At the end of the day: Macmillan's account of the Cuban missile crisis

Pre-publicity for the final volume of Harold Macmillan’s memoirs, At the End of the Day, stressed that it would provide the British side of the Cuban missile crisis for the first time. The Churchillian model chosen, changes required by the Cabinet Office and Macmillan’s desire to rebuke those political opponents who claimed that the crisis demonstrated a lack of British influence in Washington, however ensured a focus on his personal relationship with President Kennedy. His larding the text with contemporary observations from his diaries also skewed Macmillan’s account and, in particular, underplayed the significance of British moves at the United Nations in New York to secure a credible United Nations inspection regime and a US guarantee of the inviolability of Cuba. Careful reconstruction of Macmillan’s real-time experience of the Cuban missile crisis demonstrates the limitations of his own account of this event

Transgender Freedom and the Law: A Liberal-Poststructural Discussion on McNally

In R v McNally, gender deception is found capable of leading to the vitiation of consent to sexual intercourse and, in so doing, places restriction on the freedom of transgendered individuals in favour of cisgendered freedom. This paper seeks to challenge the standing of this decision by adopting a combined methodological approach between Deleuzian post-structuralism and Gewirthian legal idealism. In so doing, we attempt to show that the combination offers a novel and productive approach to contentious decisions, such as that in McNally. Our approach brings together post-structuralist corporeality which conceives of the body as material and productive, and Gewirth’s ‘agent’ to conceptualise the legal body as an entity which can, and should, shape judicial reasoning. It does this by employing the criterion of categorically necessary freedom on institutionalised practical reasoning. These ‘bodies of agents’ can be conceived as the underpinning and justificatory basis for the authority of the law subject to the morally rational Principle of Generic Consistency. This egalitarian condition precedent requires individualisation and the ability to accept self-differentiation in order to return to a status, which can be validly described as “law”. Ultimately, we argue that this theoretical combination responds to a call to problematise the connection made between gender discourse and judicial reasoning, whilst offering the opportunity to further our conceptions of law and broaden the theoretical armoury with which to challenge judicial reasoning in McNally. That is, a ‘good faith’ attempt to further and guarantee transgender freedoms.