Books

A critique of the US-as-empire is a good call, says J. Simon Rofe

Roger Morgan on Germany’s economic domination of the European Union and the need for a sociological approach to redress the balance

Jane O’Grady on how the rise of love as a central value of modern society is leading us to the brink of second humanism

Unsolicited emails can be a costly nuisance, says John Gilbey

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Philip Kemp on how the American film industry reacted variously to the rise of fascism in Germany

Biancamaria Fontana on the influences that shaped a French aristocrat’s ambiguous view of democracy from his studies of the American model

James Stevens Curl on a summary of Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies in the context of 17th-century scholarship on paganism and oriental languages

Euan Clarkson is inspired by a detailed history and guide to the richest cluster of fossilised remains

Barbara Graziosi on a renowned reviewer’s disciplinary skirmishes

Stephen Halliday on a forgotten tragedy of the First World War

Shelley King on asking questions, realist fiction and female subjectivity in Victorian novels

Robert Eaglestone on the experiences of a Holocaust survivor and how he rebuilt his life afterwards

Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik on a study of the process of researching the Bosnian wars

Simon Underdown discusses an evolutionary counterfactual

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Michelle Harvey agrees with inspiring advice to young science researchers to never forget what initially attracted them to the discipline

Alec Ryrie on a persuasive account of demoniacs and how society perceived and dealt with them

Matthew Feldman on the expanding threat to society from unpredictable individuals

Tim Birkhead on the first comprehensive documenter of North American birds

Robert Eaglestone extols a great historian’s insights into a great and disquieting writer

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Chris Knight on an anthropologist whose theories were embraced then shunned by the US military

Susan Hogan on a challenge to analyses of 19th-century politics that marginalise the role of women

Christina Hellmich on the complex dynamics reshaping the Arab world

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Neil Rennie on the 18th-century fascination with exotic visitors and the cultural exchange that took place

Tristan Bekinschtein recommends a challenge to our notions of consciousness and cognition

Kate North recommends an analysis of the use of apparently contradictory concepts in selected texts over the past 15 years

Margaret Weitekamp on a historical study of the relationship between religion and spaceflight

Les Gofton ventures into the shadowy suburban world of competing cultures

Eric Michael Johnson reviews the argument that human moral feelings have been shaped by natural selection

Sheila Rowbotham on a crisp portrait of a restless thinker who was neither infallible nor prophetic

David Revill on diverse art forms that focus on, literally, nothing

Tim Hall on an informed probe into the world of illegal trade in East London

Joanna Williams seeks more context in this political and economic analysis of sector finance

Lucy Wooding discusses a fresh examination of fervent belief

Ulrike Zitzlsperger on the evolution of an iconic vehicle

Marilyn Young on the harrowing history of a chemical used to kill hundreds of thousands of people

A. W. Purdue on the prevalence of crime within the British armed forces

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

A study of la petite mort focuses on cultural views not sociological explorations, finds Sally R. Munt

Howard Segal pieces together the fascinating history of a key innovation in US manufacturing

Christopher Innes applauds a memoir of tempestuous father-son relationships framed by elements of literature and performance

Jyothsna Latha Belliappa on technology’s transformative effects

Christopher Phelps on a dazzling new look at the US response to the Depression

Camilla Power enjoys a demolition of prelapsarian pseudoscience

Roger Morgan on a great historian’s last essays that illuminate an era of social and artistic change

Matthew Feldman on the connections between literary history and intelligence studies

Steve Redhead takes a byte from a fascinating but flawed analysis

Ervand Abrahamian ponders how Muslim clerics seized and retained control of modern-day Persia

Isabelle Szmigin on how big companies sustain their profits first, and the environment second

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

James T. Crouse on a book that should be on every politician’s reading list

Harriet Harriss discusses a paragon of joined-up thinking

John Pollard on a biography of a controversial head of the Catholic Church

Ursula King on the use and meaning of the absence of noise in religious beliefs and practices

Luciana Astiz on how seismology evolved from the combined observations of scientists and citizens

Roger Rees on gaining some understanding of the linguistic and literary richness of Latin poetry without knowing the language