Ian Davidson

A vital and illuminating look at this profoundly important (and often perplexing) historical moment, by former Financial Times chief foreign affairs columnist Ian Davidson. The French Revolution casts a long shadow, one that reaches into our own time and influences our debates on freedom, equality, and authority. Yet it remains an elusive, perplexing historical event. Its significance morphs according to the sympathies of the viewer, who may see it as a series of gory tableaux, a regrettable slide into uncontrolled anarchy—or a radical reshaping of the political landscape. In this riveting new book, Ian Davidson provides a fresh look at this vital moment in European history. He reveals how it was an immensely complicated and multifaceted revolution, taking place in different places, at different times, and in different spheres; and how subsequently it became weighted with political, social, and moral values. Stirring and dramatic—and filled with the larger-than-life players of the period and evoking the turbulence of this colorful time—this is narrative history at its finest.

From Enlightenment to Tyranny

The French Revolution

The author says of this book: These poems were written in Bangor, in north Wales, in Barcelona, in London, on the Baltic coast and in Fez and Marrakech. Despite the distances involved they are the result of a period of introspection and self-possession. Travel doesn't necessarily broaden the mind. In some cases only the long lines would do, and the language had to be chewed over, while in others, when the town was quiet and the blood had stopped pounding in my head, I could clip the tone and measure out the words a few at a time. A lot happened in the two years in which these poems were written. There was a war, and there were bombs in London. There were things hardly possible to deal with, including the return of an imperialist and colonialist attitude that I thought was part of history and would never return in my lifetime. Some of that gets in the poems. But I was mainly interested in myself, and how I'd got the way I had. How the traces of a life had marked the skin.

As If Only

Catherine Walsh

Tom Raworth

Ken Edwards

Solicited Material

Sugato Basu

Kiri Wagstaff

Since the initial work on constrained clustering, there have been numerous advances in methods, applications, and our understanding of the theoretical properties of constraints and constrained clustering algorithms. Bringing these developments together, Constrained Clustering: Advances in Algorithms, Theory, and Applications presents an extensive collection of the latest innovations in clustering data analysis methods that use background knowledge encoded as constraints. Algorithms The first five chapters of this volume investigate advances in the use of instance-level, pairwise constraints for partitional and hierarchical clustering. The book then explores other types of constraints for clustering, including cluster size balancing, minimum cluster size,and cluster-level relational constraints. Theory It also describes variations of the traditional clustering under constraints problem as well as approximation algorithms with helpful performance guarantees. Applications The book ends by applying clustering with constraints to relational data, privacy-preserving data publishing, and video surveillance data. It discusses an interactive visual clustering approach, a distance metric learning approach, existential constraints, and automatically generated constraints. With contributions from industrial researchers and leading academic experts who pioneered the field, this volume delivers thorough coverage of the capabilities and limitations of constrained clustering methods as well as introduces new types of constraints and clustering algorithms.

Advances in Algorithms, Theory, and Applications

Constrained Clustering

In 1753, Voltaire - playwright, poet, philosopher, and one of the most feted figures in Europe - was forced into exile by King Louis XV, where he would remain for the last 25 years of his life. This period heralded a startling new beginning for this remarkable character during which Voltaire became a successful entrepreneur and wrote his masterpiece Candide. Cast out by the establishment, he also developed astonishingly modern ideas about human rights, borne out in his campaigns against a series of miscarriages of justice. Ian Davidson has drawn on the rich correspondence between Voltaire and his family, members of the Court at Versailles and the French intellectual elite, to paint a wonderful portrait of the man declared by Diderot to be 'the unique man of the century'.

Voltaire in Exile

Bretton Woods and After

We think of Voltaire as the epitome of the Enlightenment; in his own time he was also the most famous and controversial figure in Europe. Davidson tells the whole, rich story of his life (1694-1778) - his early imprisonment in the Bastille; exile in England and his mastery of English; an obsession with money, of which he made a huge amount; a scandalous love life; his infatuation with Frederick the Great; a long exile on the borders of Switzerland; his passion for watch-making; his human rights campaigns and his triumphant return to Paris to die there as celebrity extraordinaire. Throughout all of this Voltaire's life was always informed by two things: a belief in the essential value of toleration in the face of fanaticism; and in the right of every man to think and say what he liked. It is rare to have such a vivid portrait of a great man.

A Life

Voltaire

The Boxing Day Football Went Goal Crazy

Late December Back In '63

Zoë Skoulding

The essays in this volume present a thorough re-evaluation of the idea of place for the twenty-first century, linking across theoretical interests in space and spatialisation and in motion and mobility. ‘Placing’ becomes an active process that happens in different parts of the world, and there is work here from the countries of the United Kingdom, from Ireland, the USA, Australia and mainland Europe. Placing also happens in different contexts, in the Production of visual images, in translation, in performance and in poetry that is both ‘there’ and ‘here’. The range of poets under consideration matches the breadth of the range of the Contributors. International in scope, and drawn from a variety of practices and processes, their combination in a single volume leads to unusual connections and new readings of their work.

Ian Davidson

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