Social science

Chris Turney reviews a history of attempts by Antarctic explorers to conquer the southern continent

Oversensitivity is bad news for the debate, argues Joanna Williams

Clémence Scalbert-Yucel on a worthy addition to the study of a state in flux

Shahidha Bari on Straw Dogs’ author’s new tricks

Vernon Bogdanor on Cabinet decision-making

Christina Hellmich on Al-Qaeda’s Arabian battles

Willy Maley identifies an old-fashioned charm in the telling of a tale of two rival, divided cities

John Brewer reviews a book that focuses on the spiritual motivations of peacemakers in the Middle East

Hillegonda Rietveld reviews a study of recording artists as cultural workers

Simon Blackburn on higher education via a postmodern lens

Hera Cook on a study of young Californian women’s thoughts on gender and sexuality

Stewart Lansley on a sobering tale of plutonomy and the ‘failed science’ of economics

Two economists aim to put the crisis to rights with the help of Iceland’s ash cloud, finds Howard Davies

Democracy suffers when the Islamists, the military and the secret police collude, writes Mariz Tadros

Alan Ryan on political reaction at two extremes of the American higher education system

The ‘most authoritative polymath of our age’ offers a reverse recipe very much to Chris Knight’s taste

A.W. Purdue on the ramifications of the demise of Western civil society’s foundational structures

Steve Yearley weighs claims that environmental policies sweep emissions under a Chinese rug

Sergio Sismondo on a critical exploration of a new, lucrative model for public well-being

Joanna Lewis on how cultures and circumstances skew our passions more than we may realise

Kathleen McNamara on the technocracy that created the EMU - and its current malaise

A close-focus study of Arab schooling calls Western views into question, writes Carine Allaf

Alison Bashford applauds a magisterial study of scarily relevant bioeconomic history

The man-woman pairing displaced other well-established forms of bonding, finds Robert Mills

Olga Wojtas meets an environmental psychologist studying architecture's impact on academic life

Lecturers steer students away from some topics and get material vetted. Melanie Newman reports

A work exploding the myths surrounding so-called race riots wins David Gadd's enthusiastic approval

In the UK, the gulf between the political and the academic worlds seems all-but unbreachable while Americans flit easily between lecture halls and halls of power. Here Matthew Reisz examines why Whitehall seems so inhospitable to scholars, while overleaf Jon Marcus looks at why Washington is so accommodating

In America, it is common for academics to play a prominent political role. Jon Marcus reports