Written mostly by political luminaries from the Blair era (and a dusting of other public servants), they offer readers a brisk and accessible tour of 27 policy areas where governments struggle to make progress.
Organized in very short chapters, Dikötter's book takes its reader through a brisk tour of the follies, inefficiencies, and deceptions of Mao's commandeered economy: impossible targets, exaggerated claims, maladroit innovation, lack of incentive, corruption, and waste.
Hamilton's later chapters take the reader on a brisk tour of the respective effects on biography of film, First Amendment law and the technology of the tape recorder, among other topics.
Hayes takes his readers on a brisk tour of the debate about crime and punishment in the United States.
Ms Bradford takes readers on a brisk, assured canter through the familiar landmarks of both genres, adding a dose of history as she goes.
Stuart Broom, of Waterstone's, who is also a judge, said: "The longlist is going to involve the readers in a brisk gallop through history, from the 17th-century London of John Donne to 21st-century China.
Only a strong narrative voice, backed up by a disciplined willingness to winnow out the intriguing but extraneous from the vitally relevant, can carry the reader forward at a brisk pace and with satisfying comprehension.
The resulting 1,400 recettes tick through the French repertoire, from abricots à l'anglaise to zephyr veal scallops, and are written in a brisk, authoritative manner that assumes the reader does indeed know how to cook.
Along the way the reader is led through a brisk introduction to time, relativity, black holes, worm holes, negative energy and some other weird aspects of modern physics.
He writes a brisk, colloquial, straightforward prose that not only is easy to read but also bears the reader on shoulders of wonder and excitement, especially late in the book as the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railheads grow ever closer.
Part of the pleasure for its first readers was guessing at the contemporary personalities it mocked, and it excited a brisk trade in "keys", pamphlets that offered to decode its satire and identify Pope's victims.
