Politics & Society

KCL Professor Alison Wolf is an authority on education and the labour market. She recommends books on education and society, highlighting Icelandic pastoral neo-myth Independent People

From 2001 to 2003, Cassie Knight lived and worked in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, managing a humanitarian aid program after the 1999 civil war. Here, she recommends books on aid work, and its realities as well as inspiring books about it.

The campaigning expert explains what it is that makes a successful political campaign. Highlights The Election Game And How To Win It as the bible for all political consultants

Tom Shakespeare, a professor of disability research at Norwich Medical School, says early books on disability focused too much on physical impairment, and not enough on the stigma attached to it.

Iraqi academic May Witwit tells of the horrors of US-occupied Iraq: "We were being shot at, and for three days a body lay at my front gate and nobody dared to move him"

The graduate of West Point Military Academy, fluent Arabic speaker and Iraq war veteran, talks about the books that inspired him to take a stand against the US military's regressive Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy

Keith Slotter has been an FBI Agent for the past 23 years. He chooses five books about crime and says that legalising abortion cuts crime – because the criminals remain unborn

Having served as the International Co-Prosecutor of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia, Andrew Cayley QC draws on his firsthand experience to nominate the best books on war crimes.

Marshalling one of the first ever televised coups, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's legacy is fraught. While some apologists try to justify the dictatorship on economic grounds, his time in office saw innumerable human rights abuses. Alan Angell, Emeritus Fellow in Latin American Politics at the University of Oxford, considers the regime of "a very cruel man."

Emeritus professor at the LSE's Mannheim Centre for the Study of Criminology & Criminal Justice tells us about the consequences of mass incarceration and a breakdown in social and moral cohesion