Alex Southern
Palgrave Macmillan

Long before that YouTube- and Mooc-filled future arrived, sober chaps in wartime Britain¡¯s Ministry of Education saw fit to commission an experimental programme of non-fiction films for the classroom (not least for ¡°dull and backward¡± children). It is an experiment that today¡¯s visual education advocates could learn from, says Southern, in an insightful study informed by trawls through ministry minutes and alert readings of the films. A pedagogical theory-informed national policy on film education, supported by partnerships with teacher training institutions, is, she argues, essential in helping young people to become ¡°twenty-first century literate in the current technological, cultural and political landscape¡±. Recommended.

Graham Harman
Repeater

Why is there humour only in Hell? Is Dante a masochist? Is fraud, not hate, love¡¯s opposite? The big cheese of object-oriented philosophy returns to the Divine Comedy, the subject of one of only two pieces of work of value created in his ¡°intensely studious but not very successful¡± undergraduate years. Armed with close readings of ¡°the most organizationally complete masterpiece in Western literature¡±, Harman takes on Kant ¨C and joins forces with Kant¡¯s challenger, ¡°the rambunctious German thinker¡± Max Scheler ¨C to proclaim Dante ¡°one of the classical allies of the object-oriented claim that aesthetics is first philosophy¡±.

Thomas K?nig
Polity

Cash and advances: a former adviser to the ERC¡¯s president details, with some frankness, the birth and early years of the most important instrument in European science policy. K?nig¡¯s keen eyes take in everything from inspirational words about discovery printed on ¡°cheap looking woven fabric¡± on a wall in its Brussels headquarters to key players¡¯ optimism, arrogance, high ideals and wounded pride. ¡°I could not believe how dull the meetings were. Yet I soon realized that all the boredom, confusion and awkwardness may have been necessary to lead up to the decisive moment¡­What is our understanding of excellence?¡± It is a tale, he believes, of scientific reason¡¯s ¡°precarious and temporary triumph over politics¡±. Trigger warning: may prompt tears of rage on Brexitland benches.

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Simon A. Waldman and Emre Caliskan
Hurst

In a word: turbulent. Its focus running up to the bungled military coup of 2016 and taking in the tangled threads of judiciary and media, the Kurds and the Alevis, Iran and Isis, Atat¨¹rk¡¯s legacy and fistfuls of political-faction acronyms, this valuable study by two UK-based scholars weighs the Turkey of the Erdog?an era and sees less a ¡°deep state¡± than a ¡°weak state¡±, with many shades of grey between the religious, rural, poor ¡°Black Turks¡± and urban, secular, educated ¡°White Turks¡±. A closing reminder that the nation has only recently entered a post-military age sounds a note of hope.

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Barbara Brownie
Bloomsbury

Stripping off: there¡¯s more to it than you think. A visual communication scholar muses on a private gesture done in public, via thoughtful commentary on the relevant literature. Brownie takes in Hussein Chalayan¡¯s ¡°unstable coverage¡± and the disruption of streaking, mooning and flashing; public disrobement as protest; sculptor Jude Tallichet¡¯s Dropped Clothes and Yoko Ono¡¯s Cut Piece; shoes from Auschwitz-Birkenau, gang-related ¡°shoefiti¡± and the come-ons, irony and awareness-raising of striptease, burlesque and ¡°criptease¡±. Revealing.

karen.shook@tesglobal.com