Apple isn’t just a brand; it’s the world’s most valuable company and creator of the 21st century’s defining product. The iPhone has revolutionized the way we live, work and connect. But Apple is now a victim of its own success, caught in the middle of a new Cold War between two superpowers.

On the brink of bankruptcy in 1996, Apple shifted its operations offshore. By 2003 it was lured to China by the promise of affordable, ubiquitous labour. As the iPod and iPhone transformed Apple’s fortunes, their sophisticated production played a seminal role in financing, training, supervising, and supplying Chinese manufacturers – skills Beijing is now weaponizing against the West.

Investigative journalist Patrick McGee draws on 200 interviews with former Apple executives and engineers to reveal how Cupertino’s choice to anchor its supply chain in China has increasingly made it vulnerable to the regime’s whims. Both an insider’s historical account and a cautionary tale, Apple in China is the first history of Apple to go beyond the biographies of its top executives and set the iPhone’s global domination within an increasingly fraught geopolitical context.

Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination explores the democratic thought of Spinoza and its relation to the thought of William Blake, Victor Hugo, and James Joyce. As a group, these visionaries articulate: a concept of power founded not on strength or might but on social cooperation; a principle of equality based not on the identity of individuals with one another but on the difference between any individual and the intellectual power of society as a whole; an understanding of thought as a process that operates between rather than within individuals; and a theory of infinite truth, something individuals only partially glimpse from their particular cultural situations. For Blake, God is the constellation of individual human beings, whose collective imagination produces revolutionary change. In Hugo's novel, Jean Valjean learns that the greatest truth about humanity lies in the sewer or among the lowest forms of social existence. For Joyce, Leopold and Molly Bloom are everybody and nobody, singular beings whose creative power and truth is beyond categories and social hierarchies.

This 1997 book explores the political significance of aesthetic analysis in the context of cultural studies. It applies the theories of Adorno, Derrida, and Lacan to film studies, and asks how political responsibility can be reconciled with the concept of the university as a democratic institution. Art and the university, Patrick McGee claims, share a common feature: they are commonly regarded as autonomous realms that resist the determination of economic and political interests, while still playing a crucial role in ethical and political discourse. Through detailed reference to Neil Jordan's film The Crying Game, McGee shows how film can be both a product and a critique of the culture industry. He goes on to analyse the function of the university in producing interpretations of such highly political art forms and in determining the limits of critical discussion. McGee links Adorno with Derrida to provide a new route through cultural studies and the claims of political criticism.

This 1997 book explores the political significance of aesthetic analysis in the context of cultural studies. It applies the theories of Adorno, Derrida, and Lacan to film studies, and asks how political responsibility can be reconciled with the concept of the university as a democratic institution. Art and the university, Patrick McGee claims, share a common feature: they are commonly regarded as autonomous realms that resist the determination of economic and political interests, while still playing a crucial role in ethical and political discourse. Through detailed reference to Neil Jordan's film The Crying Game, McGee shows how film can be both a product and a critique of the culture industry. He goes on to analyse the function of the university in producing interpretations of such highly political art forms and in determining the limits of critical discussion. McGee links Adorno with Derrida to provide a new route through cultural studies and the claims of political criticism.

Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination explores the democratic thought of Spinoza and its relation to the thought of William Blake, Victor Hugo, and James Joyce. As a group, these visionaries articulate: a concept of power founded not on strength or might but on social cooperation; a principle of equality based not on the identity of individuals with one another but on the difference between any individual and the intellectual power of society as a whole; an understanding of thought as a process that operates between rather than within individuals; and a theory of infinite truth, something individuals only partially glimpse from their particular cultural situations. For Blake, God is the constellation of individual human beings, whose collective imagination produces revolutionary change. In Hugo's novel, Jean Valjean learns that the greatest truth about humanity lies in the sewer or among the lowest forms of social existence. For Joyce, Leopold and Molly Bloom are everybody and nobody, singular beings whose creative power and truth is beyond categories and social hierarchies.