Local government in the UK is in crisis. It is now neither local in terms of the geography and populations of its principle units, nor does it truly govern in these areas. As this book reveals, over the previous 200 years local government has moved from a system in which local interests held governance over localities to one in which central government and national and multi-national agencies such as corporate businesses hold governance over local and community decision-making. These changes seriously undermine the important role that local government can play in liberal democracy in the UK. The book explains the nature of local government today and asks if there is any possibility of change. -- .

The charismatic, near-mythological figure of Josip Broz Tito was many things: an inspirational partisan leader and scourge of the Germans during their occupation of Yugoslavia in the Second World War; a doctrinaire communist but an ever-present thorn in Moscow's side; an oppressor, a dictator, a reformer, and a playboy. He managed Yugoslavia's internal tensions through personality, force of will, and political oppression. It was only after his death in 1980 that the true scale of this feat was understood; the country's institutions and politicians were then revealed as rudderless, and the country created by Tito - a Croat turned Yugoslav - collapsed into a bloody and at times genocidal civil war. These ethnic conflicts were Tito's nightmare, yet, as Neil Barnett shows in this short but engaging biography, they were in many ways the result of his own myopic egomania.

Leon Sciaky, whose family were prosperous Jewish grain merchants and descendents of the Sephardic Jewish exodus from Spain in 1492, grew up in the vibrant city of Salonica (now Thessaloniki) in Macedonia in a remarkably polyglot world where Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Bulgarian, French, Spanish and Hebrew were all spoken regularly in the city's busy streets and quays. In the early part of the book, Sciaky's recollections are achingly nostalgic and lyrical and describe an intimate and affectionate family existence where every day the young Sciaky would eat with his parents and his adored grandfather Nono on the oriental divan, exchanging stories and jokes. But in retrospect, the city was doomed to destruction and as early as 1902 when Leon Sciaky experienced an earthquake, he remarked: 'One's very conception of solidity, one's feeling of security was suddenly destroyed'. Soon after, the young Sciaky witnessed the earliest examples of terrorism and a downward spiral of violent attacks. His account of the end of a world is powerful and intense; when, as a young boy, he saw the look of terror in the face of a refugee peasant, he likened it to 'the animal dread of cattle in the slaughterhouse'. Farewell to Salonica was first published in America in 1946. It is a beautiful and touching memoir, which also offers a unique political and historical insight into the complex history of the breakdown of the Turkish Empire. The Sciakys left for America in 1915 and like them many non-Greeks left Salonica following the Balkan Wars and World War I. All but sixteen hundred of the city's fifty thousand Jewish inhabitants perished in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.