An engaging, balanced and thoroughly researched history.
It is often a moving and amusing tale containing plenty of mavericks and colourful episodes.

Fascinating, complex and exhaustively researched ... This is a book that travels far beyond the bomb-scarred walls of Broadcasting House, bringing the reader as it did the 1940s listening public, the drama and immediacy of the war, and eventually the reality of a post-Nazi world, where Dimbleby's pared down description of the liberation of Belsen must be one of the most shattering pieces of ever broadcast.

This book captures how and why the BBC came to be trusted around the world so much that people like my grandparents - refugees from the Nazis - would hide in a cupboard every day with their short wave radio just to hear the truth as reported by the BBC.

The story of the BBC during the war has hardly been told though it is both fascinating and important. Edward Stourton's book is an engrossing account of this important time for one of our great institutions, perhaps to be read along side Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant novel Human Voices.

This engaging book about the BBC is full of astonishing incidents, truth versus propaganda and the unspoken heroism of correspondents. It tells how eyewitness reports gave a voice to everyone for the first time.

Highly readable. Auntie's War captures the peculiar mix of establishment conservatism and technocratic progressivism that shaped the BBC during its first decades, and demonstrates the huge reward in soft power that Britain reaped from its broadcasts to occupied Europe . . . He successfully brings out the craft that enabled the best radio performers to enthral their listeners.

Highly readable history

Must read: an affectionate and finely researched look at the BBC's inner workings during this critical period.

Broadcaster Ed Stourton's history of the BBC during the war is rich in incident and character and almost makes you fall in love with the old girl again.

Lively...a definitive account

The BBC had a "good war". It generally gave a high-minded moral tone to Britain's war effort, entertained the people during dark and uncertain days and won their affection and confidence. In this engaging, balanced and thoroughly researched history, Edward Stourton, a veteran broadcaster, reveals how and why this occurred. It is a moving and amusing tale full of colourful episodes.

Fascinating

A truly great story

The Czech nation will surely feel that he has done [Lata Brandisova] justice.

Few historians could be better placed to investigate this subject than Keith Lowe . . . riveting

Magisterial. The biography of Maclean we have all been waiting for

Admirable… [a] compassionate, absorbing book

[A] persuasive and polished biography

Roland Philipps illuminates, in both broad and subtle strokes

Philipps does an admirable job of piecing together the spy’s tale

Philipps’s telling of the tale is masterly. He weaves a complex web of professional, psychological and marital themes into a wonderful fluent, coherent and compelling narrative

Elegant, thorough and surprisingly exciting

[A] superbly told tale

In A Spy Named Orphan Roland Philipps’s description of Donald Maclean’s psychological make-up chimes with what I have always felt about the Cambridge spies (Philby excepted) – namely, that their romance with the Soviet Union partook of patriotism as much as it did of espionage… Philipps makes the story and the slow uncovering of his treachery a gripping narrative and an overwhelmingly sad one