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The seventeenth century saw Irish migrants in Spain branch out from their traditional haunts in the counting house and the seminary into the army, the navy, the university and, of course, the Inquisition itself. Their complex relation with England, central to their sixteenth-century reception in Spain, continued to mark their experience abroad. The peace brokered at the 1604 Treaty of London ushered in a new era of diplomatic relations between the rulers of Spain and England and permitted the exchange of ambassadors. Initially their role, like that of the port consuls, was to ensure the observance of the treaty. By and large, the new arrangement disadvantaged Spain, which was left with its strategic vulnerability in the Netherlands and its susceptibility to English, French, Dutch and Danish incursions into its New World territories. Queering the diplomatic pitch was the vague possibility of a Spanish match for Prince Henry, the eldest Stuart heir, unrealistically premised by the Spanish on religious guarantees for the Stuarts’ Catholic subjects in England, Ireland and Scotland. This was the central plank in Anglo-Spanish relations in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and set the volatile context for the reception of Irish visitors travelling to Spain and within its Empire.

I guess it is not totally unfair to suggest that the plot of The Tempest is folded somewhere within the following piece of dramatized casuistry: What will the just man do, if he shall happen to have suffered shipwreck, and some one weaker than himself shall have seized the plank? Will he not thrust him from the plank, that he himself may get upon it, and supported by it may escape, especially since there is no witness in the middle of the sea? If he is wise, he must do so; for he must perish himself unless he shall thus act. But if he choose rather to die than inflict violence upon another, in this case he is just, but foolish, in not sparing his own life while he spares the life of another. (Quoted in Tuck, Philosophy 56) The author of the discussion to which this fragment belongs is Carneades, the head of the sceptical Academy. The discussion, Richard Tuck explains, was recorded in a lost portion of Cicero’s De republica which was preserved and handed down to us by the Christian writer Lactantius. In the provisional logic of this analogy, the plank is the island, the just man is Prospero and the weaker man is Caliban. Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi supplies another suitable term of comparison, with a Hindu boy in the role of the just man, the plank turned into a raft, and the weaker man promoted to tiger.

Chapter 2 will present evidence to support the first plank in the argument: the nature of the global economy and the constraints it imposes on policy makers. The evolution of globalization will be traced over time and its implications and economic effects will be outlined. Evidence will be drawn from a variety of sources, including comparative political economy and official statistics.

The early years of the 21st century have been a turbulent time in the financial world. The turmoil unleashed by the bursting of the United States housing bubble and the sub-prime mortgage crisis was undoubtedly the severest financial crisis since the 1930’s. The scale of the crisis has highlighted weaknesses in the financial system and its regulation and represents a watershed affecting both banking business models and the regulation of the system. This chapter focuses on the banking sector, which forms the central plank of the Spanish financial system.

Research on the linguistic landscape (LL) is starting to become conspicuous, particularly with regard to Europe and Asia. As far as Italy is concerned, I am aware of 14 pieces of research published so far that have looked at its linguistic landscape, four of them focusing on the presence of English (Griffin, 2004 carried out in Rome; Ross, 1997 carried out in Milan; Schlick, 2002 carried out in Klagenfurt, Ljubljana and Udin/Udine; Schlick, 2003 carried out in eight European cities including Trieste and Pordenone), three on English and/or the languages of recent immigrants (Barni, 2006; Gorter, 2009; Barni and Bagna, 2010), and another seven on the local minority/regional languages (Blackwood and Tufi, this volume; Coluzzi, 2009b; Dal Negro, 2009; Grazioli, 2006; Plank, 2006; Puzey, 2009; Puzey, this volume). Plank’s research was carried out in Bozen/Bolzano (Trentino Alto-Adige) and looked at the presence of the state language, Italian, and of the co-official language, German, on commercial shop signs, bars and restaurants in two areas of the city, the centre and the neighbourhood of Europa-Novacella. Dal Negro’s research was carried out in two non-urban settings: Formazza (Piedmont), where an Alemannic German variety is spoken, and Vilnos/Funes (Trentino Alto-Adige), where similarly to Bozen/Bolzano, a Bavarian variety, standard German and Italian are present.

