Michael Taylor

Traversing Parallels explores the work and life of American glass artist Michael Taylor, who has enjoyed a prominent career in the art glass world since 1967. The book focuses on work made from 2005 through 2017, exploring the conceptual progression of Taylor's work during this time and scrutinizing his notion of sociopolitical awareness and the responsibility of all artists to use their gifts to speak on social perspective. His cut and laminated glass constructions celebrate the progress of human ingenuity while also considering the wider implications of our impact on the world. Taylor himself provides autobiographical texts throughout the book, recounting his many years as a teacher of glass as well as his own education and evolution as an artist. With an exciting design and a wealth of images, this monograph makes a welcome addition to the history of contemporary American art glass.

• Intuitive and easy-to-follow format makes it simple to study a whole topic, or to find answers to specific problems• Regular consolidation (in-text questions and exam preparation) checks understanding and reinforces learning• New group-work feature tests students’ investigative and problemsolving skills and demonstrates real-world applications of keysyllabus points• Practical activities and experiments throughout the text encourage hands-on learning• Dedicated School-Based Assessment section gives step-by-step tips to maximise success in the CSEC coursework.

· Covers all sections of the latest CSEC syllabus · Learning objectives are stated for each chapter · The books form a useful reference resource for teachers · Keywords highlighted in the margins form a glossary · Diagrams and photographs with captions illustrate important points · Table summaries and diagrams provide all the essential information for less able students · Questions in the margins enable students to check their understanding as they read · Multiple-choice, short answer and essay questions as set in the examinations are given for practice at the end of each chapter

The Order of the Illuminati was a secret society of intellectuals, judges, soldiers, politicians and poets who genuinely sought to infiltrate and overturn the system of world power from within. Their ambitions were progressive and democratic at a time, the late eighteenth century, when Church and monarchy were all powerful. Dukes and Princes, the likes of Goethe and Mozart, joined – but in reality their effects were minimal. Within a few years of its founding, the order was outed and banned, its leaders prosecuted, exiled and shamed, and its life was over. But shortly after came the French Revolution, and so shocking was the upheaval and carnage that, in the absence of an adequate-seeming explanation, the Illuminati were blamed – and so the conspiracy theory was born. Grippingly told, richly peopled and based on original research, this is the true story that lies behind the original conspiracy theory from which all others have since derived, as well as the story the theory itself as it recurred over and over again – in Britain, Ireland, America and Europe. Through the great upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it shows how the theory became entwined with antisemitism and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, gained momentum through the rise of America’s Christian Right and even infused the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, before finding new leases of life in the paranoid thinking of 9/11 Truthers, Qanon, the ’Great Reset’ and the Manosphere. The Illuminati has a deep and unsettling hold on the public imagination and has done for centuries. This book, the first full account of its kind, explains how and why the myth was born and presents a disturbing account of its wholly undiminished power.