Clare's extraordinary and mesmerising odyssey following the migration of the swallow from South Africa to South Wales

A gifted and lyrical travel writer

The author deploys some fine lyrical writing and a gift for inventive, unexpected metaphor ... Clare's other great asset is his brave, modern, multicultural and open-hearted approach to travel itself

Fizzingly entertaining. His own prose has something of their flight: daring, sharp-edged, fast-moving, graceful, full of surprises. This is a great adventure, thrillingly realised

Remarkably insightful and entertaining, with Clare proving himself to be the most enthusiastic, open-minded, intelligent and incorrigibly romantic of travellers

Clare has produced an enthusiastic, often elegiac, chronicle of his encounters with the swallows

His eye for detail and his elegant pen give flavour of each country he crosses: great veldt and high plateaux, Congo's "green vastness", the "sandy seas" of the Sahel and, finally, the fertile plain of the north African coast

The resulting book, travel writing at its very best, is enthralling, passionate, hair-raising, quirky, hilarious, informative, occasionally mad and utterly, utterly brilliant... irresistible stuff.

Horatio Clare pays tribute to the extraordinary migratory journeys of the swallow...a book that combines travel with natural history

It's graphically done, making me feel I was with him all the way

Clare is engaging and makes a convincing case for the futility of borders

An exciting book, and often very moving

This is a book of rare lyrical beauty

His descriptive prose is faultlessly evocative

A curiously thrilling read, written with an elegance heightened by its clarity and economy

A valuable and unflinching account, since it so clearly tells the truth

This book is mesmerising

Her description of the struggle to remain individual and hence moral is her real achievement. This, to me, is what female writing has to do, and she does it with style and humour and beauty

Richard Dawkin's new book... gives the fact-rejecters their just deserts

The book is full of evidence, some familiar and some new. Its case is presented in a manner succinct, clear and sometimes vivid

No other book currently available approaches Dawkin's comprehensive yet accessible treatment of the extraordinarily diverse and massive body of data that drives ineluctably to the same conclusion

The Greatest Show on Earth is a lucid, thorough and often exciting survey of evolution and takes in rats' teeth, dogs, bacteria, the so-called missing link, crustaceans, giraffe anatomy, hummingbirds, chimpanzees, enzymes - you name it. It is informed in nearly every paragraph by Mr. Dawkins's irrepressible enthusiasm

The Greatest Show on Earth... is essential reading. I would currently rate it... as the best overall book on the evidence for Evolution

This is a magnificent book of wonderstanding: Richard Dawkins combines an artist's wonder at the virtuosity of nature with a scientist's understanding of how it comes to be