Political Culture

Cookbooks are not political in conventional ways. Yet, as repositories of human taste, cookbooks transmit specific blends of flavor, texture, and nutrition across space and time. Cookbooks both form and reflect who we are. Cookbook Politics argues that cookbooks highlight aspects of our lives we rarely recognize as political - taste, production, domesticity, collectivity, and imagination - and considers the ways in which cookbooks have or do politics, from the most overt to the most subtle.

There was once a fashionable theory that history was determined not by individuals but by economic and geopolitical forces. Recent years have proved that idea abundantly wrong. From Nigel Farage to Donald Trump via (inevitably) Vladimir Putin, we have largely been governed, endangered and thrown into confusion by a pack of angry men. (Nearly always men. Nearly always white). Men whose ambition is inversely proportional to their ability - and stability.

In this bold and far-reaching exploration of our new political landscape, William Davies reveals how feelings have come to reshape our world. Drawing deep on history, philosophy, psychology and economics, he shows how some of the fundamental assumptions that defined the modern world have dissolved. With advances in science and medicine, the division between mind and body is no longer so clear-cut. The spread of digital and military technology has left us not quite at war nor exactly at peace.