'It is all a bit Dad dancing at the disco, an impression reinforced by bumbling forays into pop culture, such as calling hip-hop artists 'black dudes with diamond earrings' and muddling up dubstep and 'the grime'.' Ian Birrell in the Observer took against Paul Mason's habit in Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions of referring to students by their Twitter tags. The collection's title is ironic, and it inverts the moral idea that only the wicked should suffer.' The Sunday Telegraph's Catherine Taylor argued that the 'pivotal moments appear almost insignificant, but brim with drama and import … The prose is picked clean, pellucid.' David Mills in the Sunday Times held that 'the best stories in this collection are the ones where he deals with ordinary lives … You don't need the end of civilisation, or even a gun, to build an atmosphere of unease and create a threatening tension.' Life, inner and outer, is so meticulously dissected that events appear to happen in slow motion.' Arifa Akbar in the Independent enjoyed Jon McGregor's first book of short stories, This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You: 'There is, in these brooding stories, that same sense of impending cataclysm that gave his debut, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, its intrigue … in McGregor's world, terrible things can happen to ordinary people. 'There is a precision and a poetry to his prose. He nowhere tests his basic assumptions against actual behaviour.' The Times's Ian Kelly felt that 'the depth of detailed historical research is as eye-catching as the breadth and topicality of Dabhoiwala's argument … If it takes passionate liberalism to defend liberty then this is more than just exemplary history it is timely and important work.' For Dominic Sandbrook in the Sunday Times it's a 'sumptuously rich, learned and enlightening debut … What makes Dabhoiwala's book so gloriously enjoyable is its happy blend of provocative ideas with splendidly memorable historical anecdotes: at the end of a lucidly written, densely researched and thoroughly persuasive book, you are left in little doubt that this period represented a crucial turning point in western cultural history.' Germaine Greer in the Observer was the exception, seemingly having read a different book: 'Dabhoiwala's sources, 100 closely printed pages of them, are modish theoretical discussions of the topics he chooses to address. Noel Malcolm in the Sunday Telegraph called it a 'marvellously rich and thought-provoking book, written with clarity and humanity, and drawing on a huge range of materials, from sermons to pornography to social statistics'.

The Origins of Sex, by Oxford historian Faramerz Dabhoiwala, which argues for an 18th-century sexual revolution, has garnered rave reviews.

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