Madawi Al-Rasheed
Hurst

Most of the interviewees who gave so generously of their insights and time for this nuanced, myth-debunking book, says its author, must remain nameless. And for good reason, too. Al-Rasheed¡¯s close-up focus on ¡°religious modernists¡± (a term intended to challenge assumptions about these Islamists¡¯ social conservatism) takes in ulama, writers, intellectuals and online activists, all of them daring to imagine a new politics in the very teeth of a paranoid and hostile Saudi regime.

Kenneth O. Morgan
University of Wales Press

Vice-chancellor, peer, labour and Labour historian, Keir Hardie¡¯s biographer and James Callaghan¡¯s too (despite Callaghan¡¯s daughter jotting ¡°Too Welsh?¡± in her meeting notes), Morgan writes gracefully of his life and times and those who threaded through it, from Asa Briggs to the Queen ¨C to whom Morgan¡¯s first word was, accidentally, ¡°socialism¡±. The best kind of scholarly memoir, told with clear-eyed understatement and flashes of fire, as when recounting his denouncement of the impending Iraq War in the House of Lords, or reaffirming, despite it all, that ours is ¡°a better world than when I entered it in 1934¡±.

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Martin Cohen
Imprint Academic

Cohen, unclubbable philosopher and devout sceptic, specialises in free-range skewering of solemnly intoned bullshit. In this glinty-eyed grab-bag of variably digestible disquisitions on H1N1 vaccines, God particles, Ben Goldacre¡¯s awards shelf, not-so-jolly climate change hockey sticks and philosophers¡¯ star signs, his gadfly jibes serve serious ends. Bestow on your favourite contrarian.

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Odile Heynders
Palgrave Macmillan

Thinker as superstar: if you¡¯re writing your to-do list for Pikettydom, it¡¯s all about cultural authority; social and cultural context; mediated context of production and reception; and aesthetic performance of theatricality, says Heynders, a comparative literature scholar. Her detailed, geographically broad account sizes up the cut of the public-intellectual jib of H.?M. Enzensberger, Dubravka Ugre?i?, Slavenka Drakuli?, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, David Van Reybrouck, Geert van Istendael, Hamed Abdel-Samad, Elif Shafak and, inevitably, Bernard-Henri L¨¦vy. It is, however, Slavoj ?i?ek-free.

Marion Nestle
Oxford University Press

Are the fizzy drink pedlars a big problem? Yes. It¡¯s exhilarating watching a scholar of this eminence not only write the rap sheet for the sugar-pushers ¨C in all their kid-targeting, water-siphoning, tooth-eroding, medic-suborning, politician-buying evil glory ¨C but also persuasively and precisely detail the current fightbacks and potential solutions. Now ³Ù³ó±ð°ù±ð¡¯²õ a public intellectual for you.

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Ferdi De Ville and Gabriel Siles-Br¨¹gge
Polity

A Belgian, a German and a scary acronym: two political economists walk us deftly through a beyond-the-headlines, polemic-free analysis of the US-European Union trade negotiations that could usher in huge economic growth ¨C or, say opponents ranging from the Greens and Corbyn¡¯s Labour to Ukip, an ¡°assault on society¡±, workers¡¯ rights, safety regulations and national autonomy. The study ends with three possible scenarios, in which the words ¡°Pyrrhic victory¡± and ¡°chlorinated chicken¡± appear.