Perennially on the outside, Brian has led a solitary life; he works at Camden Council, lunches every day at Il Castelletto café and then returns to his small flat on Kentish Town Road. It is an existence carefully crafted to avoid disturbance and yet Brian yearns for more. A visit one day to the BFI brings film into his life, and Brian introduces a new element to his routine: nightly visits to the cinema on London’s South Bank. Through the works of Yasujirō Ozu, Federico Fellini, Agnes Varda, Yilmaz Güney and others, Brian gains access to a rich cultural landscape outside his own experience, but also achieves his first real moments of belonging, accepted by a curious bunch of amateur film buffs, the small informal group of BFI regulars. A tender meditation on friendship and the importance of community, Brian is also a tangential work of film criticism, one that is not removed from its subject matter, but rather explores with great feeling how art gives meaning to and enriches our lives.

In Bolt from the Blue, Jeremy Cooper, the winner of the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize, charts the relationship between a mother and daughter over the course of thirty-odd years. In October 1985, Lynn moves down to London to enrol at Saint Martin's School of Art, leaving her mother behind in a suburb of Birmingham. Their relationship is complicated, and their primary form of contact is through the letters, postcards and emails they send each other periodically, while Lynn slowly makes her mark on the London art scene. A novel in epistolary form, Bolt from the Blue captures the waxing and waning of the mother-daughter relationship over time, achieving a rare depth of feeling with a deceptively simple literary form.

The role of the judiciary is constantly evolving and is in many ways more important than ever. Indeed, many argue that the sovereignty of parliament is eroding and being replaced by the respective power of judges. The Jackson Reforms of 2010, for example, saw judges bestowed with more power over case and budget management than ever before. Equally, courtrooms are transforming under the weight of technological innovation and the increasing presence of litigants in person. Stemming from a series of lectures arranged by the Judicial College on the theme of 'Being a Judge in the Modern World', this book provides a survey of many significant aspects of the modern judicial role. With contributions from some of the most senior judges in the UK and beyond, this collection provides a unique and firsthand insight into the development of the legal system and the challenges faced by today's judiciary. Additional contributions from the realms of journalism and civil liberties offer an external perspective and provide a wider context to the judicial voices.

This comprehensive volume assesses the relationship between legal rights and disability and the effect of law, legal process and third party professional intervention on the lives of people with disabilities. Stressing the crucial role played by disabled people themselves in fulfilling the promise of the worldwide rights movement, the chapters examine this relationship across a variety of themes, stressing the legal elements of each issue, and the extent to which law can assist in strengthening individual rights in that area. The contributors, who are all either academics or other professional experts in their field, write in a jargon free accessible style. The volume will be of interest to lawyers, human rights activists, health care professionals and to disabled people generally. The main areas covered in the volume are: * new perspectives on working in partnership with disabled people; * the changing attitudes to the rights of people with disabilities across the globe; * improvements to the rights of disabled people through legal process, using national and international law; * an examination of the rights and entitlement of disabled people to community care, housing, employment, education, and special services for children; * disabled people and mental health law; * messages from disability research for law, practice and reform implications for research.