Christopher Kelly...gives a fine account of this complex story, unpicking its strands cleanly and persuasively

Learned, fluent and often witty study of the great Hunnish leader...Kelly is ideally qualified to write this account

Acute and entertaining biography set against the fall of the Roman Empire

Gripping

What Preston does better than any other writer is to capture the human aspects of the frankly exciting race to create a nuclear weapon . . . This energetic book is a fine place to begin.

Her skill is in weaving ethical struggles, scientific innovations and the grim dance of international relations into a riveting, coherent narrative.

Historian Diana Preston has done a truly stupendous job in marshalling the facts and threading together the myriad storylines about the birth of the atomic age, from Marie Curie's discovery of radium to Nagasaki and beyond ... I particularly admire her ability to synthesise abstruse technical detail...in a way that makes it easy to understand. She has taken all this potentially arid science and given it a human force ... A complex, monumental tale I doubt will ever be better told.

Compelling...Told with great skill by Diana Preston. There are personalities and discoveries, enterprises and adventures, colour and detail, and naturally there are moral dilemmas. But the lasting impression, implied in the subtitle and enhanced by the fluency of the tale, is of inevitability.

A concise and very readable overview of the human chain reaction that began in 1896 with the innocent observation that uranium salts could fog a photographic plate and culminated half a century later in the most potent weapon the world had ever seen.

North African pirates were the scourge of the 17th century, and plundered as far as Cornwall. Tinniswood tells their story with verve

The author's style is an absolute joy and his stories of attacks, based in eyewitness accounts, make rather more thrilling than many fictional thrillers are... He also proves an even-handed judge. While there's no attempt to whitewash the privateers here, there are explanations of what caused men to turn their hand to conquering the seas.

This well-researched history of piracy presents brutal seafaring extortionists instead of eye-patched rascals.

Tinniswood unearths colourful characters and historical oddities while pointing out that the West's inability to deal with Somali pirates show how little we've learned in 400 years

Meticulously researched history of unrestrained murder, robbery and kidnapping on the high seas... This is a brisk, entertaining story, with royal proclamations, letters, maps and lavishness illuminating Tinniswood's vivid tales.

[He] has unearthed many colourful characters and historical oddities and uses eyewitness accounts to weave a fascinating tale