Recent Reviews

While we are primarily an academic publisher, many of our books are also of interest to a general readership. This is reflected in the outstanding reviews our books receive in the general media as a well as in specialist journals.

"A highly insightful, and often very funny, commentary on the party’s dysfunctionality in the post-Thatcher era. In this election year, if you are going to read one book about the party that may shortly once again govern our nearest neighbour, read this one."
Irish Times

"Excellent ... a very useful first account of how the oldest and most successful political party in the western world lost its electoral advantage and then, finally, took years to find its way again."
Total Politics

"There haven’t been a lot of good books published about the Conservative Party in recent years, but Tim Bale has written on that fills the gap ... he tells the story well, combining breezy prose with academic rigour and anecdotes from the key participants."
Andrew Sparrow, Guardian.co.uk

"An articulate and devastating memoir."
Military Writers Society of America

"An exceptional book. It takes the reader to Iraq, to feel all sides of a deployed soldiers life, from the boredom, the bullshit to the battles and the searing heat inside the tank. This is a book that every American should read in order to get a full accounting of what it means to send men and women off to war. You may finish, but you won’t forget Beyond Duty. I can’t recommend this one highly enough."
Pundit Review

Stuff
by Daniel Miller
"Stuff really is a little gem. Timely, well-written and highly accessible, it is a concise and grounded resource in the struggle to analyse the complexities of contemporary cultural life ... For undergraduates and general critical readers alike, it will be a welcome and thought-provoking reminder that the material world of things we have created, and which in turn helps to create us, needs to be understood dialectically - for better and for worse."
Times Higher Education

"There are fascinating things here: a seven–page description of how a woman who wears a sari navigates daily life through the garment; a portrait of council tenants as ‘artists’ redecorating their flats in different ways; and analyses of fashion, furnishing and ‘mobile phone relationships’ in Jamaica. When Miller is focused on the details, the writing hums with empathetic colour and detail."
Steven Poole, The Guardian

So Close
by Hélène Cixous
"The pages of So Close are soaked with tears ... Cixous’s prose – impressively rendered into English by one of Derrida’s principal translators, Peggy Kamuf – is hallucinatory, richly allusive and poetic ... sly humour tugs you back into her world, pulls you headlong towards an epiphany, into a great swell of emotion, a rush of memories, sensations, impressions, like the crescendo of a symphony, whose effect is all the more powerful because it cannot be explained or described. The devastating climax of the book is moving beyond words."
Jewish Chronicle

Max Weber: A Biography
by Joachim Radkau

"No serious sociologist can be without a copy of this heavy tome. Artfully translated by Patrick Camiller, the study is hypnotic reading, beautifully written, lively, stimulating, and wonderfully well organized. No review could do justice to the plethora of new insights into Weber that emerge in this study, which will keep specialists happy in controversy for years to come."
Canadian Journal of Sociology

The Comfort of Things
by Daniel Miller

"It would be an injustice to Daniel Miller and to the exquisite text he has crafted to describe The Comfort of Things as anything less than beautifully written ... This particular book opens up a variety of avenues for exploration, and serves as a reminder of what sociologists can learn from such rich anthropological research."
British Journal of Sociology