This books attends to what in French, since the 1980s, has been called the passeur, the figure of the intellectual, mediator, translator or journalist, who is also a socialized being in the world.The volume sets out from biographical contexts in such a way that the work as a whole is offered as a gallery of portraits leading from one kind of cultural understanding to another and then another... Geographically, the range is broadly European (England, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Poland,...

The appearance and development of a "Four Nations" slant on British history over the last two decades has in many ways pointed up "the Union" as an essential component of the national history or histories of the British Isles. "Four Nations" historians, however, have tended to focus exclusively on the United Kingdom as the core of either a nascent or a now defunct Empire. History is variously invoked to account for the emergence of the British dynastic state, explain its (to some) puzzling...