With the title The Development of the British Welfare State readers might be surprised to learn that this history essentially begins in 1945. The book is a political and social history of the welfare state since the 1940s with one chapter devoted to the early-twentieth-century ideologies which led to the idea of a welfare state. The first part of the book chronicles the politics and history of the successive administrations. Part II has chapters on the welfare state services while there is a short concluding section which looks at current trends and prospects for the future in which Sullivan discusses the implications of markets and consumerism for the welfare state idea.

Families Behind the Headlines brings together eight papers presented at one of the annual meetings organised by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. One of the aims of recent meetings has been to present ‘fundamentally important scientific material in an intelligible way to wider audiences than the specialist and narrowly academic’. The papers produced as a result of the 1995 meeting certainly take on board this principle. The result is a publication that manages to cover a wide range of issues connected with the family in a concise, readable but challenging way.

The book's subtitle – The New Zealand experiment – a world model for structural adjustment? is more revealing of its contents than the title. The New Zealand experiment was a rapid and radical liberalisation of the economy incorporating: substantial freeing-up of financial, labour, external trade and foreign exchange markets, large reductions in the direct government intervention in every economic and social sphere, all combined with general fiscal and monetary restraint. Specific elements have included: substantial cuts in nominal levels of welfare benefits; removal of trade protections and subsidies; an Employment Contracts Act which emasculated the unions and thence collective bargaining; privatisation of most state enterprises (including all the utilities, railways, forestry and the HMSO-equivalent government publisher); corporatisation of hospitals and government research organisations; and statutory independence for the central bank (which was legislated to focus thereafter on inflation control only). So in just a decade New Zealand, one of the original homes of the welfare state, went from having a more regulated and subsidised economy than Britain, to being more like a stereotypical USA of the South Pacific. What may also surprise JSP readers is that the programme was initiated by a Labour government (1984–90). The National, traditionally Tory government (1990–present) did however significantly accelerate the process.

One of the most striking changes in British society in recent years has been the dramatic increase in income inequality, which is unprecedented by comparison with contemporary international experience or recent domestic history. During the 1980s the number of people living in poverty doubled as the real living standards of those at the bottom of the income distribution stagnated whereas those closer to the top experienced very substantial increases. Public awareness of these developments was heightened by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's Inquiry into Income and Wealth (see JSP review, 24:3, pp. 443–6). This book now provides more detailed coverage of many of the key research projects that were supported by the Foundation to investigate trends in the distribution of income and wealth.

The published output of research projects funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has grown considerably in recent years. The research and innovative development reports are aimed principally at policy makers and practitioners, but the academic readership must be substantial. The reports are characterised by sound research presented in an easily accessible form. These three publications do not depart from this well-established formula.

Until relatively recently, the self-employed have been something of a Cinderella group in public policy. They are excluded from various parts of the benefit system and even the official poverty figures show some results excluding the self-employed on the basis that no-one quite knows what the living standards of the low-income self-employed actually are. It is against this background that this book seeks to broaden our understanding of the low-income self-employed.

The social and economic status of children and the social construction of childhood have become subjects of increasing interest over the past decade. Children in Families provides a rich collection of essays on children and childhood from a variety of perspectives. The first few papers address some important theoretical issues. Chris Jenks discusses the social construction of childhood in post-modern society and the way in which childhood has come to represent security and stability in a world where adult life and relationships are increasingly insecure and unstable. He argues that the social response to child abuse is an attempt to preserve childhood and parent–child relations as a last remaining symbol of stability.

In terms of form and subject content, this is a finely organised, carefully balanced, and well-presented book. The eight chapters vary from 11 to 55 pages in length – reflecting, presumably, both the author's estimate of a topic's relative value and the quality of information on it that was known to her. Each chapter, too, is carefully sub-divided into up to twelve sub-sections. There is a excellent bibliography (over 400 items). Though the subject index could have been more detailed in a book with so much internal density as this, it passes muster. If there is any economically literate guide to research and debate on trends in patterns of paid employment amongst women that is more clearly written than this, it could hardly offer more condensed yet comprehensive coverage than that offered here. As a populariser, Dr Hakim has formidable skills, which she perhaps undervalues. However, this is a guide and think-piece for fellow professionals, not for the undergraduate readership duly invoked in accompanying publicity material.

Occasionally it seems as if it might have been more pleasant to have studied Social Policy in, say, the 1950s. From the fluid and turbulent perspective of the 1990s it appears an era of relative tranquillity and certainty: there were fewer books to read, apparently more certainty of both purpose and means (although it is a sign of our times that there is currently a revisionist debate going on about the reality of the so-called ‘Butskellite consensus’), and generally less to know. It is said that in the thirteenth century Roger Bacon was able to compend all the scientific knowledge of his day in a single work. This has long been impossible even for any single discipline, but at least the latest edition of the Social Policy Review does give the reader a taste of the range and diversity of issues which now characterises the subject.

Lady Thatcher welcomes this book enthusiastically as a telling exposé of the failings of state welfare and the damage it has done to the British people; she is slightly more cautious about endorsing the whole of David Marsland's package of ‘reforms’, amounting to a total demolition of the welfare state. Lady Thatcher's approval suggests that this book lays bare much of the implicit and often unacknowledged ideology which has co-ordinated so many attacks on welfare provision since 1979. The book should be read attentively, for it betrays what many influential politicians really think.

This book is a collection of essays most of which have been published elsewhere but are now conveniently assembled in one volume. The range of the themes, the methodology of analysis and the style and scrupulous scholarship exhibited in this volume give plenty of evidence to confirm Skocpol's achievement as the doyenne of social policy writers in the United States.

In Scotland, where the traditional house form was (like other European countries) the tenement flat, housing has continued to develop in a different way from the rest of Britain. Since the First World War a higher proportion of public sector housing was built and a lower proportion of Scots have moved into owner occupation. This book has both a historical and a contemporary focus. It examines not only the development of Scottish housing throughout the twentieth century but also recent housing policy, particularly the situation since 1979 when the Thatcher government came to power.