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Ruth Wodak
Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2009, 256pp., £50.00,
ISBN 978-0230018815
Political communications in the United Kingdom has become a vibrant area for publication. The past 2 years alone have seen at least three high quality books and an updated edition, each outlining many of the key and emergent issues in the mediation of politics, and all commendable to advanced students and researchers. In such a setting, Ruth Wodak deserves much credit for managing to produce a book that pursues an original angle within an innovative methodological framework.
Wodak reminds us that although much of the political communications industry is concerned with the transmission of policy, wider concerns focus on how politics works, and what is hidden from public view: 'how decisions are taken, how politicians live, and what their everyday life might consist of' (p. 163). It is the relationship between front-...