The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting has taken place in London. Queen Elizabeth the Second hosted it. What is the Commonwealth? Which countries make up its membership and why, as it leaves the European Union (EU), might Britain and its fellow Commonwealth members be working more closely together? The latest issue of Newsademic provides the answers.
On 19 December 1601, John Croke, then Speaker of the House of Commons, addressed his colleagues: "If a question should be asked, What is the first and chief thing in a Commonwealth to be regarded? I should say, religion. If, What is the second? I should say, religion. If, What the third? I should still say, religion." But if religion was recognized as the "chief thing in a Commonwealth," we have been less certain what it does in Shakespeare's plays.
A Commonwealth of Thieves - The Improbable Birth of Australia
Keneally offers a novelistic chronicle of the founding of the colony now known as Australia, focusing on the first five years, 1788 to 1793, when the initial flotillas of boats carrying convicts, their military guard and administrators arrived in New South Wales. At the book's center is the relationship between Arthur Phillip, the pragmatic first governor, and Woolawarre Bennelong, the Aborigine who eventually served as a liaison between the settlers and natives. Keneally describes their first meeting "as fateful and defining as that between Cortés and Montezuma, or Pizarro and Atahualpa."
Historians have long recognized that members of the lower branch of the legal profession, the ancestors of the modern solicitors, played an important part in early modern English society, but difficulties in establishing their identities and recovering their career patterns have hitherto left them virtually unstudied. This work charts the massive sixteenth-century increase in central court litigation and offers an explanation of it largely in terms of social change and the decline of local jurisdictions.
Commonwealth literature in English : past and presentThe present book Commonwealth Literature in English: Past and Present is a modest attempt to explore and elucidate critically some of the well-known writers of the commonwealth literature.
