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Literature and popular media in the past decade have served to introduce the broader public to the infra-red night vision developments of the Second World War, yet focus has primarily fallen upon those devices made and used by Germany and the USA. Through archival research this paper explores the British perspective, detailing the history and design of an infra-red weapon sight produced experimentally before the war's end, as well as the organisations and companies involved in the process. This is followed by an assessment of Britain's immediate post-war efforts in the field, showing why it was instead American equipment which was used in Britain's first martial deployments of infra-red weapon sights in the early 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study that explores the leisure reading habits and leisure collection use patterns of university students in the United States and United Kingdom. Ninety-eight students on ten university campuses (five in each country) were interviewed about their reading habits and observations were conducted at each campus. Results demonstrated that most university students interviewed do read for leisure, despite the persistent narrative in academic literature and popular media to the contrary. It does not necessarily follow that student readers will use their university library for this purpose simply because it has a leisure collection. Future research on student reading and practical recommendations for academic libraries with leisure collections are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are instrumental to most economies and leadership offers a means for SMEs to face today's business challenges. Despite the need for effective leadership in SMEs, researchers rarely examine leadership theories in this context. The SME context is characterized by proximal conditions that are conducive to role‐modeling leadership. Role‐modeling leadership, although popular in the practitioner literature, is an underdeveloped concept in the scientific literature because such leadership has been confounded with other leadership theories and behaviors. The present study showcases role‐modeling leadership as a distinct style of leadership and investigates its nomological framework between SMEs and large organizations. Using a sample of 371 employees across the UK, the findings supported (a) leader identification as an antecedent of role‐modeling leadership and (b) a chain of outcomes between role‐modeling leadership, leader–member exchange, job stress, job satisfaction, and turnover intent. However, the moderating effect of organization size was not supported. The present study contributes to theory by unraveling how a novel style of leadership is predicted as well as its relationship with important organizational outcomes. Limitations and suggestions for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Health Service (NHS), as a symbol of public health protection in the UK, was weaponised in pro-Brexit debates. It was suggested that European integration might inherently have undermined embedded liberalism and notably contributed to what Ruggie described as the "unbundling of sovereignty" (Ruggie, 1993). The manipulation of the NHS by right-wing populists has already been the focus of a number of articles, but calls to protect public health care from global threats have also come from left-wing politicians and activists. This article is particularly interested in socialist populist appeals to protect health care. It aims to show that for socialists the compromise between capital and labour and the protection of welfare systems, which is referred to as embedded liberalism, has not been achieved. In fact, furthering trade and investment is currently seen to be compromising the last remnants of a welfare state, which is embodied by the NHS in the UK. This conceptual article will thus start by presenting the theory of embedded liberalism. It will then establish the link between the breakdown of embedded liberalism in relation to health care systems. It will finally present populist and activist narratives on health and the UK's national health service from an international perspective. It draws on secondary literature and a corpus of popular press articles and grey literature produced by civil society organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the proliferation of popular literary texts about Modern Greece in nineteenth‐century British periodicals from the 1860s to the 1890s, texts that reveal the country's appeal to the Victorians, inviting them to imagine the birth and development of the new nation after the War of Independence (1821–1828). Short stories published in popular magazines, such as the New Monthly Magazine, Bow Bells and Sunday at Home, revisit the Greek Revolution and return to the popular allegory of Greece as an enslaved or endangered woman to reflect on the "Eastern question" and British colonial politics of protectionism in the Eastern Mediterranean. At the same time, women authors like Elizabeth Mayhew Edmonds and Isabella Fyvie Mayo, publishing in women's magazines, write stories and articles about the role of women in the Greek War of Independence, relating the feats of these historical or fictional figures to the "woman question" and to Victorian debates on femininity and gender, as well as national and imperial politics. In the late Victorians' re‐imagining of revolutionary history, Modern Greece is not enslaved to its classical past, as in traditional philhellenist representations, but must discover its modernity through its powerful nationalist agents. Revolutionary Greece re‐emerges as a symbolic event through a variety of publications, which often highlight the country's cultural hybridity and construct a transnational network of