Insightful and convincing... Figes integrates his analysis into a highly readable story, and he shows himself to be a master of historical narrative. Readers will find themselves absorbing a great deal of information and insight with very little effort

A primer intended for readers unfamiliar with the territory, it sparkles with ideas, vivid storytelling, poignant anecdotes and pithy phrases... Fresh and dramatic

A seriously comfortable armchair, a magnificent old duffer of a book that deftly knits together a national story into the fabric of a family drama. It does this with all the warmth and affection for history that mark out a former statesman and a first-class storyteller

A balanced look at a traditional tale of aristocratic power and prestige

This jaunty magnificent book tells the history of Britain just as much as it does of one family

Remarkable… The genius of this work is that it serves up a feast of details from a whole dynasty of remarkable men and women

An engaging account of a gallery of historical figures

Incredibly detailed

A delightful, beautifully researched book

An extraordinary tale deriving from meticulous research – the story of how a young Jew after 1945 almost single-handedly hunted down the Kommandant of Auschwitz.

A highly readable detective story … This is really a book about the world of Hanns Alexander…[and it is] well worth reading ... Harding has researched it thoroughly.

A remarkable book: thoughtful, compelling and quite devastating in its humanity. Thomas Harding’s account of these two extraordinary men goes straight to the dark heart of Nazi Germany.

A fascinating, well-crafted book, entwining two biographies for an unusual and illuminating approach to the history of the Third Reich, its most heinous crime and its aftermath.

This fascinating book, based on the gripping story of one man’s unrelenting pursuit of Rudolf Höss in his search for justice, confirms my belief that much of the most important knowledge of the Holocaust, comes from the personal accounts of those involved. Hanns and Rudolf vividly brings to life, not only the impact of Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies on the author’s German Jewish family, forced to flee Berlin in the 1930s; but shows how an ordinary German farmer became one of the most feared and notorious war criminals in history, implementing with chilling efficiency the extermination of over a million Jews in Auschwitz. As awareness of the full horror of these dark years continues to advance, this book fills a unique and vital role.

This important and moving book describes the unlikely intersection of two very different lives – that of Hanns Alexander, the son of a prosperous German family in Berlin who became a refugee in London in the 1930s, and Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Well-researched and grippingly written it provides a unique insight into the fate of Germany under National Socialism.

Thomas Harding has written a book of two intersecting lives: His great uncle, a German Jew and potential Nazi victim, and Rudolf Höss, Kommandant of Auschwitz. In a neat historical irony, his uncle became a British officer who tracked down war criminals, including one of the world’s worst mass murderers. A fascinating account, with chunks of new information, about one of history's darkest chapters.

Written with the verve of a writer and the sure touch of an historian, Thomas Harding's Hanns and Rudolf is a fascinating, fresh, and compelling work of history.

A vivid account of the pursuit of justice and what happened to two men who found themselves in the chaos of evil of Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

Thomas Harding … tells the story with great verve.

An astonishing and moving story…[an] excellent book

Remarkable … A beautifully balanced double biography, admirably measured but also gripping, which offers a fresh perspective on a much-examined subject

A remarkable book, which deserves a wide readership.

fascinating, intelligent, compelling, dramatic and intimate... The style is open, clear, forthright, and sprightly. It seeks – and finds – clarity at all times, whether to events or character, and delivers everything it manages to pick out of the private archives, classified documents and more just brilliantly.

Hanns and Rudolf is a magnificent book. In an era where WWII is passing from living memory and into history, it offers both, and does so in a way which is spellbinding, poignant and harrowing.

Harding builds a compelling, remarkable picture of war and its aftermath

Hoss’s life is grimly fascinating … Hanns and Rudolf is written with a suppressed fury at the moral emptiness of men like him

Perhaps one of the finest books on the Holocaust and the Second World War that I have read in a long time.

[A] gripping and superbly written book