The title of this book derives from C. Wright Millsa classic The Sociological Imagination (Penguin, 1970), in which he sees the essential project of social science as the use of the imagination to 'grasp history and biography and the relations between the two in society'. This enables the social scientist to 'range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self'. Another of Millsa concerns was the relationship between 'the personal troubles of the milieu' and 'the public issues of social structure' and these are most acutely illustrated in...