'Today, there can be no more important time to understand the United Kingdom's relationship with the European Union' reads the blurb on the back of The Essential Guide to the European Union. Indeed. So it's good to see a book that so usefully documents the European Union. To shrink-wrap this into a mere 194 pages is a bold achievement. Many would shirk away from attempting to unravel the plate of spaghetti bolognaise that is the EU. But this book succeeds, and it is a refreshing, comprehensive and substantial text that lays out each and every piece of European legislation, law, policy that has passed over this politically troubled continent.

Written by Ruth Lea, Director of the Centre for Policy Studies, the guide is critical of much of the centralist and bureaucratic approaches that infest the European Union way of thinking. But it is not a 'what should-be-done' manifesto. Rather, it charts the rise of the European Union from what was once, some might say, a pioneering force for free-trade and free-markets into a very different beast.