In Our Time: Essential Conversations
Fans of Melvyn Bragg’s radio broadcasts (typically Thursday, Radio 4, 9:00) will likely be delighted by this recent hardback (1), a 324-page acknowledgement to the…
Neil Richardson
Improving Political Parley
A recent issue of the Daily Telegraph (1) discussed events during the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester. The issue’s editorial column notes a bold reassertion…
Machines that Think
This 260-page paperback in an Instant Expert series (1) holds eight chapters whose titles may well capture the spirit of a machine-learning age, for instance,…
Metaphysical Animals: How four women brought philosophy back to life
The authors (1) heavily indexed, four-hundred-page paperback delivers, as promised on the book’s closing cover, a ‘vivid portrait’ of talented Oxford undergraduates during the 1940s…
Pursuing Political Aims
A recent paperback by Cambridge Professor of Politics and author David Runciman (1) examines the writing of twelve major scholars to reconsider their main themes…
Review of Not In Your Genes
With seven chapters and four appendixes, clinical child psychologist, journalist, and best-selling author Oliver James (1) makes a strong argument that our genes do very…
Appreciating Sociology
Professor Steve Bruce has added (1) another volume (one hundred and twenty pages) to a busy library of short introductions (from Accounting to Zionism); and…
Methodology Across the Millennia
In his handwritten yet entirely legible sixteen-page reading for students, Peter Checkland (1) explains how, by the 1970s, the subject systems thinking had evolved into…
Review of The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking – Governance in a Climate Emergency
Authors Ray Ison and Ed Straw have produced an illustrated 300-page paperback (1) which states their concern for alleviating what they describe as ‘the climate…
A Life in Systems
Looking back in his valedictory lecture at Lancaster University (1), Professor Peter Checkland recalls career moves in the fifties and sixties, from the science tribe…