Read this book and London will never look the same again

With a darkly evocative sense of place and period, this is a shocking and often poignant history of human nature’s most violent impulses, and the vibrant city that forms their backdrop

A fascinating, sideways view of London’s real underground

An insightful and multi-layered depiction of crime in London

God’s Traitors, with its crisp prose and punctilious scholarship, brilliantly recreates a world of heroism and holiness in Tudor England... It is little short of a triumph

Beautifully written... Hollywood could not have made it up

Brilliant

Truly excellent... God's Traitors crosses the divide between popular and academic history. It raises issues of some real historical importance

This vivid, minutely researched and brilliantly original history is a much-needed look at the dark side of the Elizabethan age

Excellent... An engaging history of English papists, filled with memorable episodes

In the quality of her research and sensitive handling of issues that remain raw to this day, Jessie Childs succeeds in evoking ‘the lived experience of anti-Catholicism’ as few have done before... Childs’s language is lively and inventive... By picturing Elizabethan recusants in all their complexity, Jessie Childs has enabled them to speak for themselves at last

Superb and groundbreaking... It isn’t possible in the space of a review to do justice to the breadth and depth of Childs’ research and insight; but they illuminate the entire landscape of English life...a superlative, flawlessly written book... Childs’ description of an exorcism at Lord Vaux’s house in Hackney...is one of the most extraordinary things I have ever read

Plots and priest holes abound

Childs is a lucid, passionate writer and she gets under the skin of her subject... It's not often that history books get the balance of expert research and storytelling with chutzpah just right but Childs has managed it with this informative and entertaining book

[A] moving historical account... Childs paints a vivid, sometimes even humorous picture of devout Catholics keeping up appearances

Vivid but measured…never has the actual experience of the recusants been rendered with such a wealth of searing detail…richly packed, absorbing… It is a parade of extraordinary characters and a banquet of Elizabethan and Jacobean prose

This superbly researched and vividly narrated account conjures a lost world of exorcisms, priest’s holes and miracle-performing relics

[A] fascinating work of narrative history… What makes Childs’s book different is that she concentrates not on the derring-do of the foreign diplomats and priest-adventurers – who invariably ended up hung, drawn and quartered – but on the stay-at-home English Catholics who were obliged to negotiate their divided loyalties in these trickiest of times

Splendid book… Childs does a splendid job of explaining this unenviable situation and of putting it in the wider context of Elizabethan Catholic life. There are many fruitful digressions

An impressive history

A gripping account of an aristocratic family defying Elizabeth I’s thought police and executioners

· Thorough research coupled to a vigorous, readable style… This colourful saga of a downwardly mobile family on the losing side of national events reminds us that history is not all about the winners

All the way through, you ask: just how far would I go to protect and express my faith?

It’s been eight years since Jessie Childs’ last book, and her latest…was worth the wait

Thought-provoking and timely

There have been many books on the turbulent lives of Catholics in post-Reformation England, but Childs’s nuances account of the Vauxes of Harrowden Hall in Northhamptonshire convinced me there is still new ground to explore or, at least, revisit with fresh eyes

A timely exposé of our gruesome, intolerant past

[A] gripping and superbly written book