literary affiliations, creating parallelisms between Greece and Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the mid nineteenth into the mid twentieth centuries a significant number of British people spent their careers in India administering what was regarded as the most important territory of the British Empire. During this period, an extensive body of literature on Indian wildlife was published both in Britain and in India itself. This paper surveys the authors and the publishers of this literature and suggests that the material was shaped by the differing interests of readers in the two countries. The emergence of a community of enthusiastic naturalists among the British expatriates is contrasted with the promotion of India as an exotic location for readers in Britain itself. The role of hunting narratives in providing information for the study of natural history is explored, along with growing concerns about the need for conservation. The complexity of the relationships between expatriate British naturalists and the local populations is used to throw light on how the situation changed in the decades leading to independence. In conclusion, the publications of the Bombay Natural History Society are used to illustrate these developments [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the proceedings of a single semester module, delivered in fourteen weekly ninety-minute units, focusing on the (British) popular romance and three novels from the Regency and desert romance subgenres in particular: Georgette Heyer's Bath Tangle (1955), E.M. Hull's The Sheik (1919), and a recent Mills & Boon category romance, Marguerite Kaye's The Governess and the Sheikh (2011), which falls into both the Regency and desert subgenres. Taught entirely in English during the 2012 summer semester at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (Bavaria, Germany) to second- and third-year BA and teaching degree students, the class offered cultural as well as literary studies approaches and analyses and required student participation. The latter happened via team tasks, group discussions and joint presentations on either introductory or advanced topics concerning the two subgenres, thereby giving the students the opportunity to specialize in the analysis of a specific field of (British) popular culture and literature. This article outlines and reflects on: schedule planning; various teaching approaches and class activities; the students' choice in assessments; and their reaction to and evaluation of the seminar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Britain during the 1970s saw the publication of a spate of cheap, lurid novels based around the sensationalised portrayal of subcultural groups such as skinheads and motorcycle gangs. Publisher New English Library led the field, with books such as ‘Skinhead’ and ‘Suedehead’, and this article analyses such books in relation to their social, economic and political context. Focusing on the novels' narratives and representations, it argues that the genre was constituent in broader media constructions of 1970s Britain as being beset by a social and political ‘crisis’. The article concludes by considering the books' appeal. The genre, it is argued, was rooted in traditions of ‘exploitation’ fiction characterised by open-ended ambivalence. As such, the novels could be understood in a variety of ways. Their worldview was often authoritarian and chauvinistic, but their emphasis on defiant rebellion also gave the books significant cachet among the subcultures they represented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Eric Fitch Daglish (1892-1966) was a naturalist by inclination, a free-lance author and editor in business and, by practice, a wood-engraver of high repute. Taught wood-engraving skills by Paul Nash, he was a close friend also of other famous engravers (John Nash, Eric Gill) within the Society of Wood Engravers. He applied these skills to illustrating his own books for popular audiences on topics ranging from flowers to birds, beasts and the English countryside. Fluent in German, he translated books from that language to supplement his income in the years succeeding the First World War. He is perhaps best known for his bird books: Woodcuts of British birds, The life story of birds and Birds of the British Isles, but was also a prolific writer about dogs. His oeuvre is examined, and his contribution compared with other contemporary bird artists who embraced wood-engraving techniques. A bibliography of his natural history works as author and as editor is included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women in colonial Virginia had a greater role in the eighteenth-century world of print and the public sphere than previously recognized. This article focuses on less-elite printed matter: books for women, newspapers, and popular almanacs. Women went so far as to ask for equal treatment under the law and were indeed involved in public debates in print even before the Stamp Act controversy. This participation goes beyond the elites to the middling sort. The conclusion here is that colonial Virginia women were involved in the debates that prefaced the Revolution, a discovery that has implications for understanding how people of the separate colonies conceived and formed a new nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses aspects of Indian nationalism, religious belonging, and the participation of British missionaries during the Post-World War I period in India. It says that British missionaries have conveyed the pressure on national identities and faced the threats to their missions. It adds that interwar popular literature has asserted the connection between Protestantism and Britishness, despite of increasing cynicism and doubt on the existence of God after the Great War in Great Britain.

