Books by John Gaffney

Analyses of leadership speeches by David Owen, David Steel, Neil Kinnock and Margaret Thatcher. The author examines how the leader's conference speech reveals both the constraints upon and the possibilities for the national presentation of personalized political leadership in Britain.

The relationships between narrative and leadership,between rhetoric and performance, between doctrine and its voicing, are crucialto party politics and are underrated by both practising politicians andscholars. A political leader's persona is aconstruction that performs - rather like an actor - in the political space.

An examination of the ways in which the French Left adapted, through a series of transformations, to the exigencies of presidentialism and the myths which underpin it. The study aims to illustrate the crucial role played by language in the political practice of representative democracy.