Bøker av Arthur Aughey

The Last Train to Hull is the story of bookish but naive Edward Sweeney. Arriving at Hull University from Belfast in 1976 to study for his doctorate, Sweeney finds himself between worlds - Northern Ireland and England, working-class family and middle-class friends, youth and maturity, fantasy and reality. Yet he doesn't feel he's exchanged one godforsaken place for another. Hull, despite an atmosphere of isolation and economic decline, gives him permission to live freely. A scholarly career beckons, and life has never seemed better. He falls in love with a local woman who, like him, lives between worlds and he jokes he had to travel all this way just to find her. It is a relationship which challenges Sweeney's comforting illusions and confronts him with the question whether, in life and in love, we should choose to be more, rather than less, deceived. This is one in a series of novels featuring Edward Sweeney. The chronological order of the trilogy is: The Last Train to HullFour Days in VillachBetween Hougham and Heaven

Four Days in Villach tells a story of return, reminiscence and rediscovery. Former lovers Edward Sweeney and Sonja Maier meet again after a gap of twenty-five years. Partly dissonant, partly harmonious, theirs was a romance which ranged across nations and between cultures. Now, as they struggle to re-map the boundaries of that relationship, they take a sentimental journey through the landscape of their past on the borderlands of Austria, Italy and Slovenia. Both are surprised to find neither age nor separation has diminished mutual pleasures of companionship. In these four days they experience late joys as fulfilling as the expectations of youth. This is one in a series of novels featuring Edward Sweeney. The chronological order of the trilogy is: The Last Train to HullFour Days in VillachBetween Hougham and Heaven

This book is an important and timely re-assessment of the significance which the role of national identity plays in Conservative politics. It examines the challenges facing the party in its commitment to preserve the Union, in its promise to address the English Question and in its objective of using Brexit to consolidate a new Conservative nation. -- .

With the advent of devolution, it is clear that the British Constitution is currently undergoing a period of dynamic transformation. England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales were slowly united by conquest and treaty over the last 300 years, a unity which was only broken by the 1922 agreement that split Ireland in two. The last 50 years have seen the collapse of empire, and while the pull of local nationalism within the United Kingdom continues to strengthen, integrative narratives of Britishness weaken. *BR**BR*In this insightful book, Arthur Aughey outlines the changing character of the United Kingdom polity, and examines the developing debate about the meaning of the Union in the context of New Labour/New Britain. *BR**BR*In a systematic survey of historical, theoretical and political reflection on the nature of Britishness, he questions what the Union once was, what it means now and what it might become, taking into account the challenge posed by internal divisions along with the problems posed by European integration and globalisation.

This book is designed as both a framework text - setting out concepts by which to understand the British question - and a synthetic text - providing a digest of significant academic work on historical, conceptual and political matters relevant to that question. -- .

The politics of Englishness provides a digest of the debates about England and Englishness and a unique perspective on those debates. Not only does the book provide readers with ready access to and interpretation of the significant literature on the English Question, it also enables them to make sense of the political, historical and cultural factors which constitute that question. The book addresses the condition of England in three interrelated parts. The first looks at traditional narratives of the English polity and reads them as variations of a legend of political Englishness, of England as the exemplary exception, exceptional in its constitutional tradition and exemplary in its political stability. The second considers how the decay of that legend has encouraged anxieties about English political identity and about how English identity can be recognised within the new complexity of British governance. The third revisits these narratives and anxieties, examining them in terms of actual and metaphorical 'locations' of Englishness: the regional, the European and the British.

In this book, one of the leading authorities on contemporary Northern Ireland politics provides an original, sophisticated and innovative examination of the post-Belfast agreement political landscape.

This text provides an introduction to the multi-faceted nature of the politics of Northern Ireland. It has been written in response to the moves for peace currently being made by all parties involved in the conflict.