One of the most entertaining and thoughtful pop-science books to be published for years

Anyone drawn to the big questions will enjoy this latest synthesis

A wonderful, miraculous book ... The whole universe bottled for your delight

You Are Here will provide an antidote to existential vertigo, helping you find your feet in a limitless universe

One of the best popular science books I have ever read

Wonderful stuff, the most thoughtful pop science book of the last few years ... erudite, elegant and thoughtfully constructed

I read it in an evening, with a sense of increasing excitement, and then vertigo, and finally a sort of stunned awe

For many years, I've secretly longed for someone to take me by the hand and walk me through time and space - someone who would marvel with me at every strange thing we encountered, and pepper his scientific discourse with lines of poetry. Thank goodness Christopher Potter has come along at last

A marvelously capacious book that will attract serious readers everywhere

Any reader who has avoided science for fear of being overwhelmed will find a friendly guide in Potter ... This clear and smoothly written look at the mind-boggling history of everything is both informative and provocative

This Portable History of the Universe is awe-inspiring in its reach. It ranges easily over millions of miles and takes in billions of centuries at a stroke, yet at the same time it's somehow intimate and conversational in its manner. The engaging medium is the message, perhaps: to contemplate the universe, suggests Potter, is "to find ourselves at two poles at the same time: we are uniquely special and we are insignificant". Playing both poles against the middle with extraordinary aplomb, his book opens up to us the vastness of the cosmos

Less folksy and biographical than Bill Bryson, less zany than a Bluffer's Guide. But many a bang for your buck, washed down with quotations from the greats ... Potter has an engaging style

With marvellous clarity, compassion, erudition, humour and open-mindedness, Potter blasts us through the vast vacuum of space