After being pushed onto the defensive through the institutions of the Washington Consensus as well as unilateral management action in MNEs in the 1980 and 1990s, international trade unionism is making headlines again. Trade unions are part of multi-faceted campaigns to secure fundamental labour rights (Riisgaard and Hammer 2011) and to regain influence in the workplace. While these rights, based on the ILO core labour standards and the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, constitute a common plank in the various campaigns, the latter are conducted through a variety of organizational forms. A large number of IFAs, for example, have been achieved against the background of established union networks within MNEs as well as the institutional platform of European works councils (EWCs); others only serve as a starting point for creating such international union networks. Thus, it should not be surprising that union networks can take different forms, have diverse power constellations, and serve different purposes.

With T.R.W. & Percy to George Eliot’s funeral.’ Most dismal day, drizzle settling into heavy rain — 3/4 hour waiting at the grave: we secured footing on a plank; other outsiders on swampy clay & drenched clay-sward. No arrangements for comfort save broken red brick up path to grave, & sawdusted planks for mourning-coach intimates & reporters.2 For distinguished people present see newspapers.3 Dr Sadler conducted service in Chapel & mumbled something over grave — scarcely a word to be caught at two yards’ distance. Coffin polished oak, covered with camellias & a few violets & lilies of the valley. Brick sarcophagus, to be lidded. It struck me no pauper’s funeral could be more dismal. Nothing to see but expanded umbrellas.

Credit risk that concerns the dependability and solvency of a counterparty is the earliest type of risk known in finance and banking. Credit risk is part of the broader concept of risk, which is not alien to people even in the sciences. Max Plank, the physicist, once said: ‘Without occasional venture or risk, no genuine inventions can be accomplished even in the most exact science.’

School decentralization arguments have been widely adopted in the rhetoric (if less in the practice) of educational reform in many countries around the world, and particularly in the English-speaking states. Claims that decentralization will enhance the effectiveness of school systems have formed the central plank in the work of many prominent school reform advocates (Chubb and Moe, 1990; Sexton, 1987). However, the logical arguments advanced to support these claims are much contested (Ball, 1990a; Carnoy, 1993; Green, 1994; Whitty, 1992) and the empirical evidence, such as it is, has yet to substantiate the case. Decentralizing measures, such as ‘school choice’ and ‘local management’ policies in England, New Zealand and the USA, are too partial and too recent in origin to permit any definitive analysis of their effects on aggregate national outcomes; and the evidence proffered by advocates from within-country cross-school comparisons only weakly supports their case, if at all. Chubb and Moe (1990), for instance, find that private (i.e. less centralized) schools in the USA rate higher than state schools on school effectiveness traits but this could be simply the result of their ability to select pupils with whom it is easier to display effective schooling. Comparative studies have not adequately established that they can achieve higher levels of ‘value-added’ than the supposedly more centralized schools in the public systems (Carnoy, 1993).

This chapter describes a set of mainly sociological ideas and arguments which have been associated with a loose grouping of academics and writers working at the margins of British academic sociology in the 1970s and 1980s. It also explores the way in which this set of ideas was influential in the Department of Industry for a time, especially in the period leading up to the establishment of the Finniston Committee of Inquiry into the Engineering Profession. The central plank in the argument was that British culture consistently undervalues the practical business of making things. This is particularly marked in the disdain that the British show for manufacturing industry. This anti-manufacturing ethos pervaded Government thinking, and is equally to be found in much of British social science.

