Books by Michael Griffin

This book takes the long-view by analysing Islamic State's beginnings in Iraq to their involvement in the Arab Spring and through to the present day.*BR**BR*The world is watching IS's advance through the Middle East. The US risks being drawn into another war in the region despite its experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. IS are creating catastrophic waves across the region, but it is still unclear what lies behind its success. *BR**BR*Michael Griffin uncovers the nature of IS through investigating the myriad of regional players engaged in a seemingly endless power game: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Iraq, which have all contributed to the success of IS by supplying arms and funds. *BR**BR*He foregrounds the story of the uprising against President Assad of Syria, the role played by the Free Syrian Army, Islamist groups, Iran, Hezbollah and Russia, the chemical weapons attacks in 2013 and the House of Commons vote not to impose a no-fly zone over the country.

Oliver Goldsmith (17281774) moved between the genres and geographies of enlightenment writing with considerable dexterity. As a consequence he has been characterized as a passive purveyor of enlightenment thought, a hack, a harried translator of the French enlightenment for an English audience, an ideological lackey, and a subtle ironist. In poetry, he is either a compliant pastoralist or an engaged social critic. Yet Goldsmith's career is as complex and as contradictory as the enlightenment currents across which he wrote, and there is in Goldsmith's oeuvre a set of themesincluding his opposition to the new imperialism and to glibly declared principles of libertywhich this book addresses as a manifestation of his Irishness. Michael Griffin places Goldsmith in two contexts: one is the intellectual and political culture in which he worked as a professional author living in London; the other is that of his nationality and his as yet unstudied Jacobite politics. Enlightenment in Ruins thereby reveals a body of work that is compellingly marked by tensions and transits between Irishness and Englishness, between poetic and professional imperatives, and between cultural and scientific spheres.