The keyguide is divided into three parts: Part One is an overview of the literature, covering the mass media in general, telecommunications, broadcasting in all its forms, cinema and video, the press, advertising, publishing and ethical issues, such as government policy and influence, legislation, codes of practice, censorship and reportage issues; Part Two is an annotated bibliography; and Part Three is an international directory of organizations. A detailed index completes the work.

Ending the Terror makes accessible for the first time to an English-speaking readership a major revisionist assessment of a crucial moment in the history of the French Revolution. The months that followed the fall of Robespierre in July 1794 mark not just a turning point in the history of the Revolution: "Thermidor" is also a symbolic moment that came to haunt the subsequent revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By this date the Terror as a system of power was discredited, and the engineers of the Terror were confronting the problem of how to dismantle it without repudiating the aims of the Revolution itself and its work. Professor Baczko analyzes the Terror in detail through the political history of the French National Assembly, and looks at the broader issues of the political culture of Revolutionary France.

Non-linguistic conflicts - economic, religious, territorial - are often projected on to language differences, and may be played out in the language policies of governments and other holders of power. Jean-Louis Calvet deals broadly, in a non-technical and introductory style, with this interaction of language issues and political process. He examines the fundamental problems arising from language contact, multilingualism, and the conflicts caused by inequalities symbolized in various patterns of language use. The author draws extensively on his own research and uses numerous case studies to illustrate the power-political dimensions of language policies from many parts of the world, such as Africa, China, South America, the former Soviet Union, and Europe. He cites the former Soviet Union as a prime example of an attempt to impose, for ideological reasons, a supra-national vehicular language, in order to supersede the languages of regional nationalism. Professor Calvet offers no simple solutions to the `war of languages' but urges all those involved in language intervention - from the professional `language planners' to school teachers - to combine the need to promote majority languages with respect for the diversity of local languages and language varieties.