The religion of the Aztecs boasted a god of espionage –an unusual deity in any other new world religion. The Aztecs were brilliant soldiers and administrators and viewed espionage and intelligence gathering as a key to domination. The successor regimes to the Aztecs also created elaborate and successful entities for political and spiritual control: this monograph discusses the efforts of the Hapsburg and Bourbon administrations to exact information (as well as gold and silver) on a wide scale.

The authors, who have served in the Intelligence services, have made a close and original study of Sir Francis Walsingham and his associates in the Elizabethan secret services. Walsingham is seen as a darkly effective (the Queen called him “my Moor”)master of a comprehensive intelligence gathering network with sophisticated centralized control and all-source processing.

This work is the study of a family’s century long involvement with Irish self rule and political freedom. Joe Johnston (1890-1972), from a Tyrone Presbyterian small-farm background, had 3 elder brothers who made their careers in the Indian Civil Service. The family were 'Home Rule within the Empire' supporters in the Ulster liberal tradition. After studying classics and ancient history in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and then in Oxford, JJ became a Fellow of Trinity in 1913.

Edmund Burke, the great British statesman, had a long and uncomfortable relationship with Ireland beginning with the circumstances of his birth: He was born an Irishman. As a conservative thinker, as a fierce critic of revolutionary movements and political terrorism, He hoped to knead a British nation from imperial fragments, disparate and fissiparous polities and marginal nonanglophone kingdoms and duchies. This monograph by a distinguished researcher in Burkean language and thought deals with Burke’s attempts to redefine Ireland an integral part of Britain.

With a combination of robust research and coherent overview, Dr. Hutchinson argues that the origins of the Conservative Party in Britain begin with Henry Vll's attempt to define and order a Tudor solution to the chaos and civil war of the preceding century. This order is to begin a conservative political pattern: the capturing of successive revolutions by the forces of order, property and pragmaticism.

This work examines text as cultural force. It specifically discusses the thematic potency of Evolution as the evolutionary topics of the Darwin and the post Darwin generation increasingly found their way into popular discourse and popular culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. Both Britain and America were (and to an interesting degree, still are)the center of a series of debates about evolutionary development of life. Unlike Appleman’s critical edition of Darwin (now in 3/E) this collection emphasizes literary and popular responses using original material and debates.

One of medieval Ireland’s greatest collections of stories and poems, THE COLLOQUY OF OLD MEN (12 th century by anonymous bards and compilers)is an extraordinary fictive accountant of journeys made by saint Patrick and the pagan Cailte, a survivor from an earlier epoch. The contrast between Druidic paganism and Christianity permeates the collection It is seen in accounts of Patrick’s miracles, his success as a missioner, his claims to authority both moral and secular. In Cailte, ancient Ireland gives as good as it gets.

It was in 1916 that Patrick Pearse proclaimed Ireland a sovereign nation on the basis of its mourning, stating that "from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations." The concept of creating an Irish nation as a process of mourning has been both popular and prevalent in the writing of politicians, philosophers, artists, and patriots of every kind. This book analyzes Irish literary, political, and nationalist rhetoric as works of mourning. It focuses on a series of interlocking commemorative discourses: obituaries, decommissioning talks, and hunger strike commemorations.

This research monograph is the result of many years of archival investigation in Russia, France and elsewhere into the nature of Catherine the Great’s involvement with the French Enlightenment. Professor Gorbatov’s conclusions go far beyond the consensus of philosophic and cultural interests masking an authoritarian and, at times, barbarous emerging European power and delves instead into Catherine’s fascination with French political and social ideals.

In the tradition of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, Professor Scott Gardiner approaches media as an extra somatic tool and engages in a bracingly different approach to the purpose and power of media via an investigation into its historical, psychological and technical underpinnings as well as the powerful and disturbing/benign configurations of its future. Gardiner goes beyond the usual sociological level of analysis and the readings approach to the topic.