What is "race"? A biological fact, a social construction, or an assumed disguise? In Masks: Blackness, Race and the Imagination, acclaimed novelist and critic Adam Lively offers a brilliant exploration of how the concept of blackness has evolved in Western thought and literature, and how changing notions of racial identity helped to shape modern consciousness.

Lively traces ideas of racial difference to their earliest expressions in European culture, at the time of the Europeans' first encounters with African and American peoples, and follows these ideas to their current incarnations in...

Democracy in Britain includes a rich and varied selection of key writings, from the debates around Britain's representative and democratic institutions, from constitutional commentary and diaries to poetry and fiction; from Locke and Burke to Dryden and Auden; and from Magna Carta to Spycatcher.

• Provides the best resource available for the understanding and study of Britain's system of representative democracy
• The editors have made efforts throughout to make the material selected accessible to non-specialists
• Rather than following one side of the...