[Roy Hattersley] is very good: Catholics is a great read and spectacularly well-researched…. British Politics, especially the shipwrecked Labour Party, could do with a generation of Hattersleys – tough, committed, smart and cultivated.

[An] elegantly written, sweeping account of Catholics in these islands from the Reformation to the present day. It’s a tale of high drama and high stakes, by turns horrifying, romantic and ultimately hopeful.

big-hearted, fair-minded, insightful...a joy to read

Enjoyable… Perfectly solid, sensible and often astute.

Hattersley narrates… with his characteristic energy… His talent for invective remains strong.

Hattersley offers a scholarly chronicle of heroism and holiness in post-Reformation Britain, when the age of Catholic saints and miracles was seen to survive against the odds.

Thoroughly entertaining… I heartily recommend this volume, which is written with great brio, intelligence and charm; and with a wistful distance from his subjects’ faith which I found very appealing.

Hattersley… excels in describing political machinations… One must admire his courage, not to say his chutzpah, in undertaking a book of such enormous scope.

Thoughtful and thought provoking, minutely researched and well-written

The author writes with authority... He engages with his material and shares his enthusiasm with the reader. But equally he is detached: he has no interest in covering up scandals or selling a party line. The engaged outsider becomes a compelling biographer, at once intrigued and underwhelmed by his subject-matter

Sympathetic and lucid.

Grander, more didactic ambitions underpin "How Democracies Die" ... a more scholarly approach

The most thought-provoking book comparing democratic crises in different nations

The most important book of the Trump era was not Bob Woodward's Fear or Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury or any of the other bestselling exposés of the White House circus. Arguably it was a wonkish tome by two Harvard political scientists, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, published a year into Donald Trump's presidency and entitled How Democracies Die

Submission is polemical and comic by turns.

A diligent, even-tempered novel of ideas.

A brilliant translation by Lorin Stein…It is a captivating read (perhaps thanks to the translator, who is plainly equally at home in English and French, and who is so good that you hardly ever remember that you are reading something originally written in a language utterly different from English)…A highly plausible political thriller.

Submission is an intelligent, misanthropic satire that addresses questions crucial to multicultural societies.

The publication of Houellebecq's controversial novel...was a political event in itself. The book is brilliant, funny and deliberately offensive...and offers a sharp insight into the troubles of modern France

The year’s most prophetic and provocative novel.

The most talked about, and most topical, novel.

If you only read one book this summer, read this one … Please read this book. It says more about where we stand and what might happen than anything else I have read in the past few years.

A fascinating book, and, as always with Houellebecq, horribly readable.

Brilliant novel.

Uncomfortable and satirical – it shows one of France’s great controversialists at his best.

A timely, caustic, often funny novel… It has the cleverest, most satisfying ending I’ve read all year.

Submission is the latest Houellebecq novel and perhaps his most bitingly funny in parts, but it’s also a reminder of how European nations may succumb to foreign domination and “submit”.

What a visionary!... You must read it this summer, you’ll love it. It’s so incredible they published that a year before everything happened… He has a vision and it’s incredible… Incredible!

The literary chronicler of Western decadence