Books

The author of A Taste for Provence on The Secret Garden, de Tocqueville’s travels in America and maternal pride

Book of the week: Why are those pushed into food poverty then stigmatised and shamed, asks Lisa Mckenzie

Willy Maley on the many ways of interpreting that thin strip of water between England and France

It is focused and deliberate practice that leads to expertise, not natural ability, says Philip Roscoe

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Robin Feuer Miller on a 19th-century Russian who was part of a line of thinkers from Francis Bacon to Charles Darwin

Annmarie Adams revels in the bunker mentality of an architectural enthusiast who sees the glory of grey

Richard Joyner on the Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch, who discovered and deciphered bees’ communicative choreography

Rosa Luxemburg's letters, godless Americans, womanist ways and an anthropologist among the undergraduates: must-read monographs

Book of the week: Shahidha Bari on our attachment to consumption and whether we might ever somehow escape it

The building design industry continues to construct glass ceilings, finds Flora Samuel

Victoria Bateman is swayed by a persuasive history of our global financial order and how it needs to change

The author of The Gift of the Gab: How Eloquence Works on the delights of Just William, serendipity and Victorian self-help books

An anecdote about a sandwich illustrates the Allies’ struggle to make the Nazis pay, says Hester Vaizey

A punchy whodunnit is backed with plain talk of misogyny, says Helen Bynum

Book of the week: Joanna Lewis on nationalism’s truest friend and the books that made him a world authority

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Book of the week: Academics need to hit the brakes and work to change the system they’re in, says Emma Rees

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Fresh perspectives on a 19th-century Tory leader can be gleaned from his fiction, finds A.W. Purdue

New technology has changed how we approach the act of writing, finds John Gilbey

Joy Hendry on an after-dark fantasy land of Prince Charmings and their female customers

References to the university sector abound in an informative and lively study, says Gillian Youngs

The author of Justice Across Boundaries: Whose Obligations? on Swallows and Amazons, W.B. Yeats and reading Henry Kissinger and Immanuel Kant

A guide to ‘happy ever after’ assumes an affluence enjoyed by the girl in Pulp’s hit, says Danny Dorling

Book of the week: Blacks were key agents in the international battle against slavery, Olivette Otele writes

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Jörg Michael Dostal on whether one German thinker directly influenced Hitler’s geopolitics

Angelia Wilson on a time in gay culture that no one forgot

We are spellbound by an opus whose copies once gathered crumbs and scribbles, says Lisa Hopkins

Lisa Mckenzie on a study of the personal stories of female workers in different industries and the challenges they faced

Just deserts, theatres of war, hearting Hayek and the best lust-free years of your life: must-read academic books

Book of the week: Reconstructing Dante’s life via the Divine Comedy is a complex but enlightening task, says Prue Shaw

Gendered dichotomies distort our perceptions of aloneness in the academy, writes Aniko Horvath

A continent-hopping survey of garden cities mulls dreams, war and exclusion, says Richard J. Williams

A. W. Purdue on a bold and refreshing revisionist study

The author of The Cultural Revolution: A People's History 1962-1976 on dictators and survivors, Dostoevsky and Pushkin, and narrative, truth and fiction

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Valuable nuggets await in a master-apprentice Q&A but be ready to dig, says Andrew Robinson

Rachel Dickinson on a study that asks if 19^th-century lifestyle choices can help us solve 21^st-century problems

Hillegonda Rietveld on the consequences of a cultural shift from musical creativity to profit

Jane O’Grady on the development of empirical investigation in attempts to understand human behaviour

Edtech unhyped, Nigerian noir, hard-bodied prose and squaring heavens above with those urges below: must-read academic books

Joanna Bourke on a memoir focusing on secrets, grief and desire following a life-changing accident

Richard Joyner on a biography seeking to reveal the chemist’s talent for reinvention

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Book of the week: A spirited palaeobotanist’s memoir splices flora with friendship and family, says Cait MacPhee

Marcus Chown heaps praise on a fascinating study full of charm and infectious enthusiasm

Book of the week: Tracey Warr on De Kooning’s iterative output and his fascination with the physicality of paint

Robert Eaglestone admires the reasoning applied in the description of this moment as ‘postirony’

Richard Murphy seeks more justification for the authors’ arguments on taxation of the wealthy

The author of Speculative Blackness on Star Trek and race, fan fiction and graphic novels, and life-changing works by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Ray Bradbury

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A working-class scholar, or ‘straddler’, explains the academy’s often unspoken rules, says Eve Worth

Digital habits reveal the delicate dance between our public and private selves, says Tara Brabazon

James Delbourgo on a study of how scientists shared information and how through it they constructed the nation as an object of study

Tudor shades of emotional grey, China's 'overquota' generation, pithy philosophy and 1930s London's electric dreams: unmissable scholarly books

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

James Crouse on the exclusive, macho culture of recreational flyers in post-Second World War US

Kate Macdonald on the publications that used humour to share the trauma of the First World War