F Mandl and G Shaw 1984 Chichester: John Wiley xii + 354 pp price £38 (£19 paperback) ISBN 0 471 10509 0 Hdbk, 0 471 90650 6Pbk Perturbative quantum field theory was originally developed and tested on electromagnetic interactions, but its recent success in explaining the weak interactions and, through the quark model and quantum chromodynamics, many aspects of the strong interactions of elementary particles too, has stimulated the publication of a number of excellent but weighty introductory textbooks. However, they can seem rather formidable to the research student meeting the subject for the first time and the short, elegant book by Mandl (Introduction to Quantum Field Theory 1959 Interscience) has remained a useful, if increasingly outdated, insight into how it all works.