Chris Renwick's fresh and inspiring study shows the long term history of the British welfare state and its liberal underpinnings. He reminds us all of its remarkable significance as a means of making a good society.

In lively and incisive fashion Chris Renwick tells the story of the remarkable men and women whose ideas and decisions led, by accident as much as by design, to the creation of a distinctively British welfare state.

Formidably learned... Carefully argued, deftly balanced and wittily written, with an infectious sense of intellectual enthusiasm... although we often associate the welfare state with the 1940s, Renwick shows that the key period was the turn of the 20th century... Bread for All ends with the Attlee government's implementation of William Beveridge's blueprint for a postwar welfare state. In Renwick's account, this is best seen as the final act in a long drama, rather than a revolutionary moment... the product of endless compromises with private and local interests, built on the legacy of the past and designed to improve capitalism rather than to replace it.

A brilliant book, full of little revelations-my personal favourite is that Britain's leading eugenicist also invented the dog whistle. Bread for All anchors the creation of the welfare state deep within 19th-century science... It is written with real agility in an accessible style, and is bound to figure in "books of the year" lists-it will in mine.

Thought I was reading a Carl Hiaasen novel. Then I realized it was NON-fiction. Hotel Scarface is to Miami what 'Narcos' is to Colombia.

Miami in the 1980's. It's one of the most exciting and dangerous stories in modern American history. Yet so little is known of this time and place other than a handful of oft-repeated legends. Enter Roben Farzad, whose Hotel Scarface will now and forever serve as the definitive record. You won't be able to put this book down!

Farzad captures the excess, decadence, and debauchery of the Mutiny in its heyday... a crucial piece to Miami's history as the era's cocaine epicenter. A gripping account of how the Mutiny's role in Miami's cocaine business changed not only the city, but America.

'Scarface' was inspired by this lavish, coke-fuelled hotel. The de-facto headquarters for Miami’s cocaine trade was a dangerous, opulent place where the underworld mixed it up with celebrities.

I can all but guarantee that this will be the most enjoyable and entertaining non-fiction book you’ll read this year.

Exhaustively researched... clean and precise. It’s an easy read; its implications, however, are profound. Tales of opportunistic, cutthroat men who made fast money at the expense of other people’s lives.

Sensational. Farzad seems to have penetrated the minds, while discovering the habits, of cocaine traffickers and users.

McGregor's brilliant book is packed with insights on the complex Sino-Japanese relationship, the gist of that being that past history should be our teacher rather than master. Will a more powerful China learn magnanimity, one wonders.

For journalists taking up new posts in China, the first book I always suggest is Richard McGregor's The Party. I will now add McGregor's new book, Asia's Reckoning, to my list for those headed to the Far East.

In Asia's Reckoning, Richard McGregor provides a cogent and superbly researched guide to the deep forces that undergird China's geopolitical strategy and the attempts of two other great powers in the region, the United States and Japan, to deal with it.

McGregor's fascinating narrative of the three countries' relations over 50 years is filled with fresh anecdotes drawn from interviews and newly released archival documents. McGregor has a sharp eye for personalities and policy factions, as well as a firm grasp of geopolitics.

Richard McGregor has followed up his masterful 2010 book on The Party by focusing on the collisions and the less frequent collusions between the three Pacific powers: China, Japan and the US. Most regional strategic writing is focused on one of the three countries, but McGregor has done immense research in each of them and sets up the story beautifully.

McGregor offers a masterful account of the complex fifty-year dance between China, Japan and the United States.

McGregor has written a magisterial book that combines old-fashioned shoe leather reporting and extensive archival research to hart seven decades of history between the three countries.