Jonathan Miller’s short study of Marshall McLuhan is less an introduction than an argument with him.

Written in 1971, when McLuhan’s influence on media theory was peaking, it takes apart the intellectual machinery behind ideas like the primacy of the medium, the effects of print culture, and the supposed psychic transformations produced by new forms of communication.

He traces McLuhan’s debts to art history, literary criticism, sociology and cultural theory, and pushes especially hard on the tendency to turn historical difference into sweeping claims about human perception. The result is sharp, sceptical and useful precisely because it comes from inside the period when McLuhan still felt startlingly contemporary rather than already canonical.

A good little corrective to reading McLuhan as oracle: part intellectual portrait, part demolition job, part snapshot of media theory before it became a department.

Edition & condition: Fontana Modern Masters, 1971. First edition. Paperback. Light shelf wear and age-toning; binding sound.