In 1982, Selbourne's The Making of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a first-hand account of Peter Brook's rehearsals of the play for the Royal Shakespeare Company, was published, and has since established itself as a key work for students of theatre.
At the same time as teaching social and political theory at Ruskin College, Oxford, from 1966 to 1986, Selbourne contributed as a freelance journalist and commentator to New Society, the New Statesman, the Independent, and the Guardian among other publications.
His heterodox writings in the 1980s on Britain for New Society were published in Left Behind: Journeys into British Politics (1987); in Death of the Dark Hero: Eastern Europe, 1987–1990, he wrote at first-hand on the fall of communism in the region from Poland to Bulgaria, where he also participated in teaching in the 'underground universities'.
They include Against Socialist Illusion (1985) – written while he was still at Ruskin, a college of adult education supported by the labour movement, and a work which was regarded by the left as a provocation – The Principle of Duty (1994), which argued that limits must be set to selfish individual entitlement if a free social order is to be preserved, The Spirit of the Age: An Account of Our Times (1995) and The Losing Battle with Islam (2005).
There has also been widespread controversy over his book The City of Light (1997), which Selbourne has claimed to be a translation of an account of a trading voyage to China by a thirteenth-century merchant, Jacob of Ancona.