This new volume of Bernard Shaw's book reviews is a companion to Brian Tyson's previously edited collection of Shaw's earlier book reviews. Here Tyson collects seventy-three of the best remaining literary book reviews written by Shaw throughout his lifetime. Two-thirds of the reviews appear in book form for the first time, the originals residing in the archives of newspaper libraries, and only three of the remainder have been reprinted within the last twenty years. Politics feature largely in the works that Shaw reviewed: there are books of socialist theory and its practical appearance in the Soviet Union, as well as books on the individualism of J. H. Levy, the anti-socialism of Thomas McKay, and the economics of E. C. K. Gonner and Philip Wicksteed. There is often an immediacy about the books reviewed, too: discussion of books on World War I, the Soviet Revolution, women's suffrage, the British General Strike of 1926, and World War II all take place concurrently with the events. Many of the works reviewed are biographies, which give Shaw the opportunity to reveal his personal acquaintance with their subjects, including Samuel Butler, William Morris, and Dean Inge. This widely varied collection sparkles with wit and wisdom, taking us briskly through Shaw's own writing life, beginning when he was relatively unknown and concluding when he was a legend.

This volume covers all aspects of Shaw's drama, focusing both on the political and theatrical context, while the illustrations showcase productions from the Shaw Festival in Canada.

This four volume collection looks at the essential issues concerning crime and punishment in the long nineteenth-century. Through the presentation of primary source documents, it explores the development of a modern pattern of crime and a modern system of penal policy and practice, illustrating the shift from eighteenth century patterns of crime (including the clash between rural custom and law) and punishment (unsystematic, selective, public, and body-centred) to nineteenth century patterns of crime (urban, increasing, and a metaphor for social instability and moral decay, before a remarkable late-century crime decline) and punishment (reform-minded, soul-centred, penetrative, uniform and private in application). The first two volumes focus on crime itself and illustrate the role of the criminal courts, the rise and fall of crime, the causes of crime as understood by contemporary investigators, the police ways of ‘knowing the criminal,’ the role of ‘moral panics,’ and the definition of the ‘criminal classes’ and ‘habitual offenders’. The final two volumes explore means of punishment and look at the shift from public and bodily punishments to transportation, the rise of the penitentiary, the convict prison system, and the late-century decline in the prison population and loss of faith in the prison.