This is a fascinating, informative, revelatory book … The vast array of knowledge that Elborough disperses in this book will make you look at parks differently … Parks seem an immutable, strangely paradisiacal element of our fraught and complicated urban lives, but the fact that we actually have them, as Elborough demonstrates in this wonderful book is something to be marvelled at.

Travis Elborough is becoming a latter-day Alan Bennett. Let loose in an array of reference libraries, he summons many a curious fact…from the shelves, which makes for a rich narrative… Alluring detail fills every page.

Amiable new history of the public park… Turns up lots of interesting, joyful stuff… A Walk in the Park is an enjoyable stroll.

His writing combines subtle drollery with a fantastical, Monty Python-ish strain… We can count this captivating book among the boons they [parks] have granted us.

Charming blend of the patriotic, popular and whimsical… Beautifully written.

Breezy but fact-filled prose… A worthy paean to the importance of parks to British life. His book is impassioned, informative.

Quirky and delightful.

Travis is a joyful cultural celebrant offering tantalizing nuggets of social history.

Quirky, lively history, full of unexpected detail.

Amiable new history of the public park… He turns up lots of interesting, joyful stuff along the way. He’s particularly good on our forebears’ taste for the ersatz… A Walk in the Park is an enjoyable stroll.

Fast-paced and richly peopled… Ebullient and enamored of his heroes is Elborough.

Highly enjoyable.

Elborough's quietly effervescent style manages to transform the reader from being someone with a passing interest in whatever topic he happens to be writing about into a fully-fledged Routemaster/LP/London loon.

Elborough writes in an aptly meandering style with an appetite for the eccentric marginalia of history

[It is] quirky and original.

[A Walk in the Park is] wittily written and wide-ranging.

In The Butchering Art, Lindsey Fitzharris becomes our Dante, leading us through the macabre hell of nineteenth-century surgery to tell the story of Joseph Lister, the man who solved one of medicine's most daunting - and lethal - puzzles. With gusto, Dr. Fitzharris takes us into the operating 'theaters' of yore, as Lister awakens to the true nature of the killer that turned so many surgeries into little more than slow-moving executions. Warning: She spares no detail!

With an eye for historical detail and an ear for vivid prose, Lindsey Fitzharris tells a spectacular story about one of the most important moments in the history of medicine-the rise of sterile surgery. The Butchering Art is a spectacular book-deliciously gruesome and utterly gripping. You will race through it, wincing as you go, but never wanting to stop

An absolutely fascinating and grisly read that vividly brings to life the world of the Victorian operating theatre

Fitzharris slices into medical history with this excellent biography of Joseph Lister, the 19th-century "hero of surgery." ... She infuses her thoughtful and finely crafted examination of this revolution with the same sense of wonder and compassion Lister himself brought to his patients, colleagues, and students

The Butchering Art is medical history at its most visceral and vivid. It will make you forever grateful to Joseph Lister, the man who saved us from the horror of pre-antiseptic surgery, and to Lindsey Fitzharris, who brings to life the harrowing and deadly sights, smells, and sounds of a nineteenth-century hospital

Fascinating and shocking ... [Fitzharris] offers an important reminder that, while many regard science as the key to progress, it can only help in so far as people are willing to open their minds to embrace change

Roper’s Luther is an angry man: a renegade and a rebel… [She] paints a vivid picture of the political and economic context in Mansfeld, where Luther grew up, and of the situation of Wittenberg and its political governance. There are important findings here, particularly relating to Luther’s early life

Roper writes with the virtuosity of an unsurpassed archival researcher, the grace of an elegant stylist, and the compassion of a seasoned student of human nature. Her nuanced and insightful portrait brilliantly evokes the inner and outer worlds of the man Luther. The book is a complete triumph.

Magnificent and surely definitive – a work of immense scholarship, acute psychological insight and gloriously fluent prose. Lyndal Roper has got under the skin of her subject and the result is thrilling.

Roper’s scholarly strengths plus 10 years of careful research have yielded a richly contextualised biography of a man whose influence has been and remains enormous, for good or ill or both.

This is a helpful and insightful examination of Luther’s attitudes and relationships… Highly recommended.

Roper portrays a deeply flawed but fascinating human being to rival any of the major personalities of Tudor England.

I heartily commend Martin Luther… It is simply the best English-language biography of Luther I’ve read and I’d be amazed if its combination of rigorous scholarship and approachable tone is bettered.

[A] superb new biography… A challenging and deeply stimulating study of a major historical figure.

The work of a brilliant scholar, who had devoted years of research to the project, and it repays careful reading… There are rich treasures in the book, without a bout. Roper has a great gift for narrative… Roper’s exploration of the cultural and social world of the Saxon miners is masterly… Fascinating.

A probing psychological account.