Bücher von Alan James

Iceland, about 1270 AD. A Christian scribe writes down a heathen poem composed three centuries earlier. He probably thinks the verse exposes inadequacies in the old northern gods and goddesses. But does it? Alan James' essay explores the Old Norse poem Lokasenna and was first published as a booklet in 1997. This second and fully revised Australian edition includes a new introduction and a rollicking translation of the poem. James shows Lokasenna to be "the psychological tale of the progressive deterioration of a sociopathic, perhaps psychopathic personality, from mere heavenly mischief-maker to deicide bound down on a rock for the crime of conspiring to destroy the cosmos for the gratification of his own sick monster ego" (Gárman Lord, reviewing the first edition, Theod, volume 14, number 3, 1997).

In 1788 Britain founded a tiny new colony half a world away. For the next two centuries millions of young men and women from all over the British Isles - but mostly from England - settled in Australia. They brought with them the best traditions of the "mother country", believing that their manifest destiny was to create a new and better Britannia. Yet for the last forty years the cultural fire that these young pioneers carried with them from the British Isles hearth has been assailed from all sides. Whether Anglo-Australia eventually survives or succumbs, its fate may well be a microcosm of what awaits the rest of the British diaspora.

The book focuses on peacekeeping as a device for maintaining international stability, and for remedying situations in which states are in conflict with each other.