A page turner... Hugo Vickers' compelling account makes one feel that Wallis did the Queen a favour

With a lifetime's interest in the subject, Vickers knows everything there is to know about the Windsors . . . The first half of Behind Closed Doors, as well as being an accumulation of evidence against Blum, is the story of a personal journey into the world of the Windsors in which Vickers quotes from nearly 40 years of his own diary entries. It is also a hugely entertaining account of the battle between biographers for ownership of their subject . . . The book's second half is a biography of Wallis Simpson, nee Warfield. Vickers delves into her family tree with his accustomed detail and gives a realistic account of the end of her marriage to Ernest Simpson.

A definitively brilliant history of the whole story

Hot on the heels of The Victorians ... His witty conversational style and eye for period detail bring the brilliance and spectacle of the Elizabethan age vividly to life.

a compulsive read.

He looks through the eyes of some of the most colourful and celebrated characters in English history and culture . . . Readers will take delight.

A fitting monument to an expansive epoch.

There is much to treasure.

AN Wilson’s one-volume history captures the heady turmoil of a flourishing era, laying doting emphasis on the titanic charisma of the Virgin Queen herself.

It wasn't all sweetness and light between Maggie and Ronnie, as this account of their difficult relationship shows

Pankaj Mishra has produced a riveting account that makes new and illuminating connections. He follows the intellectual trail of this contested history with both intelligence and moral clarity. In the end we realise that what we are holding in our hands is not only a deeply entertaining and deeply humane book, but a balance sheet of the nature and mentality of colonisation

Highly readable and illuminating ... Mishra's analysis of Muslim reactions is particularly topical

Enormously ambitious but thoroughly readable, this book is essential reading for everyone who is interested in the processes of change that have led to the emergence of today's Asia

Sophisticated ... not so much polemic as cri de coeur, motivated by Mishra's keen sense of the world, East and West, hurtling towards its own destruction

Outstanding ... Mishra wears his scholarship lightly and weaves together the many strands of history into a gripping narrative ... The insights afforded by this book are too many to be enumerated ... Mishra performs a signal service to the future - by making us read the past in a fresh light

[Full of] complexity and nuance

Subtle, erudite and entertaining

Mishra allows the reader to see the events of two centuries anew, through the eyes of the journalists, poets, radicals and charismatics who criss-crossed Europe and Asia

A vital, nuanced argument ... prodigious