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The challenge for experts in government is often described as one of speaking unwelcome truths to a resistant power. Yet, just as problematic can be instances where the advice is welcome and so left unchallenged. Two such cases in which the UK government followed flawed expert advice are considered: intelligence assessments and military advice leading up to the 2003 Iraq War and the role of SAGE (the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) during the first stages of the Covid‐19 pandemic in 2020. Governments need to interrogate advice and make sure that they understand its underlying assumptions and implications. It remains vital to protect the independence of the experts, but to get the best out of their advice early and active political engagement is required rather than an arms‐length relationship.

Jean-Claude Milner’s Le sage trompeur (2013), a controversial recent piece of French Spinoza literature, remains regrettably understudied in the English-speaking world. Adopting Leo Strauss’ esoteric reading method, Milner alleges that Spinoza dissimulates his genuine analysis of the causes of the persecution and survival of the Jewish people within a brief “manifesto” found at the end of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP), Chapter 3. According to Milner, Spinoza holds that the Jewish people themselves are responsible for the hatred of the Jewish people, and that the engine of their longevity is the hatred they engender. Additionally, claims Milner, Spinoza covertly insinuates that the solution to this persistent state of hatred consists in the mass apostasy of the Jewish people under the leadership of a Sabbatai Zevi-like figure. This article presents the Milner–Spinoza controversy to the English-speaking public along with the larger context of French-language scholarship on Spinoza’s relation to Judaism. While refuting Milner’s reading of Spinoza, I simultaneously clarify relevant elements of Spinoza’s discussions of Judaism in the TTP, such as Spinoza’s examination of Jewish identity and the nature of divine election, Spinoza’s understanding of the causes of national hatred, and Spinoza’s appeals to Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, and Turkish political history.

UK government ministers state that their COVID-19 policy is “guided by the science.” In practice they mean “our scientists,” and initial UK government policy was highly consistent with that advice. Ministers formed strong relationships with key scientific advisors, relied on evidence from their Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), and ignored or excluded many other sources. I explore two types of lesson from this experience. First, UK studies of interest groups help explain the politics of expert advice. They show that the minister-adviser relationship is conditional on the ways in which the UK government assigns status to particular sources of science advice, and the willingness of those advisers to follow the “rules of the game,” within a wider political and policymaking context. Second, documentary analysis of SAGE minutes and meeting papers, and analysis of oral evidence to key House of Commons committees, shows high consistency between SAGE advice and UK government policy in the run up to lockdown. Ministers relied on their advisers to define the policy problem and identify feasible solutions throughout this period, while their advisors supported government policy and the right of ministers to make it. This new experience reflects and reinforces longstanding evidence from policy community studies: some experts remain core insiders if they advise on policies that they do not necessarily support, while outsiders have the freedom to criticize the policy they were unable to influence.

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research consists of 314 entries totaling around 600,000 words by people expert in their topic. What if it was treated as a corpus of data about the current state of action research and related matters? So treated, it can provide a valuable current perspective on what action research is, who uses it for what purpose, and how it is done. A companion paper by Bob Dick reports on what the encyclopedia has to say about current action research methodology. This paper does the same for theories/concepts used in action research. I review and comment on what the encyclopedia says about the broad array of theoretical perspectives and concepts that are often deployed in varying combinations in action research. I emphasize some of the key features of many approaches to action research and make it clear that action researchers borrow eclectically from other fields in orchestrating action research processes.

The author, former President of RC33 and organizers of several RC33 congresses, tells his story of association with the BMS and SAGE Publications.