The builder Thomas Hardy had done important work for the architect Benjamin Ferrey when the west front of Stafford House, to the south of Lower Bockhampton, was built. Here, below the plank crossing of a Frome rivulet on the north side of the western garden area, the boy Hardy had discovered the weir which was to become the focal point in both the narrative and time-theme of ‘The Waiting Supper’. About this time, from the same place, he may have wandered down the valley to the nine-hatched weir, and watched the body of a drowned boy being hauled to land from the pool. At first he had thought by ‘some curious trick of light’ that it was a girl, and it was the memory of this which suggested the fatal climax of The Return of the Native, where the heroine is drowned in the pool below Shadwater Weir. It is possible that he witnessed the recovery of the body when his father and another builder were employed very near, by the architect John Hicks, on restoration work at Woodsford Castle, a manor farmhouse which had been built as a castle in the fourteenth century. Late in his life Hardy could not remember whether it was there or elsewhere that Hicks, finding he had no definite career in mind, ‘tested him by inviting him to assist at a survey’.

The history of Napoleon presented by Carlyle is a teleological one: his fall is due to his ambition outstripping its unity with history. Carlyle’s Napoleon soliloquises on St Helena, a spent egotist, still imagining himself ‘Nature’ or ‘France’: ‘and yet look how in fact — here am i! He cannot understand it: inconceivable that the reality has not corresponded to his program of it; that France was not all-great, that he was not France’ (On Heroes, p. 243). In Coleridge’s periodical the Friend Napoleon is identified only with an unnatural dogma. The egotistical despot is the apotheosis of the Rousseauist state ‘which had so marvellously raised and supported him, had marked him out for the representative of Reason, and had armed him with irresistible force, in order to realise its laws. In Him therefore might becomes right, and his cause and that of destiny.…his cause and the cause of God are one and the same’ (Friend [CC], i, 197). Elsewhere, however, Napoleon’s ambition is that of the usurper Satan: It has been well remarked, that there is something far more shocking in the tyrant’s pretensions to the gracious attributes of the Supreme Ruler, than in his most remorseless cruelties. There is a sort of wild grandeur, not ungratifying to the imagination, in the answer of Timar Khan to one who remonstrated with him on the inhumanity of his devastations.… Why do you deem me a man, and not rather the incarnate wrath of God acting on the earth for the ruin of mankind? (i, 232*)

An illustrator’s work must be judged by its appearance in print. Nevertheless, because the drawings of Millais and other illustrators of Trollope were engraved, indeed interpreted, by other hands, one is anxious to see how well the engraver has ‘translated’ the original drawings to the wood. But a just comparison requires that some rudimentary facts of the process be borne in mind. Wood engraving differs from both steel and copper engraving and from the older wood cutting. The wood engraver, while using the traditional graver or burin of the metal engraver, cuts away that portion of the surface which is not to be printed— the white areas; wood engraving is thus called ‘white line’ engraving. The cutter leaves raised those portions of the block that are to take ink and appear in black; thus a wood block is printed in relief, as is letterpress. On the other hand, the copper or steel engraver cuts into the metal lines that are to appear in black; ink is forced into the grooves, and the illustration is produced by intaglio printing rather than by relief printing. Etching, which requires intaglio printing also, was often combined with engraving; in Victorian times plates called ‘engravings on steel’ were often in fact etchings. Wood engraving differs from wood cutting in that the former is done with engraver’s tools on the end grain of very hard wood such as boxwood; wood cutting is worked with a knife or gouge on the plank side of a relatively soft wood such as pear.

A minister in Churchill’s War Cabinet had responsibility for reconstruction problems. He appointed, in June, 1941, an Interdepartmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services, headed by Sir William Beveridge. In November, 1942, Beveridge presented a report based upon the work of the Committee. It concluded that “in a system of social security better on the whole than can be found in almost any other country there are serious deficiencies which call for remedy.” Beveridge argued that “the purpose of victory is to live into a better world than the old world,”1 and that the provision of security against want, of medical care, and of employment for all citizens should become the central purpose of government economic policy. The report offered in some detail a plan for social insurance, which received a warm popular reception and was accepted by both the Conservative and Labour Parties as a central plank of postwar policy. The main points of his proposal are presented in the following excerpts from the report.