Although welfare reform is currently the government's top priority, most discussions about the public's responsibility to the poor neglect an informed historical perspective. This important book provides a crucial examination of past attempts, both in this country and abroad, to balance the efforts of private charity and public welfare. The prominent historians in this collection demonstrate how solutions to poverty are functions of culture, religion, and politics, and how social provision...

Frank and entertaining account of the University of Manchester's struggle to meet the Government’s demands for the rapid expansion of higher education in the 1950s and the 1960s. Looks at the University's ambitious building program: the controversial attempts to reform its constitution and improve its communications amid demands for greater democracy in the workplace, the struggle to retain its old pre-eminence in a competitive world where new ‘green field’ universities were rivalling olde...

Looking at Catholic charity and social policy in past times, this book focuses on 'unrespectable' women and children in Italy, and their treatment at the hands of charities and the law. It looks at prostitutes and women engaged in sexual relationships outside formal marriage, and foundlings, many of whom were abandoned because they were born out of wedlock.A wide-ranging synoptic survey, this study considers the practical complications and consequences of communities' decisions to ...

The decline of Venice remains one of the classic episodes in the economic development of modern Europe. Its contrasts are familiar enough: the wealthiest commercial power in fifteenth-century Europe, the strongest western colonial power in the eastern Mediterranean, found its principal fame three centuries later in carnival and the arts. This metamorphosis from commercial hegemony to fashionable pleasure and landed wealth was, however, a complex process. It resulted not so much from the Po...

In 1508, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The thirty-three-year-old Michelangelo had very little experience of the physically and technically taxing art of fresco; and, at twelve thousand square feet, the ceiling represented one of the largest such projects ever attempted.Nevertheless, for the next four years he and a hand-picked team of assistants laboured over the vast ceiling, making thousands of drawings and spending back-brea...

One of the world's leading historians of Renaissance Italy brings to life here the vibrant--and violent--society of fifteenth-century Florence. His disturbing narrative opens up an entire culture, revealing the dark side of Renaissance man and politician Lorenzo de' Medici. On a Sunday in April 1478, assassins attacked Lorenzo and his brother as they attended Mass in the cathedral of Florence. Lorenzo scrambled to safety as Giuliano bled to death on the cathedral floor. April Blood

In this brilliant and widely acclaimed work, Peter Burke presents a social and cultural history of the Italian Renaissance. He discusses the social and political institutions which existed in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and analyses the ways of thinking and seeing which characterized this period of extraordinary artistic creativity. Developing a distinctive sociological approach, Peter Burke is concerned with not only the finished works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Leon...

In April 1478, a plot to murder the two heads of the powerful Medici family dramatically miscarried. The younger of the two brothers was killed, but Lorenzo the Magnificent, the brilliant poet and connoisseur escaped. A bloodbath followed and all of Italy was at once affected as it emerged that the Pope, the King of Naples, and the Duke of Urbino were deeply implicated in the plot, and that binding treaties required Milan and Venice to assist Florence.If the conspirators had succee...

An innovatory exploration of art and visual culture. Through carefully chosen themes and topics rather than through a general survey, the volumes approach the process of looking at works of art in terms of their audiences, functions and cross-cultural contexts. While focused on painting, sculpture and architecture, it also explores a wide range of visual culture in a variety of media and methods. "1000-1600: Medieval to Renaissance" includes essays on key themes of Medieval and Renaissance...

'Absorbing . . . an intelligent and clear-eyed account of much that goes on in our country' Sunday TimesGetting to grips with Great Britain is harder than ever. We are a nation that chose Brexit, rejects immigration but is dependent on it, is getting older but less healthy, is more demanding of public services but less willing to pay for them, is tired of intervention abroad but wants to remain a global authority. We have an over-stretched, free health ser...

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'There was nothing extraordinary about my childhood or background. And yet I looked in vain for any aspect of my family's story when I went to university to read history, and continued to search fruitlessly for it throughout the next decade. Eventually I realised I would have to write this history myself.'What was it really like to live through the twentieth century? In 1910 three-quarters of the populati...

A TIMES POLITICAL BOOK OF THE YEARA LONGMAN/HISTORY TODAY BOOK OF THE YEARThe award-winning history of the British Welfare State –now fully revised and updated for the 21st Century.‘A masterpiece’ Sunday TimesGiant Want. Giant Disease. Giant Ignorance. Giant Squalor. Giant Idleness.These were the Five Giants that loomed over the post-war reconstruction...