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"Einstein, the world-renowned scientist, was also publicly committed to radical political views. Despite the vast literature on Einstein, this book is the first comprehensive study of his politics, covering his opinions and campaigns on pacifism, Zionism, control of nuclear weapons, world government, and freedom over his whole career. Most studies look at Einstein in isolation, but here he is viewed alongside a liberal international of global intellectuals, including Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Romain Rolland, Thomas Mann, and John Dewey. Frequently called upon to join campaigns on great issues of war, peace, and social values, they all knew or corresponded with Einstein. The book is concerned with how Einstein and comparable intellectuals sought to exert a salutary moral influence, as Einstein put it in a letter to Freud, which in practice amounted to a non-political form of politics. Close attention is given to the unique qualities Einstein brought to his interventions in political debate and in particular to the struggles he experienced in retaining control of his message. His influence derived in the first instance from his celebrity status as the scientist of genius. Einsteins complex and enigmatic personality, which combined intense devotion to privacy and a capacity to perform on the public stage, also contributed to the Einstein myth. Studying Einsteins politics takes us not only into the mind of Einstein but also to the heart of the great public issues of the twentieth century."

"The book uses autobiographical writing contributed to Mass Observation since 1981 to explore the social and cultural history of late-twentieth-century Britain. Prompted by thrice-yearly open-ended questionnaires, Mass Observations volunteers wrote about their political attitudes, religious beliefs, work, childhoods, education, friendships, marriages, sex lives, mid-life crises, aging, the whole range of human emotion, feeling, attitudes, and experience. At the core of the book are seven biographical essays, intimate portraits of individual lives set in the context of the shift towards a more tolerant and permissive society from the 1960s and of the rise of Thatcherite neo-liberalism as the structures of Britains post-war settlement crumbled from the later 1970s. The mass observers featured in the book, four women and three men, are drawn from across the social spectrum, wife of a small businessman, teacher, social worker, RAF wife, mechanic, lorry driver, banker: all active and forceful characters with strong opinions and lives crowded with struggle and drama. All of them were born before the Second World War, so they experienced the changing shape of post-1960s Britain as already fully formed adults. The honesty and frankness with which they wrote about themselves takes us below the surface of public life to the efforts of ordinary, but exceptionally articulate and self-reflective, people to make sense of their lives in rapidly changing times."