Old-fashioned books about public administration told their readers a lot about the organisation and process of government, nothing about its policies – what it was all for. Since that was unhelpful and boring, we had to invent a new subject: social administration – later renamed social policy. This book, which aims to cover all branches and levels of British government over a time span of 60 years, is mainly about policy, attempting to explain what it has all been for as well as how it has been organised. It's stance is claimed to be ‘apolitical’, but that would be difficult to achieve. Many would regard it as coolly, technocratically, Thatcherite – and therefore pretty Blairite too.

There are good things about the book. It is written very clearly – wittily too, sometimes. Any sixth-former could understand it. It gives the economics of policy a central place in the story. We learn something of the reasoning behind developments such as the monetarist revolution in macroeconomic policy, the attempt to ‘marketise’ the National Health Service and the invention of the emissions trading scheme (as befits an author who is a lecturer both in economics and in politics at two different Cambridge colleges). It is also a useful reference book. Can you recall all the steps taken by the Major and Thatcher Governments to disempower trade unions? – just why the Westland crisis led to Heseltine's resignation? – the ways in which the electoral systems of Scotland and Wales actually work? It's all here.

But to attempt so ambitious a task in 180 pages produces a text that reads a bit like a Reader's Digest version of ‘War and Peace’. Knight's understanding of the different fields of government is sometimes detailed but selective. His chapter on ‘Foreign and defence policies’ deals with every abortive weapons project, with not a word about non-proliferation or disarmament. Sometimes he's plain erroneous. His chapter on housing, though quite good on the economics of owner-occupation, takes the slum clearance programme, resumed in the 1960s, back 29 years to Attlee's government, and gives far too much emphasis to new towns and tower blocks. Sometimes he simply omits things. Little is said about distinctive Scottish policies; nothing about the Ombudsman. Town and regional planning are omitted altogether, so his readers will learn nothing about important things such as the 1947 Act which nationalised development rights and gave us an urban and rural landscape quite different from those of countries which never did this.

The reason for these oddities emerges when we look at Knight's carefully prepared pages of ‘Further Reading’ – six to eight books for each of his 14 chapters. Three of these books are attached to half the chapters. But – whether we look in the text or in ‘Further Reading’ – his chapter on ‘Social security and pensions’ omits any reference to John Hills, Peter Townsend and the Rowntree Foundation studies; that on ‘Health service policies’ omits Julian Tudor Hart and Richard Wilkinson; and ‘The housing market and housing policies’ omits Hills, Anne Power, and Rowntree. Readers of this journal would add many other surprising omissions.

Cambridge, one recalls, is a University where everyone has at least heard of Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, but few have heard of Titmuss. And they don't teach social policy.