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The article offers poetry criticism of the poem "The Prelude," by William Wordsworth, focusing on the section "Cambridge and the Alps" in Book 6 of the poem. It examines the role of the poem in determining biographical information about Wordsworth from the summer of 1790, when he and friend Robert Jones traveled in Europe and the Alps. The author discusses the poem in light of cartography and a letter written from Wordsworth to his sister during the European tour.

The article presents information about paper "Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family: Papers Presented at a Colloquium Hosted by the University of Richmond, March 18-19, 2000," edited by Robert Drews. These exemplarily edited conference proceedings are thought-provoking and richly informative. Writer Cohn Renfrew reaffirms and updates his own 1973 theory that Proto-Indo-European accompanied the diffusion of farming into Europe, splitting from PIH in Anatolia. Scholar Peter Kuniholm observes that, according to dendrochronological evidence, Anatolia's high settlement density over time is compatible with Renfrew's theory.

The paper discusses an exhibition currently hosted by the Royal Academy of Arts and devoted to over one thousand years of Byzantine art, featuring the most important and wide-reaching collection of artifacts from the Byzantine period displayed in Britain over the last fifty years. The exhibition is revealing not merely because of the objects on display but also because of what it says in connection to our contemporary understanding of Europe itself. The study suggests that the exhibition is indicative of a shift in the images of East and West. This is not to say that we are witnessing an end to the intra-European divide between East and West, but rather that the current geopolitical context has accentuated the notion of a division between Europe and Islam. Thus, the public are inadvertently presented with the false yet dominant idea that Islam represented and still represents the end or at the very least a caesura of European culture. A deeper insight into history, however, reveals a very different picture, as the persistence and legacy of Byzantine art and religious life were more or less guaranteed under Ottoman rule. great britain [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the book "The Second Generation of Democratic Elites in Central and Eastern Europe," recommended for reading. The book brings thirteen papers addressing theoretical issues in the elite studies and discussing elite development in eight countries: Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovakia and Slovenia. The second generation of democratic elites is the elite of consolidation (by some called "post-transitional"). Their role has been not to struggle for the new rules of the game, but to employ them in the process of crafting democracy and a market economy. They were elected or nominated to their posts according to the new procedures. They had to face the challenges of more mature democratic politics and market mechanisms: electoral campaigns, class and value conflicts, unemployment, mass social protests, radical re-direction of international political and trade relations and many others. The charisma of communism fighters was gone, together with peoples' joy and their unequivocal support for reforms.

The article offers poetry criticism of the poem "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats. It mentions the poem as one of the best poem in the twentieth century by the poet. It further mentions that the poem has also been cited in connection with the Iraq War. It mentions the poem as the poet's response to the European political and economic crises.

In search for a European theological contribution to the debate on the new global context, this essay undertakes a theological-aesthetic exploration of theological motifs in the current political imagination, in particular: the theme of the angel. After a problematisation of the theological reception of Benjamin's Messianic-apocalyptic angel figure, I develop a critical position in the wake of von Balthasar. Von Balthasar's interpretations of Rilke and Bonaventure lead to two angelological paradigms, the monad and the crucified seraph, which occur in current political debates, as exemplified in recent essays of Zizek. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among EU Member States, there are basically two models of government. The standard European model, mainly developed in Prussia and France at the beginning of the nineteenth-century, has been successfully imitated to a very large extent in combination with the adoption of a parliamentary regime. The British civil service adopted the same type of hierarchical organisation as it was particularly suitable to the Westminster model of government responsibility. Opposed to this standard European model, the Swedish model has long been seen as a survival of Ancien Régime administrations. In the last part of the twentieth-century, several institutions have been directly or indirectly imported from Sweden to other countries, without taking account of the environment which made them successful in their country of origin. Some of the institutions can be seen as a way to modernisation although they were established two centuries ago. Both models feature a small number of elements, which are closely interlinked and make the system work. They are based on entirely different systems of accountability. This article presents and compares those two models in order to allow a better understanding of recent reforms and their prospects of success or failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to develop the theory of the authentic self presented in Bruce Wilshire's book "Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor." The article try to show that in certain respects this theory is an improvement over the theory of the authentic self expounded by other existentialists. Wilshire's theory is developed in two ways. First, it is shown that the theory of Wilshire provides a basis for the view that the authentic self is what is called the being-for-others and the they-self. Secondly, it is suggested that on religious level the authentic self is being-for-the-divine Other (God). The study of Wilshire's theory may be understood in a broader context as combating a certain trend or attitude in some sectors of current American phenomenological-existential philosophy. A brief word about the historical transformations of this movement will provide the necessary background to a delineation of this trend or attitude. The phenomenology of human existence and the theory of the authentic self used to be at the forefront of German and French thought. Contributions to phenomenology and existentialism can now be found almost exclusively in the U.S. The decade of the 1980's has produced the first classics of American phenomenological-existential philosophy, and these compare favorably with many of the famous classics of German and French thought. The main aim is to treat one of the American classics, Wilshire's book, in the manner it deserves, namely, as a classic and in the manner usually reserved for writings of Europeans. The essentials of the theory, developing of certain ideas of Wilshire and to defend some of the positions against opposing views have been discussed.