For much of his half-century career in the House of Commons, Tony Benn has been the most loved and loathed man in British politics. He has been idolized by the left, and reviled with equal measure by the Westminster establishment, not least by New Labour. Once tipped to lead the Labour Party, Benn's growing disillusionment with what he regarded as the democratic deficit infecting politics, reinforced his resolve to continue playing the role he valued most, as a good House of Commons Man.David Powell's fascinating new biography traces Tony Benn's extraordinary fifty year political career from the day he first entered the House in 1950. He argues that Benn's commitment to the House of Commons was fortified by his experiences during the thirty months when he fought to renounce his peerage and remain an MP; then during the twelve years he spent in government, and finally during the two decades he spent on the back benches, having been defeated in the bruising campaign for the Deputy Leadership of the Labour Party. Each was to provide him with an insight into the workings of power and cumulatively they were to convince him of the charade that passed for democracy not only in Westminster and in the Labour Party, but in the European Union and in the wider in the global context, with democratic ideals subordinated to the political and economic power of the United States. Benn has always a controversial figure. He was widely caricatured as Bogey Benn by the Tories during the 1970s and was more recently anathematised by Tony Blair as the man who almost knocked the Labour party over the edge of the cliff into extinction. Nonetheless many of the policies he championed, and for which he was widely belittled, have since entered the statute books. Indeed, if history is a chronicle of ironies, there can have been little more ironic than when, following Benn's valedictory speech in the Commons in 2001, a Tory backbencher commended him to fellow MPs as Britain's greatest living Parliamentarian.

This accessible yet authoritative collection of essays chronicles the history of dissent in the British Isles, from Magna Carta to the present day. The contributors - all specialists in their field - cover such milestones as the age of revolution, industrialisation and the foundation of the Labour Party. Tony Benn contributes a powerful, final extended chapter arguing that "we are light years away from being a true democracy."

The design of computer systems to be embedded in critical real-time applications is a complex task. Such systems must not only guarantee to meet hard real-time deadlines imposed by their physical environment, they must guarantee to do so dependably, despite both physical faults (in hardware) and design faults (in hardware or software). A fault-tolerance approach is mandatory for these guarantees to be commensurate with the safety and reliability requirements of many life- and mission-critical applications. A Generic Fault-Tolerant Architecture for Real-Time Dependable Systems explains the motivations and the results of a collaborative project(*), whose objective was to significantly decrease the lifecycle costs of such fault-tolerant systems. The end-user companies participating in this project currently deploy fault-tolerant systems in critical railway, space and nuclear-propulsion applications. However, these are proprietary systems whose architectures have been tailored to meet domain-specific requirements. This has led to very costly, inflexible, and often hardware-intensive solutions that, by the time they are developed, validated and certified for use in the field, can already be out-of-date in terms of their underlying hardware and software technology. The project thus designed a generic fault-tolerant architecture with two dimensions of redundancy and a third multi-level integrity dimension for accommodating software components of different levels of criticality. The architecture is largely based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components and follows a software-implemented approach so as to minimise the need for special hardware. Using an associated development and validationenvironment, system developers may configure and validate instances of the architecture that can be shown to meet the very diverse requirements of railway, space, nuclear-propulsion and other critical real-time applications. This book describes the rationale of the generic architecture, the design and validation of its communication, scheduling and fault-tolerance components, and the tools that make up its design and validation environment. The book concludes with a description of three prototype systems that have been developed following the proposed approach. (*) Esprit project No. 20716: GUARDS: a Generic Upgradable Architecture for Real-time Dependable Systems.

Dreams have a way of becoming influenced by the obsessions of the waking world. This holds true for Seth Reardon as well, the top professional dreamer in the new and dominant dream industry. Seth finds his entire way of life in jeopardy because of emotions too powerful to ignore, yet too dark to satisfy.

The only comfort he sees is in the eyes of a woman he barely knows, but who seems to know everything about him. Sara not only helps Seth deal with the doubts about his life, but also gives him hope for a peaceful future. If he could only escape the people trying to kill him, they could be together.

But when both his dream and his waking worlds collide with each other, he must choose whether or not to risk everything, including the very dreams he cherishes, to make things right.

