In this provocative and historically detailed reading of the relations between Victorian liberalism and aestheticism, David Wayne Thomas challenges current critical assumptions concerning modern liberal agency and aesthetic experience more generally. Through meticulous examinations of literature, visual arts, popular culture, and politics, "Cultivating Victorians" shows how a mid-Victorian liberal discourse of individual "many-sidedness"--understood as a cultivated disposition toward self-criticism and open-mindedness--was taken up by artists and writers as they claimed for art a self-reflecting agency at the core of the liberal ideal. Thomas makes plain, as well, the ongoing but often repressed stake of latter-day critics in the aesthetics of many-sidedness.
As Thomas shows, an increasingly dominant mid-Victorian liberal culture employed its rhetoric of cultivation in projects as varied as aesthetic appreciation, self-improvement, and social amelioration. By looking to topics across both elite and popular culture, Thomas demonstrates how this liberal culture had to take shape in competition with other dimensions of Victorian public life. Thus several uncommon but illuminating contexts come under inspection here: the bizarre sensation of the Tichborne Claimant, a low-born imposter claiming a noble inheritance; the reportage on life-scale historical city replicas fashioned for temporary public exhibitions in the 1880s; and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's practice of producing and reproducing his artwork for a newly constituted consumer market. Thomas also reads extensively in notable Victorian intellectuals such as George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and OscarWilde.
Theoretically inventive, engagingly written, and vividly illustrated, "Cultivating Victorians" is a timely invitation to rethink liberal values--like autonomy and reflective judgment--that have been routinely condemned as atomistic individualism and false universalism in recent decades.

The author has been a wargamer since the 1970s, member of Wargame Developments and a serious rule writer since the early 1990s. His long standing interest in asymmetric warfare led him to develop a series of wargames to reflect the individual characteristics of such conflicts. All except one of these sets of rules are written to portray the operational/ campaign level situation. Using card based systems, these games are particularly suitable for the solo wargamer. These games are not 'fair'; they each aim to give the wargamer a greater understanding of the particular conflicts they represent. The games include: Boots on the Ground: Company Level Actions in the early 21st. Century An Isolated Outpost: Six Months in the Sahara Eight Years in a Distant Country: Soviet involvement in Afghanistan Ovambo: Counter- insurgency in South West Africa Flying Column: The Irish Troubles 1920-21 Good Morning Vietnam: LBJ's War 1965-68

A solo game for 1 to 6 players about the experience of flying bombing missions over Germany 1942-44. The RAF and the USAAF dropped 1.6 billion tons of bombs on Germany between 1939 and 1945. The impact on the German war machine was huge, but so was the cost. 55,573 Bomber Command crew lost their lives during this campaign. Each morning the weather and moon state were suitable, target(s) were selected by Bomber Command. A complex series of steps were then initiated to ensure the bombers were in the air, over the target at the appointed hour to deliver their bombs. The game allows the player to assemble their crew, select their target and go through the stages of the mission. From take-off, over the enemy coast, through the flak zones and onto the target. The rules are embedded in historical research and includes period material, such as briefings, aide-memories and maps. Playing the game aims to help the player(s) understand the experience of the crews of Bomber Command a little better.