This is a must read for anyone interested in the preservation of our world's decaying treasures

The 18th century's crankiest sentimental genius

Rousseau...is one of those paradoxical geniuses who tend to inspire all-forgiving love or intense dislike

A "good story", with cops and robbers, terrorists, nincompoops, useful historical background, lurid modern foreground and a style that reanimates the past... Fascinating

Matthew Hart conveys the glamour, adventure, ruthlessness and even murderous nature of the trade with a novelist's grasp of narrative... Excellent

The Irish Game may be about crime and art, but it is accessible to just about anyone, unfolding with a good deal of suspense. For those who might associate museums and lofty works of art with elitism and stuffiness, Hart reveals a far more compelling world filled with desperation and betrayal

A gripping story of truly global reach - he has kept his tale at just the right pressure and temperature - think Indiana Jones meets James Bond meets Forbes ASAP

From the frozen wastes of northern Canada to the beaches of Namibia and on to the fortified diamond houses of London's charterhouse Street, this is, fittingly, sparkling stuff

This book is a personal memoir, a history of the left bank of Paris and an endlessly compelling tale of a family who lived in and out of Paris through two centuries of war, conflict and great politics...Nostalgia is of course a key trope in Parisian history and this book, richly textured and beautifully written, is a wonderful addition to that canon

Absorbing

A glorious read!

A splendid pontine read.

A delightful and informative romp.

As a chronicle of social and architectural history, this is an informative and fun read

Tindall transforms bricks and mortar into fascinating social history

The interest here lies in the accurate and plausible portrait of a whole society, from top to bottom… The details are fascinating

The avowed aim of this fascinating history of neighbours is to explore the delicate balance between people’s determination to protect their privacy and their simultaneous wish to cultivate contact with those who live close by

A very personal encounter with Roman Britain… Invites us to see our landscape and history as the Romans first imagined and wrote about them – strange and exotic islands, perched on the edge of the known world.

[Higgins] is as sharp and sensitive an observer of the latest version of Britannia as she is of the earliest one… Each chapter is not just a regional itinerary but also a brilliantly constructed and often exhilaratingly poetic treatment of wider themes.

Records [Higgins’] own travels around the island in search of Roman traces. She includes plenty of anecdotes about the continuing fascination with the Roman past and its penetration of the present.

Higgins produced another remarkable British travelogue… that was at once thoughtful, learned, witty and superbly written.

Filled with passion and personal interest… Higgins walks us around the landscape of this country as it would have been 2,000 years ago, and in doing so she ably captures the spirit of Britain now, Britain then and Britain in between.

Whether at Hadrian’s Wall or in a car park in the City, she [Higgins] shows how Roman traces are woven through British life.

A fascinating look at how we have viewed Rome's presence in these islands and what a debt we still owe to Roman achievements.

Part history, part travelogue, [Higgins] also brings to life the eccentric archaeologists who have tried to recapture that lost civilisation.

A fresh and readable account

Under Another Sky is not only a work of personal history, it is more personal than that... It is conversational, anecdotal, in a way that makes it easy for [Higgins] to slip in quite a lot of information

A delightful, effortlessly engaging handbook to the half-lost, half-glimpsed world of Roman Britain... The result is an utterly original history, lyrically alive to the haunting presence of the past and our strange and familiar ancestors

The beauty of this book is not just in the elegant prose and in the precision with which [Higgins] skewers her myths. It is in the sympathy she shows for the myth-makers.

Evocative...a keen-eyed tour of Britain.

Packed with fascinating and thought-provoking insights.

A captivating travelogue.

A delightfully heady and beautifully written potpourri of a book.

A fascinating look at the debt we owe to Roman achievements

One of those fantastical novels that tells us more about the realities of being human than most realist novels do…the most thrilling and moving experience fiction has to offer this year.

Kate Atkinson's audacious novel plays a virtuoso game with the nature of fiction...her best book to date and a worthy winner of a Costa Prize.