First published in 1985. In the late autumn of 1774 at the age of 37 Tom Paine arrived in Philadelphia. Eighteen months later he had established himself as a seminal figure in the Independence movement. It was the start of a career in which he became the first US Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; was outlawed from England by Pitt for the publication of the second part of the Rights of Man; delivered a final plea for the life of Louis XVI in the National Convention of 1794; was imprisoned in the Luxembourg, and sentenced to death by Robespierre. After a sad and lonely death in New Rochelle Cobbett brought back his bones to England: 'to light a taper for liberty.' Yet Paine remains a man without a past; a man who seemingly burst on the world scene as a full-blown radical at 37 years of age. No one had attempted to explore and interpret the critical, shaping influences of his early and middle life. Yet such background is crucial to explaining all the rest. Without a clear understanding of his Quaker inheritance; of his childhood years in Thetford; of his early philosophical and political apprenticeship in London; and of the six formative years he spent at Lewes, the later man and his radicalism are totally incomprehensible. Thus, the author's objective is to place Paine in his times; to interpret the evolution of his political, social and theological ideas. Paine is little more than a cardboard cut-out moving through history in the majority of biographies that have already been published. This book sees the world through Paine's own eyes and provides a human interpretation not only of 'the Age of Revolution' but also of 'the maker of revolutions' himself. To Napoleon, Paine was the man to whom: 'a statue in gold should be erected in every town'; to Theodore Roosevelt he was 'that filthy little atheist'; to Michael Foot: 'the greatest exile that has ever left England's shores.' To understand the thinking of a man who can provoke such reactions, it is necessary to understand both the man and the times through which he lived. This title will be of great interest to students of history, politics, and philosophy.

First published in 1985. In the late autumn of 1774 at the age of 37 Tom Paine arrived in Philadelphia. Eighteen months later he had established himself as a seminal figure in the Independence movement. It was the start of a career in which he became the first US Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; was outlawed from England by Pitt for the publication of the second part of the Rights of Man; delivered a final plea for the life of Louis XVI in the National Convention of 1794; was imprisoned in the Luxembourg, and sentenced to death by Robespierre. After a sad and lonely death in New Rochelle Cobbett brought back his bones to England: 'to light a taper for liberty.' Yet Paine remains a man without a past; a man who seemingly burst on the world scene as a full-blown radical at 37 years of age. No one had attempted to explore and interpret the critical, shaping influences of his early and middle life. Yet such background is crucial to explaining all the rest. Without a clear understanding of his Quaker inheritance; of his childhood years in Thetford; of his early philosophical and political apprenticeship in London; and of the six formative years he spent at Lewes, the later man and his radicalism are totally incomprehensible. Thus, the author's objective is to place Paine in his times; to interpret the evolution of his political, social and theological ideas. Paine is little more than a cardboard cut-out moving through history in the majority of biographies that have already been published. This book sees the world through Paine's own eyes and provides a human interpretation not only of 'the Age of Revolution' but also of 'the maker of revolutions' himself. To Napoleon, Paine was the man to whom: 'a statue in gold should be erected in every town'; to Theodore Roosevelt he was 'that filthy little atheist'; to Michael Foot: 'the greatest exile that has ever left England's shores.' To understand the thinking of a man who can provoke such reactions, it is necessary to understand both the man and the times through which he lived. This title will be of great interest to students of history, politics, and philosophy.

This accessible new study provides a much-needed guide to the pivotal period of British history between 1910 and 1935, against the background of upheavals such as the First World War and the transition to full democracy as a consequence of the Reform Acts of 1918 and 1928. Combining an up-to-date synthesis of previous work with a re-appraisal of the main personalities, themes and events of the period, David Powell brings clarity to this crucial yet complex period.
Examining British politics on the eve of war, the author assesses the impact of war on the parties and the political system and the process of realignment that followed in the interwar period. In particular he analyses to what extent these events as a whole constituted a crisis of the party system.
From the structure of the Edwardian political system and the party politics of pre-war Britain, through to the economic and political crisis of 1931 and the subsequent rebuilding of the party system, this comprehensive analysisoffers an indispensable survey to all students of British history or politics.

This accessible new study provides a much-needed guide to the pivotal period of British history between 1910 and 1935, against the background of upheavals such as the First World War and the transition to full democracy as a consequence of the Reform Acts of 1918 and 1928. Combining an up-to-date synthesis of previous work with a re-appraisal of the main personalities, themes and events of the period, David Powell brings clarity to this crucial yet complex period.
Examining British politics on the eve of war, the author assesses the impact of war on the parties and the political system and the process of realignment that followed in the interwar period. In particular he analyses to what extent these events as a whole constituted a crisis of the party system.
From the structure of the Edwardian political system and the party politics of pre-war Britain, through to the economic and political crisis of 1931 and the subsequent rebuilding of the party system, this comprehensive analysisoffers an indispensable survey to all students of British history or politics.