Clergymen's prescriptions that wives should confine themselves to the home were hardly pragmatic for most households. Popular literature reveals both an anxious misogyny and a grudging acceptance of the necessity of female forcefulness in the household and market place. Loud, abusive and profligate wives populate popular ballads and city comedies, but so too do careful, frugal housewives who, all too often, had to reform their immoderate husbands. Authors of ballads and city comedies sometimes celebrated sharp, aggressive market women, for the survival of the household often depended on the acuity and assertiveness of women in the marketplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the manuscript copy of a 1748 political satire titled "Petition of Negro Slaves, 1748," signed "Cudjoe," written in response to legislative reform debates regarding legal rights and laws for Jamaica's slaves. The author asserts that the public statement was written by Dr. James Smith, a physician in Jamaica who became known for his satire verse. Other subjects considered include Great Britain's colonial administration and its policies towards slavery and the slave trade, the legal status of the testimony of slaves in Jamaica's courts in the 18th century, and the legal and social status of Jews in colonial Jamaica.

English children's annuals developed as a genre during the late nineteenth century and contained short fiction, articles and illustrations. In what seems an odd pairing, the 'wild west' was a dominant trope in annuals. One of the ways in which children's cultural knowledge of the American west came about was through exposure to popular literature in annuals, most of which was written by English writers, for whom it seems the American west had a particular resonance. Why were twentieth-century British writers of this type of popular children's fiction so powerfully attracted to the 'wild west'? This essay argues that children's western tales provided opportunities to demonstrate white, western, and particularly English superiority, at a time of declining English world power. Class, race and gender ideology was transmitted easily in such stories for youthful, mostly uncritical readers. This essay explores the cultural significance of the strange pairing of the American 'wild west' and English children's annuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses royal attitudes toward reporting and political journalism on parliamentary proceedings in Great Britain. Moreover, it mentions popular terms of orders and resolution, motions and divisions, Commons and Lords debate. The article also explores changes in political participation and the breakdown of political secrecy with the rise of newspapers and popularity of pamphlets. Other topics include royalist propaganda, private versus public interests, and government transparency.

Bestsellers are an important commercial and social phenomenon. The paper defines and analyses bestsellers in the UK between 1998 and 2005, following on earlier work by one of the authors. It is concluded that there is a core groups of genres and authors dominating the bestseller lists, although there are also unexpected successes, especially at Christmas time. There is some evidence of long-term changes in taste, including the apparent decline in the popularity of romantic fiction and the growth of fantasy literature. It is also shown that media and movie adaptations and spin-offs are now an integral part of this dimension of the book industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians are currently debating whether or not leading members of the New Model Army and Parliament decided to execute King Charles 1 in late December 1648 or in late January 1649. In order to comprehend how contemporaries viewed this process, this essay explores the discussions about Charles's fate that occurred in the vibrant print culture thriving in England during the late 1640s. It argues that over the last week of December and the first two weeks of January members of every political faction announced in print that the government planned to judicially execute the king. Thus, while some leaders of the army and Parliament may have been uncertain in their own minds whether they would eliminate the king through the end of the month, it appears that, in the public discourse, the king's fate was sealed even before his trial began on 20 January 1649. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explains that human abnormalities are described in the ballad-sheets or broadsides in Great Britain, the popular street literature during the Elizabethan period, between 1500 to 1700. Titles include the 1561 "A Pycture of a Monsterus Chylde Which Was Bourne at Chechester", and "A Tru Dyscription of Twoo Cheldren Borne at Herne in Kente the xxvijth Day of Auguste Anno 1565".

• Our analysis shows how practitioners embed climate justice in urban smart initiatives. • Discourse analysis helped to reveal the explicit, implied and obscured aims of smart city initiatives. • Our heuristic could improve traditional policy analysis assessments. This article investigates the application of the "smart cities" and "urban climate justice" concepts to two urban initiatives based in Bristol, UK. Both ideas are increasingly popular in academic literature. Yet, little is known about their understanding by the practitioners such as policymakers, third sector organisations and citizens. Two case studies, a community-based energy efficiency initiative, and a local authority electric vehicle policy were critically reviewed using discourse analysis. The method helped to reveal the explicit, implied and obscured aims of the examined initiatives. Using discourse analysis, the researchers developed a heuristic which could improve traditional policy analysis approaches. The examination of case studies illustrates how practitioners understand the notions of "urban climate justice" and "smart cities" and whether their conceptualisations differ from those present in the academic literature. Finally, the paper offers methodological suggestions for embedding justice in "smart" initiatives at each stage of policy and project design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]