultural forms, including film, theater, photography, landscape art, political murals, and the visual iconography of commercial marketing. Bringing together established scholars and emerging young critics in the field, ""Ireland in Focus"" breaks new ground in showcasing the essential dynamism of visual culture and its relationship to Irish studies.

This first modern scholarly edition of the letters of Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) sets the author of The Vicar of Wakefield, The Deserted Village, and She Stoops to Conquer in a rich context, showing how Goldsmith's Irish identity was marked and complicated by cosmopolitan ambition. He was at the very heart of Grub Street culture and the Georgian theatre, and was a founding member of Dr Johnson's Literary Club; his circle included Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, George Colman and Hester Piozzi. Containing a detailed introduction and extensive notes, this edition is essential to those wishing to know more about Goldsmith the man and the writer, and provides a rich and suggestive nexus for understanding the cultural cross-currents of the literary Enlightenment in eighteenth-century London.

This first modern scholarly edition of the letters of Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) sets the author of The Vicar of Wakefield, The Deserted Village, and She Stoops to Conquer in a rich context, showing how Goldsmith's Irish identity was marked and complicated by cosmopolitan ambition. He was at the very heart of Grub Street culture and the Georgian theatre, and was a founding member of Dr Johnson's Literary Club; his circle included Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, George Colman and Hester Piozzi. Containing a detailed introduction and extensive notes, this edition is essential to those wishing to know more about Goldsmith the man and the writer, and provides a rich and suggestive nexus for understanding the cultural cross-currents of the literary Enlightenment in eighteenth-century London.

The development of unconventional oil and gas shales using hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling is currently a focal point of energy and climate change discussions. While this technology has provided access to substantial reserves of oil and gas, the need for large quantities of water, emissions, and infrastructure raises concerns over the environmental impacts. Written by an international consortium of experts, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the extraction from unconventional reservoirs, providing clear explanations of the technology and processes involved. Each chapter is devoted to different aspects including global reserves, the status of their development and regulatory framework, water management and contamination, air quality, earthquakes, radioactivity, isotope geochemistry, microbiology, and climate change. Case studies present baseline studies, water monitoring efforts and habitat destruction. This book is accessible to a wide audience, from academics to industry professionals and policy makers interested in environmental pollution and petroleum exploration.

Oliver Goldsmith has a claim to be the only eighteenth-century author who wrote canonical works in prose fiction, poetry, and drama. An Irish writer working at the centre of the British and Irish Enlightenments, with all the rich complications of identity this entailed, he authored The Vicar of Wakefield, The Deserted Village, and She Stoops to Conquer, works that number among the greatest literary productions of the century. He was also a major historian, biographer, journalist, and translator operating at the heart of literary London. Through four sections covering Goldsmith's Life and Career; Social, Cultural, and Intellectual Contexts; Literary Contexts; and Critical Fortunes and Afterlives, this volume engages with a wide range of illuminating topics that will allow both new and experienced readers of Goldsmith to understand more deeply the impact he had on his times and the powerful influence he exerted on subsequent literary culture.

This open access book looks at Olympiodorus (AD c. 500–570), possibly the last non-Christian teacher of philosophy in Alexandria, who delivered 28 lectures as an introduction to Plato. This volume translates lectures 10–28, following from the first nine lectures and a biography of the philosopher published in translation in a companion volume, Olympiodorus: Life of Plato and On Plato First Alcibiades 1–9 (Bloomsbury, 2014).For us, these lectures can serve as an accessible introduction to late Neoplatonism. Olympiodorus locates the First Alcibiades at the start of the curriculum on Plato, because it is about self-knowledge. His pupils are beginners, able to approach the hierarchy of philosophical virtues, like the aristocratic playboy Alcibiades. Alcibiades needs to know himself, at least as an individual with particular actions, before he can reach the virtues of mere civic interaction. As Olympiodorus addresses mainly Christian students, he tells them that the different words they use are often symbols of truths shared between their faiths.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The University of British Columbia.

