The book critically explores values in the State of the Union addresses delivered by George W. Bush. It examines pragmalinguistic tools applied in political legitimization, such as proximization, metaphor or assertion. The analysis reveals that prevalent are three values, invoked in the context of foreign policy: security, terrorism and freedom.

The book addresses the issue of the patient’s presence in specialist medical publications in the context of a patient-centred approach to medical practice. The author combines both quantitative and qualitative approaches in order to analyse the patient discourse in one of the oldest medical genres, case reports.

The book attempts to disclose various representations of ugliness in discourses ranging from Shakespeare’s colonialism to Patrick White’s, J. M. Coetzee’s and Ayi Kwei Armah’s postcolonialism. Attention is also given to American Indian captivity narratives and contemporary British and Irish theatre, where ugliness is the manifestation of the human.