Timothy Snyder's bold new approach to the Holocaust links Hitler's racial worldview to the destruction of states and the quest for land and food. This insight leads to thought-provoking and disturbing conclusions for today's world. Black Earth uses the recent past's terrible inhumanity to underline an urgent need to rethink our own future

A wholly readable and utterly persuasive attempt to get us to look at the Holocaust in a different light. I read it twice, aghast but gripped by the moral abyss into which I was plunged on each page

Black Earth is provocative, challenging, and an important addition to our understanding of the Holocaust. As he did in Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder makes us rethink those things we were sure we already knew

Part history, part political theory, Black Earth is a learned and challenging reinterpretation

In this unusual and innovative book, Timothy Snyder takes a fresh look at the intellectual origins of the Holocaust, placing Hitler's genocide firmly in the politics and diplomacy of 1930s Europe. Black Earth is required reading for anyone who cares about this difficult period of history

Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth is not only a powerful exposure of the horrors of the Holocaust but also a compelling dissection of the Holocaust’s continuing threat

Timothy Snyder is now our most distinguished historian of evil. Black Earth casts new light on old darkness. It demonstrates once and for all that the destruction of the Jews was premised on the destruction of states and the institutions of politics.I know of no other historical work on the Holocaust that is so deeply alarmed by its repercussions for the human future. This is a haunted and haunting book—erudite, provocative, and unforgettable

Timothy Snyder argues, eloquently and convincingly, that the world is still susceptible to the inhuman impulses that brought about the Final Solution. This book should be read as admonition by presidents, prime ministers, and in particular by anyone who believes that the past is somehow behind us

Always readable, highly sophisticated, and strikingly original

Black Earth is mesmerizing

an engrossing and often thought-provoking analysis of Hitler’s antisemitic ideology and an intelligently argued country-by-country survey of its implementation between 1939 and 1945

A masterful work

A passionate and semi-polemical account

a wholly readable and utterly persuasive attempt to get us to look at the Holocaust in a different light

this is a deeply insightful and original treatment and, as the Holocaust drifts slowly but surely from living memory and into history, a warning against future complacency

Snyder excels in repositioning the Holocaust in a global context

Timothy Synder reorientates our understanding of the ideological structures and political circumstances that made the Nazis’ genocidal programme possible
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To his recalibration of the conventional topography and chronology of the Holocaust, Snyder adds a novel interpretation of Hitler’s worldview and of the place of Jews in it

Snyder delivers what is surely the best and most unsparing analysis of eastern European collaborationism now available.

As our world fragments and dissolves into chaos, Snyder offers a chilling lesson about how easy it is for people to slip into evil and bloodlust.

a book of the greatest importance… written with searing intellectual honesty.

Snyder's extraordinary book may be about events more than seventy years ago, but its lessons about human nature are as relevant now as then

Disturbing but utterly compelling... The how’s and whys of what happened have never been better explained.

Highly praised, and indeed it is a worthy contribution to the subject.

Harding has recorded the fate of the house and its inhabitants, from the Weimar republic until reunification. This is German history in microcosm ... as exciting as a good historical novel.

An inspirational read: highly recommended.

A genuinely remarkable work of biographical innovation.

I’d like to reread Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey every Christmas for at least the next five years: I love being between its humane pages, which celebrate both scholarly companionship and deep feeling for the past

Ruth Scurr’s innovative take on biography has an immediacy that brings the 17th century alive

Anyone who has not read Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey can have a splendid time reading it this summer. Scurr has invented an autobiography the great biographer never wrote, using his notes, letters, observations – and the result is gripping

A triumph, capturing the landscape and the history of the time, and Aubrey’s cadence.

A brilliantly readable portrait in diary form. Idiosyncratic, playful and intensely curious, it is the life story Aubrey himself might have written.

Scurr knows her subject inside out.

The diligent Scurr has evidence to support everything… Learning about him is to learn more about his world than his modest personality, but Scurr helps us feel his pain at the iconoclasm and destruction wrought by the Puritans without resorting to overwrought language.

Acclaimed and ingeniously conceived semi-fictionalised autobiography… Scurr’s greatest achievement is to bring both Aubrey and his world alive in detail that feels simultaneously otherworldly and a mirror of our own age… It’s hard to think of a biographical work in recent years that has been so bold and so wholly successful.