Politics & Society

The magazine editor, journalist and biographer of Ayn Rand selects five books that define the essence of libertarianism. Atlas Shrugged is first on her list.

The sociology professor and blogger at spiked-online.com says when society is faced with problems like homophobia, healthy eating or integration, for example, then we try to

Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review from 2004 to 2013, explains how the American right reinvented itself as a cultural counter-revolution and selects five books as backgrounders to conservatism.

Former British diplomat Mike Maclay chooses five books on the glamour, the reality and the future of the people trained in the canny art of diplomacy

The veteran British diplomat Jeremy Greenstock talks about the history and future of diplomacy. On Iraq: ‘The magnificent work that was done was largely wasted, and lives with it – both Iraqi and outsiders’

The Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations discusses diplomacy versus coercion and selects five essential books on international relations.

Academic and author of textbooks on the field tells us that diplomacy can well do without rank amateurs "in the same way that medicine can do without snake-oil merchants"

The Governor of Indiana promotes a new philosophy of libertarianism and selects the books that have influenced him most.

The Lib Dem peer says that reading Cicero’s speeches, George Eliot’s novels and Gerard Manley Hopkins's poems can help us manage the ethical dilemmas of our own historical moment, and provide clues to human nature

The veteran British journalist and author John Kampfner discusses five books that address concepts of democracy and freedom.