Eleanor Dickey
Cambridge University Press

Poring over declensions is as old as antiquity, as demonstrated in this fascinating look at Latin-learning materials for the Roman Empire¡¯s Greek speakers, from glossaries to Virgil for beginners and colloquia. Much will be familiar to today¡¯s language learners, but these ancient phrasebooks have some wonderful peculiarities: party behaviour (¡°I am certainly very much ashamed¡±), insults (¡°I shall make you go to prison, where you deserve to grow old¡±) and oddly feeble excuses (¡°I¡¯m hurrying to take a bath¡±).

Policy Press

Kudos to the University of Bristol¡¯s ¡°publisher with a purpose¡± for this paperback edition of Human Rights Watch¡¯s 26th annual report. Much news is bleak ¨C Syria, mass surveillance, repression in China, Russia and Turkey ¨C but bright spots include Myanmar¡¯s elections and LGBT rights advances. The front and back cover photos ¨C a baby handed to waiting arms on Lesbos¡¯ shore, and the eyes of a Bangladeshi girl married off at 13 to save money for her brothers¡¯ schooling ¨C will remain with you.

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Holly Lewis
Zed Books

Dedicated to a father who ¡°fought racism and taught me never to cross a picket line¡±, a philosophy scholar aims to ¡°distinguish the productive tensions from the irrelevant bluster in queer politics¡±, arguing for inclusivity in an era in which ¡°the word everybody is politically unsettling¡± and the ¡°infinite taxonomy¡± of LGBTQQIAA is exhausting. Queer politics¡¯ focus on desire, she argues, is a neoliberal trope; queer materialism and fighting ¡°imperialism with a queer face¡± is needed.

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Jonathan Hogg
Bloomsbury

¡°We are now living in the atomic age,¡± pronounced J. B. Priestley in 1947. And so are we still: in 2015, when this detailed study was completed, the UK had a stockpile of 225 nuclear weapons. Hogg focuses on understudied ¡°unofficial¡± narratives in sources ranging from calypso songs and ¡°radium¡± hair dye adverts to Albert Schweitzer¡¯s Declaration of Conscience and Kingsley Amis¡¯ sour priapic dread, and on events including the Harwell reactor¡¯s launch in 1947 and the drafting in 1983 of a speech for the Queen to read in the event of Armageddon.

B. N. Goswamy
Thames & Hudson

¡°We know so little about the Indian painters of the past that it is tempting to say¡­¡®There are really no artists; there is only art,¡¯¡± writes the eminent art historian in this weighty, truly ¡°lavishly illustrated¡± work. Goswamy aims to reconstruct the identities of 800 years¡¯ worth of artists, but it is his lyrical writing on theme and symbolism that truly beguiles, along with asides on everything from the risks of painting a rani a bit too realistically to the grumpy gaze of A Lady of Rank c.1875.

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Sarah Conly
Oxford University Press

A philosopher¡¯s nuanced, unapologetic proposal for a world in environmental crisis: ¡°When should we realize that in today¡¯s world procreation is not a private act? Now. When should we work to make contraceptives available to everyone who wants them? Now. When should we voluntarily refrain from having more than one child ¨C for those of us for whom that is possible? Again, I would say now.¡±

karen.shook@tesglobal.com