Introduction: British think-tanks and the climate of opinion in the twentieth century

Academic interest in think-tanks is growing, but it has not kept pace with their remarkable rise to public prominence on both sides of the Atlantic. The American literature is far more substantial than the British and continues to dominate international discourse on the subject; even so, during the 1970s and 1980s only one article on the subject appeared in any of the major political science journals, and think-tanks are seldom mentioned in standard textbooks on American politics (Dye 1978; Ricci 1993:2).