What meaning does the past hold for the present? History writing often prioritizes the ethos and actions of the "great men" of the past, those connected to formal expressions of power, as models worthy of imitation. The problem with such exemplars is that they craft a limited view of national identity, drawn from political, economic, religious, and social institutional superstructures. Inherently exclusionary, narratives of exemplary men inadequately represent the complexities of a metropolitan and diverse society. In Exemplary England, Sarabeth Grant explores three canonical texts of 1740s England that critique the class, geography, and gender assumptions of the exemplar model. Through original readings of Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and Samuel Richardson, she locates practices of constituting history and registering national identity in eighteenth-century England beyond that tradition. Her book argues that these literary texts offer recompense for the national injustices endured by the disenfranchised, charting the development of inward historical consciousness as necessary to civic stability.

This book, written within the framework of a research project funded by the European Commission Civil Justice Programme, identifies the ways in which cross-border EU competition law actions can best be handled in Europe. Employing traditional library-based legal research methods as well as qualitative interviews with legal practitioners in Germany and England (countries sharing different legal traditions) and policy-makers in Brussels, the book considers how private EU competition law actions are functioning at the moment and how they could and should be developed. The study proposes solutions for some of the most pressing practical problems, and includes chapters by the following academics, legal practitioners and judges: Judge I Pelikánová (General Court of the EU); J Lawrence and A Morfey (Freshfields); P Lasok QC (Monckton Chambers); H Mercer QC (Essex Court Chambers); J Webber (Shearman & Sterling); T Reher (CMS Hasche Sigle, Germany); P Bos and J Möhlmann (BarentsKrans, the Netherlands); P Beaumont (Aberdeen); S Bariatti (Milan); G Howells (Manchester); D Fairgrieve (BIICL); J Fitchen (Aberdeen); A Andreangeli (Edinburgh); D Tzakas (Athens Bar, Greece); S Dnes (Sidley Austin, Brussels); F Becker and J Kammin (Kiel University, Germany); and M Danov (Brunel University).

In this study, Michael Ullyot makes two new arguments about the rhetoric of exemplarity in late Elizabethan and Jacobean culture: first, that exemplarity is a recursive cycle driven by rhetoricians' words and readers' actions; and second, that positive moral examples are not replicable, but rather aspirational models of readers' posthumous biographies. For example, Alexander the Great envied Achilles less for his exemplary life than for Homer's account of it. Ullyot defines the three types of decorum on which exemplary rhetoric and imitation rely, and charts their operations through Philip Sidney's poetics, Edmund Spenser's poetry, and the dedications, sermons, elegies, biographies, and other occasional texts about Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, and Henry, Prince of Wales. Ullyot expands the definition of occasional texts to include those that criticize their circumstances to demand better ones, and historicizes moral exemplarity in the contexts of sixteenth-century Protestant memory and humanist pedagogy. The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England concludes that all exemplary subjects suffer from the problem of metonymy, the objection that their chosen excerpts misrepresent their missing parts. This problem also besets historicist literary criticism, ever subject to corrections from the archive, so this study concedes that its own rhetorical methods are exemplary.

Identifying 'permissive populism', the trickle down of permissiveness into mass consumption, as a key feature of the 1970s, Leon Hunt considers the values of an ostensibly 'bad' decade and analyses the implications of the 1970s for issues of taste and cultural capital. Hunt explores how the British cultural landscape of the 1970s coincided with moral panics, the troubled Heath government, the three day week and the fragmentation of British society by nationalism, class conflict, race, gender and sexuality.