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My publications are listed under the following headings:
Within each list, items are in reverse chronological order (i.e. most recent first) with respect to the time when I wrote them; delays in press have often meant that the order of publication was rather different. At least for the majority of these headings, I now list book reviews I have written on a separate page, accessed from a link at the foot of the page to which the respective link above leads.
Clearly, the topics listed above overlap with one another. Each item is included in only one list, but the choice of list is often fairly arbitrary.
The lists are rather complete with respect to my “professional”, academic publications. They include only a few of my journalistic/current-affairs pieces.
Bibliographical details do not normally show place of publication of books. Academic journals make something of a fetish of specifying place of publication, as a ritual inherited from days when publishing businesses were tiny, numerous, and widely scattered. Nowadays most books are published by relatively few large organizations whose names are well known and each of which has offices in many places, so the ritual has lost its point. I compromise by including place of publication in brackets only when the name of the publisher does not incorporate its location, and the list of publisher locations given in the book does not include London; for modern English-language books, it usually does.
Dates of publication (of books or journal issues) can be misleading, because publishers have a habit of putting next year’s date on items published late in a year, I suppose to make them seem more up-to-date. This seems a bit naughty, and when I first set this website up I tried to be more precise about publication dates. But since the printed dates are what readers see, that gets confusing, and by now I have given up and shown those dates whether they are strictly correct or not. I may adjust the older entries when I can get round to it.
For many of my more recent writings, where technical considerations made it easy to do, I have placed online preprints on the Web, with links from the listings indexed above. Please note, though, that these online versions will not normally be identical to the eventual printed versions, and the latter are definitive: if you want to quote me, your quotation should be taken from the printed version of my piece. (There is no way I could find the time to bring the preprints into line with these.)
Some readers may be interested in an article I wrote on moves to force British researchers systematically to place all their publications online. While there would be obvious benefits, on balance this strikes me as a thoroughly undesirable, ill-thought-through policy.
last changed 2 Jun 2024