Much reading is a weariness of the flesh and the quantity of academic books now produced may be producing terminal weariness as Lindsay Waters, chief editor of Harvard University , has eloquently testified. This series, like the magazine Critical Quarterly which sponsors it, is committed to producing academic work of the very highest quality which will be compulsory reading in its academic speciality but will also address readers outside that speciality. The first two books published in 2007 are Moustapha Safouan's Why are the Arabs not Free? – the Politics of Writing and David Trotter's Cinema and Modernism 2008 will see the publication of Ashley Tauchert's Against Transgression and Brenda Whitney's Fear of thought on the American Campus