Social policy is the means by which we improve the welfare and well-being of society. This introductory text offers an overview of the 'five pillars' of social policy: social security, employment, education, health, housing. It outlines the basics of social policy and explains key policy goals and how welfare is delivered.

Diverging Paths? investigates an important question, to which the answers must be very complex: "why did certain sorts of institutionalisation and institutional continuity characterise government and society in Christendom by the later Middle Ages, but not the Islamic world, whereas the reverse end-point might have been predicted from the early medieval situation?" This core question lies within classic historiographical debates, to which the essays in the volume, written by leading medievalists, make significant contributions. The papers, drawing on a wide range of evidence and...

Amelia Bassano was born in 1569 into a family of Venetian Jews who were court musicians to Queen Elizabeth I. At about the age of thirteen, she became mistress to the fiftysix-year-old Lord Hunsdon, Henry VIII's reputed son by Mary Boleyn. As Lord Chamberlain, Hunsdon was in charge of the English theatre and would become the patron of the company that performed the Shakespearean plays. Amelia lived with him for a decade, during which time she also had an affair with the playwright Christopher Marlowe. When she became pregnant, Amelia was exiled from court and next surfaces as the mysterious...

In "The Making of Europe" Essays in Honour of Robert Bartlett, a group of distinguished contributors analyse processes of conquest, colonization and cultural change in Europe in the tenth to fourteenth centuries. They assess and develop theses presented by Robert Bartlett in his famous book of that name. The geographical scope extends from Iceland to the Islamic Mediterranean, from Spain to Poland. Themes covered range from law to salt production, from aristocratic culture in the Christian West to Islamic views of Christendom. Like the volume that it honours, the present book extends...

The Road Taken by John Hudson brings together three sequences of poems created for walks in London and France. "Shapeshifter," written for a small rural community in France, explores the transformations a community uses and undergoes in order to thrive on a daily basis. "Stride" draws inspiration from the poet's cultural roots on London's East End and undertakes a twelve mile walk across varied terrain, socially, physically, spiritually and psychologically. "A Strange Guide to Places" walks a thirty four kilometre path in a sequence of poems that can be read in either direction and takes the...

In How to Survive, John Hudson, Chief Survival Instructor to the UK military, shows how strategies for life or death situations can help us excel in our everyday lives.