The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations (4th edition)

Compiling a handy dictionary of politics is an ambitious undertaking. The range of relevant ideas, policies and movements is vast, made only vaster by the political experience of nation states. The task becomes almost impossible when the authors take the entire world as their oyster and even more so when figures and ideas from the historical past are included. Nonetheless, the editors (British academics at Leeds, Oxford and Sheffield) have made a brave attempt at covering the field in a volume of over 1,800 entries. Finding its shortcomings is easy, and I have noted some of them below, but Messrs...