• ISBN13: 9781444332896
• Binding: Paperback
• Subject: Politics and Current Affairs
• Publisher: Wiley
• Publisher Imprint: Wiley-Blac
• Publication Date: January 1, 2010
• Pages: 160
• Original Price: USD 41.95
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 236 grams
• BISAC Subject(s): Europe / Great Britain / General and American Government / Legislative Branch

From the Back Cover
In the modern period, Speakers and other presiding officers are expected to remain impartial and above party politics; however, this was not always so, and in previous times they acted as key, though sometimes equivocal, government allies in the political management of Parliament.

This volume is the first dedicated to the subject of Speakership since the mid-1960s, and offers an absorbing analysis of how Speakers and the Speakership have operated in Parliament in Britain. Composed of papers from a conference held at the House of Commons in April 2008, it explores the role of the Speaker and the Lord Chancellor in the Westminster Parliament before the advent of democracy, and sets it beside the practice in Dublin and Edinburgh over the same period, and the more recent history of the role both at London and at Washington. It concludes with a fascinating description by the former Speaker of the House of Commons, Baroness Boothroyd, of her own tenure of the chair.

Paul Seaward has held the position of Director of the History of Parliament Trust since 2001. Previously, he was a Clerk in the House of Commons. He has written on politics, history and political thought in the late seventeenth century and on Parliament in the twentieth century. His publications include The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661-1667 (1989); The Restoration, 1660-1688 (1991); The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (1990: edited with Mark Goldie and Tim Harris); and editions of Clarendon's History of the Rebellion (2009) and Hobbes's History of the English Civil War, Behemoth (2009).