Artificial earth sculpture

William Newsham Blair (1841-91) was born in Scotland, and trained there as an engineer and surveyor. He emigrated to Dunedin at the end of 1863 and took employment with the Otago Provincial Survey Department at the beginning of the new year. In 1871, he became District Engineer of Public Works, and in 1878, the year after election as a Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, was appointed Engineer-in-Charge of Public Works in the South Island. In 1884, Blair moved to Wellington as Assistant Engineer-in-Chief. In 1890, he became Engineer-in-Chief and Under Secretary for Public Works (Furkert 1953: 117). During his career as engineer, Blair had many opportunities to travel throughout New Zealand. For example, in the 1870s he travelled widely throughout Otago and Canterbury (including traversing the Southern Alps five times) while on reconnaissance surveys for possible railway routes, and in the 1880s he visited the King Country to report on the proposed North Island Main Trunk. It was no doubt on these and similar journeys that Blair became very much aware of the changes which man was making to the landscape. A few earlier writers had expressed concern about the wholesale clearing of the natural vegetation, but none had noted the scale of man-induced erosion and change. Similarly Blair refused to accept a commonly held theory that rainfall increased if forests were planted, and decreased if the land was denuded. In some ways, Blair may be compared with George Perkins Marsh in the United States. Over two decades earlier Marsh had already recognised that man was a potent force in changing his environment. It is interesting to speculate if indeed Blair had found his inspiration in the writings of this American naturalist. Introduction by R.P. Hargreave

Sand in the wheels, or oiling the wheels, of international finance? : New Labour's appeal to a 'new Bretton Woods'

Tony Blair’s political instinct typically is to associate himself only with the future. As such, his explicit appeal to ‘the past’ in his references to New Labour’s desire to establish a “new Bretton Woods” is sufficient in itself to arouse some degree of analytical curiosity (see Blair 1998a). The fact that this appeal was made specifically in relation to Bretton Woods is even more interesting. The resonant image of the international economic context established by the original Bretton Woods agreements invokes a style and content of policy-making which Tony Blair typically dismisses as neither economically nor politically consistent with his preferred vision of the future (see Blair 2000c, 2001b)

UK-Russia Political Relations

A complex range of issues has undermined high level relations between the UK and Russia in recent years, many of which remain unresolved. Four stand out. First, many of the negative elements souring UK-Russian relations have come about because, despite formal declarations and engagement within multilateral fora such as the EU-Russian partnership framework and the G8, there has increasingly been a focus on bilateral elements in the relationship. Second, decreasing unity on the part of ‘the West’ in the early years of the 21st century has encouraged differentiation in Russia’s foreign policy towards western powers and has intensified competition between European powers with regard to good relations with Russia. Despite frequent arguments by some observers that the era of the nation state is gone and the era of globalisation is here, this is far from the case in Putin’s foreign policy and in UK-Russian relations. Third, the personal impact of Prime Minister Tony Blair as a key interlocutor declined since the beginning of the century. When President Putin came to power in 2000, Tony Blair was seen by many as a man of the future as opposed to the other leaders of key western powers who seemed to be on their way out. Six years later, however, Blair was nearing the end of his prime ministership, there were new leaders in Europe, and any role for Prime Minister Blair as a bridge between Russia and the United States was less necessary. Fourth, and related to the above, there are serious “value” differences between the UK and Russia, for example, over the independence of important elements of non-governmental society, such as the judiciary and big business. The importance of the political relationship between Britain and Russia as a whole, has decreased notably in recent years. This will not remain the case for ever, and even as it has occurred, mutual interests and obligations have continued to keep formal contacts and cooperation on many levels positive

Book review: British foreign policy: the new Labour years

Matthew Partridge finds that Oliver Daddow and Jamie Gaskarth’s strong collection of essays on Blair and Brown’s foreign policy highs and lows is strong enough to justify its place on reading-lists, covering the Iraq, Afghanistan, and the War on Terror

John Blair Deaver, M.D., and his marvelous retractor.

John Blair Deaver was born near Buck, Pennsylvania, in Lancaster County on July 25, 1855, to Dr. Joshua Montgomery Deaver and Elizabeth Clair Moore. The elder Deaver was a reputable country physician, educated at the University of Maryland, who fathered three physicians and a college president. John Blair Deaver (Fig. 1) went to boarding school at West Nottingham Academy in Maryland. After boarding school he taught in Lancaster County country schools to raise funds to attend the nation’s first medical school, the University of Pennsylvania. On receiving his M.D. degree in 1878, Dr. Deaver completed 1-year internships at both Germantown Hospital and Philadelphia Children’s Hospital, after which he embarked into clinical practice. Alongside his brother, Dr. Harry Clay Deaver, he made home visits to patients to perform surgeries as well as managed a busy 16th Street and Vine Street Philadelphia office

The Fallacy of Nuclear Primacy

"The United States is easily deterred by any nuclear armed state, even by the most primitive and diminutive of nuclear arsenals." Bruce G. Blair is the President of the World Security Institute. Chen Yali is the editor in chief of Washington Observer

The Jospin Way

Since Malmö, Tony Blair has castigated all those who do not share his proselytising zeal for the ‘third way’. Underpinning his view is a thinly veiled assumption that ‘there is no alternative.’ Another reading, advanced by Sassoon, is that—under the influence of globalisation—the whole of the European left is converging on overwhelmingly similar positions, and all else is rhetorical embellishment and detail.1 Neither narrative is accepted here. Substantive differences are detectable between the ‘projects’ of Blair and Lionel Jospin, which go beyond the merely stylistic or rhetorical, suggesting qualitatively different ‘models’ of social democracy. This article examines the Jospin government’s first three years against the backdrop of the debate between the British and French premiers over the future direction of the left. The analysis focuses on those areas where commentators have located the fault-lines within European social democracy—macroeconomic policy, the role of the state, labour market and welfare reform, and employment policy

Blair: 'George Bush is mijn vriend'

Tony Blair, promoting his memoires in Amsterdam, had a long talk with Wouter Bos, previously Netherlands vice-prime minister. Blair admires George W. Bush because he took a deeply impopular decision (to invade Iraq); he showed courage and power. The lies about WMD, about Al Qayda, his defense of waterboarding... are not essential for Blair: Saddam was a dictator and had to be done with. In another interview (De Standaard) Blair says he is mostly inspired by religion. Religious fanaticism is on the rise he says. About the pope Blair says: he is an exceptionally honest and respectable person; I support him. We conclude that it appears more probable than before that Blair and Bush were inspired by their religious belief when deciding about Iraq. Since it is unlikely they actually had a direct line with God, they are hallucinating religious fanatics in command of nuclear weapons. May God save us