Volume II of two books on how to master Small- and Medium-Sized Projects - SMPs. These projects seldom receive serious attention in project literature of today. But the popularity of the project approach means that smaller, ‘everyday’ tasks can be performed as projects. The goal and purpose of the smaller projects are often very different from those of the bigger projects and need a different approach. The books systematically review the steps or ‘Stepstones’ any project manager needs to negotiate. The focus is on SMPs, but all projects could benefit from going through the ‘Stepstones’
Volume I of two books on how to master Small- and Medium-Sized Projects - SMPs. These projects seldom receive serious attention in project literature of today. But the popularity of the project approach means that smaller, ‘everyday’ tasks can be performed as projects. The goal and purpose of the smaller projects are often very different from those of the bigger projects and need a different approach. The books systematically review the steps or ‘Stepstones’ any project manager needs to negotiate. The focus is on SMPs, but all projects could benefit from going through the ‘Stepstones’.
On 2 August 1944, in the wake of the complete destruction of the German Army Group Centre in Belorussia, Winston Churchill mocked Adolf Hitler in the House of Commons by the rank he had reached in the First World War. ‘Russian success has been somewhat aided by the strategy of Herr Hitler, of Corporal Hitler,’ Churchill jibed. ‘Even military idiots find it difficult not to see some faults in his actions.’ Andrew Roberts’s previous book Masters and Commanders studied the creation of Allied grand strategy; The Storm of War now analyses how Axis strategy evolved.
Referred to by Henry James as ‘the first novelist of his time’ Ivan Turgenev’s works focus on class, love and suffering. Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories with its themes of the supernatural was, therefore, something of a departure for a writer who was well-known for his more humanitarian and liberal views. However, Turgenev uses these supernatural elements as a vehicle for exploring the irrationalities of the human psyche and he leaves the rational explanations for apparently supernatural events ambiguous - as Avrahm Yarmolinsky writes in his biography of Turgenev perhaps ‘there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in positivist philosophy'.
Gladstone and Ireland - Politics, Religion and Nationality in the Victorian Age
On 8 June 1886 William Gladstone urged a crowded House of Commons to think ‘not for the moment, but for the years that are to come’ and vote for a Bill conferring domestic self-government on Ireland. This dramatic scene has only a handful of parallels in British history and marked the culmination of Gladstone’s engagement with the ‘Irish Question’. This question had many aspects- political, economic, social, religious, intellectual and constitutional - raising moral issues and provoking a debate on the character and composition of the British nation.