For courses in electrical & computing engineering. Feedback control fundamentals with context, case studies, and a focus on design Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems, 8th Edition, covers the material that every engineer needs to know about feedback control-including concepts like stability, tracking, and robustness. Each chapter presents the fundamentals along with comprehensive, worked-out examples, all within a real-world context and with historical background provided. The text is devoted to supporting students equally in their need to grasp both traditional and more modern topics of digital control, and the author's focus on design as a theme early on, rather than focusing on analysis first and incorporating design much later. An entire chapter is devoted to comprehensive case studies, and the 8th Edition has been revised with up-to-date information, along with brand-new sections, problems, and examples

This authoritative edition was originally published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a generous selection of Clare's poetry and prose, including autobiographical writings and letters. John Clare (1793-1864) is now recognized as one of the greatest English Romantic poets, after years of indifference and neglect. Clare was an impoverished agricultural labourer, whose genius was generally not appreciated by his contemporaries, and his later mental instability further contributed to his loss of critical esteem. But the extraordinary range of his poetical gifts has restored him to the company of his contemporaries Byron, Keats, and Shelley, and this fine selection illustrates all aspects of his talent. It contains poems from all stages of his career, including love poetry, and bird and nature poems. Written in his native Northamptonshire, Clare's work provides a fascinating reflection of rural society, often underscored by his own sense of isolation and despair. Clare's writings are here presented with the minimum of editorial interference, and with a new Introduction by the poet and scholar Tom Paulin. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The design of computer systems to be embedded in critical real-time applications is a complex task. Such systems must not only guarantee to meet hard real-time deadlines imposed by their physical environment, they must guarantee to do so dependably, despite both physical faults (in hardware) and design faults (in hardware or software). A fault-tolerance approach is mandatory for these guarantees to be commensurate with the safety and reliability requirements of many life- and mission-critical applications. This book explains the motivations and the results of a collaborative project', whose objective was to significantly decrease the lifecycle costs of such fault tolerant systems. The end-user companies participating in this project already deploy fault-tolerant systems in critical railway, space and nuclear-propulsion applications. However, these are proprietary systems whose architectures have been tailored to meet domain-specific requirements. This has led to very costly, inflexible, and often hardware-intensive solutions that, by the time they are developed, validated and certified for use in the field, can already be out-of-date in terms of their underlying hardware and software technology."

Bringing together an unprecedented number of extensive personal stories, this book shares the triumphs and heartbreaking moments experienced by some of the first Cubans to come to the United States after Fidel Castro took power in 1959. Ninety Miles and a Lifetime Away is a moving look inside fifteen years of migration that changed the two countries and transformed the lives of the people who found themselves separated from their homeland. David Powell presents interviews with refugees who left Cuba between 1959 and the 1962 Missile Crisis, as well as those who embarked on the Freedom Flights of the late 1960s and early 1970s. During these years more than 600,000 Cubans migrated to the US, some by way of other countries and many arriving in Miami with only a few clothes and pocket money. In their own words, exiles describe why they left the island, how they prepared for departure, what situations they faced when they arrived in the US, and how they integrated into American life. Offering historical background that illuminates this pivotal period in the context of the Cold War, Powell shows how the US government’s Cuban refugee assistance program had far-reaching effects on refugee policy, bilingual education, and child welfare programs. The testimonies in this book include new information about low-cost “Cuban Loans” that enabled young exiles to attend US colleges, preparing many to be builders and leaders in their adopted country today. A powerful portrayal of the initial effects of a revolution that began a new era in Cuba’s relationship with the world, this book preserves rare accounts of the motivations and struggles of early Cuban exiles in the words of the emigres themselves, adding gripping detail to the history of the modern Cuban diaspora.

This book presents the proceedings of the First European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC-1), held in Berlin, Germany, in October 1994. EDCC is the merger of two former European events on dependable computing.
The volume comprises 34 refereed full papers selected from 106 submissions. The contributions address all current aspects of dependable computing and reflect the state of the art in dependable systems research and advanced applications; among the topics covered are hardware and software reliability, safety-critical and secure systems, fault-tolerance and detection, verification and validation, formal methods, hardware and software testing, and parallel and distributed systems.