This third and final volume concludes Hermias' commentary on Plato's Phaedrus. Here, Plato delivers a celebrated critique of writing, and its relationship to orality. Hermias follows him, and adds a general account of good writing. In addition, this volume offers the first English translation of the brief Introduction to Hermogenes' On Styles, which manuscripts attribute—probably mistakenly—to Hermias' teacher Syrianus. Baltzly and Share discuss the Introduction’s authorship and its relation to the genuine commentaries of Syrianus on the rhetorical treatises of Hermogenes. They illuminate the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric in the Neoplatonic schools, and provide a novel explanation of Neoplatonic commentaries as performances of Platonic literacy in ancient elite education. This translation offers novel evidence of interest for students of ancient philosophy, rhetorical education, and literature more broadly. It is accompanied by explanatory notes, an introduction, and scholarly apparatus, including indices, glossaries, and bibliography.

This third and final volume concludes Hermias' commentary on Plato's Phaedrus. Here, Plato delivers a celebrated critique of writing, and its relationship to orality. Hermias follows him, and adds a general account of good writing. In addition, this volume offers the first English translation of the brief Introduction to Hermogenes' On Styles, which manuscripts attribute—probably mistakenly—to Hermias' teacher Syrianus. Baltzly and Share discuss the Introduction’s authorship and its relation to the genuine commentaries of Syrianus on the rhetorical treatises of Hermogenes. They illuminate the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric in the Neoplatonic schools, and provide a novel explanation of Neoplatonic commentaries as performances of Platonic literacy in ancient elite education. This translation offers novel evidence of interest for students of ancient philosophy, rhetorical education, and literature more broadly. It is accompanied by explanatory notes, an introduction, and scholarly apparatus, including indices, glossaries, and bibliography.

This open access book looks at Olympiodorus (AD c. 500–570), possibly the last non-Christian teacher of philosophy in Alexandria, who delivered 28 lectures as an introduction to Plato. This volume translates lectures 10–28, following from the first nine lectures and a biography of the philosopher published in translation in a companion volume, Olympiodorus: Life of Plato and On Plato First Alcibiades 1–9 (Bloomsbury, 2014).For us, these lectures can serve as an accessible introduction to late Neoplatonism. Olympiodorus locates the First Alcibiades at the start of the curriculum on Plato, because it is about self-knowledge. His pupils are beginners, able to approach the hierarchy of philosophical virtues, like the aristocratic playboy Alcibiades. Alcibiades needs to know himself, at least as an individual with particular actions, before he can reach the virtues of mere civic interaction. As Olympiodorus addresses mainly Christian students, he tells them that the different words they use are often symbols of truths shared between their faiths.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The University of British Columbia.

This open access book looks at Olympiodorus (AD c. 500–570), possibly the last non-Christian teacher of philosophy in Alexandria, who delivered these lectures as an introduction to Plato with a biography. For us, they can serve as an accessible introduction to late Neoplatonism. Olympiodorus locates the First Alcibiades at the start of the curriculum on Plato, because it is about self-knowledge. His pupils are beginners, able to approach the hierarchy of philosophical virtues, like the aristocratic playboy Alcibiades. Alcibiades needs to know himself, at least as an individual with particular actions, before he can reach the virtues of mere civic interaction. As Olympiodorus addresses mainly Christian students, he tells them that the different words they use are often symbols of truths shared between their faiths.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The University of British Columbia.

This open access book looks at Olympiodorus (AD c. 500–570), possibly the last non-Christian teacher of philosophy in Alexandria, who delivered these lectures as an introduction to Plato with a biography. For us, they can serve as an accessible introduction to late Neoplatonism. Olympiodorus locates the First Alcibiades at the start of the curriculum on Plato, because it is about self-knowledge. His pupils are beginners, able to approach the hierarchy of philosophical virtues, like the aristocratic playboy Alcibiades. Alcibiades needs to know himself, at least as an individual with particular actions, before he can reach the virtues of mere civic interaction. As Olympiodorus addresses mainly Christian students, he tells them that the different words they use are often symbols of truths shared between their faiths.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The University of British Columbia.

Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) moved between the genres and geographies of enlightenment writing with considerable dexterity. As a consequence he has been characterized as a passive purveyor of enlightenment thought, a hack, a harried translator of the French enlightenment for an English audience, an ideological lackey, and a subtle ironist. In poetry, he is either a compliant pastoralist or an engaged social critic. Yet Goldsmith’s career is as complex and as contradictory as the enlightenment currents across which he wrote, and there is in Goldsmith’s oeuvre a set of themes—including his opposition to the new imperialism and to glibly declared principles of liberty—which this book addresses as a manifestation of his Irishness. Michael Griffin places Goldsmith in two contexts: one is the intellectual and political culture in which he worked as a professional author living in London; the other is that of his nationality and his as yet unstudied Jacobite politics. Enlightenment in Ruins thereby reveals a body of work that is compellingly marked by tensions and transits between Irishness and Englishness, between poetic and professional imperatives, and between cultural and scientific spheres.

Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) moved between the genres and geographies of enlightenment writing with considerable dexterity. As a consequence he has been characterized as a passive purveyor of enlightenment thought, a hack, a harried translator of the French enlightenment for an English audience, an ideological lackey, and a subtle ironist. In poetry, he is either a compliant pastoralist or an engaged social critic. Yet Goldsmith’s career is as complex and as contradictory as the enlightenment currents across which he wrote, and there is in Goldsmith’s oeuvre a set of themes—including his opposition to the new imperialism and to glibly declared principles of liberty—which this book addresses as a manifestation of his Irishness. Michael Griffin places Goldsmith in two contexts: one is the intellectual and political culture in which he worked as a professional author living in London; the other is that of his nationality and his as yet unstudied Jacobite politics. Enlightenment in Ruins thereby reveals a body of work that is compellingly marked by tensions and transits between Irishness and Englishness, between poetic and professional imperatives, and between cultural and scientific spheres.

Though his name might not be familiar to many twenty-first century readers, Laurence Whyte (d.1753) is an important missing link in eighteenth-century Ireland’s literary and musical histories. A rural poet who established himself in Dublin as a teacher of mathematics and as an active member (and poetic chronicler) of the much admired and supported Charitable Musical Society, Whyte was a poet of considerable talent and dexterity, and his body of work yields a wealth of insight into the intersecting cultures of his time and place. Published in 1740 and 1742, Whyte’s writing, by turns humorous and poignant, insightful and nostalgic, straddled the worlds of Gaelic and Anglo-Irish, of the rural midlands and the capital, of Catholic and Protestant. Some of the dualities explored in his verse were present, to varying extents, in the work of Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith. In matters poetical, political and cultural, Whyte is an important, though as yet neglected and unstudied, figure. This edition, comprehensively introduced and annotated, retrieves him from that neglect.

A 2nd Edition of this incredibly popular revision guide, this portable-sized book is ideal for consolidating knowledge both at home for revision, and at school as a lesson-by-lesson summary as the course progresses. ┒AO1 Description on the left-hand page: content divided into six points for six AO1 marks in extended writing questions.┒AO3 Evaluation is on the right-hand page: three AO3 points plus counterpoint and extra evaluation (discussion) point.┒Exam practice questions, including AO2 application questions, are on every spread providing lots of practice. ┒Research studies have been simplified to help revise and recall the information.┒Detailed exam advice section is included, with hints and tips offered throughout the book.┒Lots of illustrations and the odd corny joke help make it very user-friendly!┒It combines brilliantly with the 'Pink-hair Girl' 2nd Edition Flashbook as well as the original (and still completely relevant) Revision App.