Delta-4 is a 5-nation, 13-partner project that has been investigating the achievement of dependability in open distributed systems, including real-time systems. This book describes the design and validation of the distributed fault-tolerant architecture developed within this project. The key features of the Delta-4 architecture are: (a) a distributed object-oriented application support environment; (b) built-in support for user-transparent fault tolerance; (c) use of multicast or group communication protocols; and (d) use of standard off the-shelf processors and standard local area network technology with minimum specialized hardware. The book is organized as follows: The first 3 chapters give an overview of the architecture's objectives and of the architecture itself, and compare the proposed solutions with other approaches. Chapters 4 to 12 give a more detailed insight into the Delta-4 architectural concepts. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to providing a firm set of general concepts and terminology regarding dependable and real-time computing. Chapter 6 is centred on fault-tolerance techniques based on distribution. The description of the architecture itself commences with a description of the Delta-4 application support environment (Deltase) in chapter 7. Two variants of the architecture - the Delta-4 Open System Architecture (OSA) and the Delta-4 Extra Performance Architecture (XPA) - are described respectively in chapters 8 and 9. Both variants of the architecture have a common underlying basis for dependable multicasting, i. e."

These volumes represent the third and fourth of five volumes devoted to Clare's 'middle period', between 1822 and 1837, arguably the years of his finest creativity. The poems contained in these volumes range from examples of Clare's satirical and political verse, in 'The Summons' and 'The Hue & Cry', to a telling expression of his philosophy of nature, in 'The Eternity of Nature', and probably the most important statement of Clare's poetic objectives in 'To the Rural Muse'. If there is any lingering belief in the 'sameness' of Clare's verse, these volumes ought surely to dispel it.

These volumes represent the third and fourth of five volumes devoted to Clare's 'middle period', between 1822 and 1837, arguably the years of his finest creativity. The poems contained in these volumes range from examples of Clare's satirical and political verse, in 'The Summons' and 'The Hue & Cry', to a telling expression of his philosophy of nature, in 'The Eternity of Nature', and probably the most important statement of Clare's poetic objectives in 'To the Rural Muse'. If there is any lingering belief in the 'sameness' of Clare's verse, these volumes ought surely to dispel it.

This volume contains the finest edition ever presented of Clare's classic poem `The Shepherd's Calendar', based on the world-wide manuscripts of Clare's poetry studied for over thirty years. Many of the accompanying poems are published for the first time and all are in the poet's original language.

This volume contains many of Clare's finest poems, many of them published for the first time. It is the only edition of the Middle Poems to print what the poet wrote in his original language, and is based on the world-wide manuscripts of Clare's poetry studied for over thirty years.

For the first time all Clare's early poems are brought together with all known variants, and with Clare's characteristic vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and punctuation preserved. Through this collection, ranging from juvenilia to the published poems that first established his reputation with Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery and The Village Minstrel, it becomes clear how many more poems Clare composed in these early years than have previously seen the light of day. Strenuous efforts have been made to recover poems obliterated in some of Clare's first manuscripts, and the complete text of The Parish, his major satirical poem, is included. A glossary is provided for both volumes, together with extensive annotation. Clare's own dating of his first poems is employed and every attempt has been made to establish a reliable chronology. This edition provides the first reliable basis for a new assessment of Clare's poetic growth, allowing his increasing assurance as a poet writing in a characteristic idiom of his own to be traced, and demonstrating how surprisingly early his individuality as a poet emerged.

For the first time all Clare's early poems are brought together with all known variants, and with Clare's characteristic vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and punctuation preserved. Through this collection, ranging from juvenilia to the published poems that first established his reputation with Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery and The Village Minstrel, it becomes clear how many more poems Clare composed in these early years than have previously seen the light of day. Strenuous efforts have been made to recover poems obliterated in some of Clare's first manuscripts, and the complete text of The Parish, his major satirical poem, is included. A glossary is provided for both volumes, together with extensive annotation. Clare's own dating of his first poems is employed and every attempt has been made to establish a reliable chronology. This edition provides the first reliable basis for a new assessment of Clare's poetic growth, allowing his increasing assurance as a poet writing in a characteristic idiom of his own to be traced, and demonstrating how surprisingly early his individuality as a poet emerged.

Completing the influential Oxford edition of Clare's poetry, this volume presents the poems of the Northborough period of Clare's creativity, some of the finest of Clare's work at a particularly critical period of his life. As with other volumes in the edition, many of the poems have never before been published, and Clare's spelling, punctuation, grammar, and vocabulary have all been carefully preserved. This final volume also includes corrections to the texts, variants, and notes in previously-published volumes in the series, along with a cumulative glossary and cumulative indices of first-lines and titles that will assist readers in their use of the edition as a whole.