A gripping, vivid, deeply researched chronicle of the Russian Revolution told through the eyes of a surprising, flamboyant cast of foreigners in Petrograd, superbly narrated by Helen Rappaport.

Next year's centenary will prompt a raft of books on the Russian Revolution. They will be hard pushed to better this highly original, exhaustively researched and superbly constructed account.

This is narrative history at its very best, communicating the confusion, exhilaration, horror and despair of that momentous year

Chronicles the events of 1917 through the eyes of foreigners resident in Petrograd — diplomats, journalists, merchants, factory owners, charity workers and simple Russophiles... a wonderful array of observations, most of them misguided, some downright bizarre. What makes this book so delightful and enlightening is the depth of incredulity it reveals... [A] wonderful book.

Thoroughly-researched and absorbing... this book offers a compelling picture of life in Petrograd in this momentous and often terrible year... One gets a wonderful picture of the extraordinary and beautiful city... and a keen sense of the really grotesque inequality that has always existed there.

A past more dramatic than Chekhov, more tragic than Tolstoy and more romantic than Pasternak... Helen Rappaport collates a vast menagerie of eyewitnesses [from Petrograd 1917] into a cast of fascinating characters... bring[ing] an absorbing period of history closer to home.

A vivid account of the city ‘taut as a wire’… highly readable and fluent… Rappaport has unearthed striking new material

Fascinating… A colourful account of expatriate life in the Russian capital in 1917.

Rappaport has dug deeper. She has unearthed from private sources, the Library of Congress and the Leeds Russian archive numerous accounts previously untold, and gives an unfailingly gripping picture of chaos as seen through the eyes of the orderly.

This book will, no doubt, be followed by many others as the centenary of the revolution approaches. It will be surprising if any match this one for originality, vividness and a visceral sense of excitement... Meticulous, detailed, wonderfully comprehensive.

The strength of Rappaport’s work is the immediacy it provides, the sense of what it was like to experience the Revolution

A dramatic and absorbing narrative

A vivid account... Give[s] an authentic sense of months of chaos, marked by surging crowds, looted bakeries and outbreaks of gunfire, some seemingly random and some viciously aimed... Rappaport chooses their graphic accounts brilliantly.

Ms Rappaport's book [is] a mosaic of truth which no fictional one could outdo.

Splendid ... Rappaport has unearthed plenty of wonderful new material ... The story [her] witnesses tell is endlessly fascinating.

[A] lively narrative

This research is impressive and the narrative she has constructed makes for an excellent read

Immediate, fast-moving … fascinating

Extraordinary . . . At each stage, the meticulous quality of [Stangneth’s] research and her distinctive moral outrage make the journey enthralling . . . Stangneth’s book has the flavor of a detective story . . . [A] fine, important book

Stangneth uses new documents to reconstruct the post-war lives of Nazis in exile, revealing an egotistical and skilled social manipulator.

How [Stangneth] put all this complex information relative to Eichmann together in one book is astounding. Freshly sourced archives and statements are used throughout, building into a full depiction of Eichmann.

An engaging history-cum-memoir… Strongest when exploring the tender relationship between Nicolson and her father after her mother’s death as a result of alcoholism, her own struggles with the same condition, the knife-twist of grief when one loses a parent, and the emotional rush of motherhood.

I would recommend everyone to read this book

Juliet Nicolson is firing on all cylinders ... She is able to write about powerful emotion in a way that is both heartfelt and unselfconscious ... It makes the book perfectly personal as well as a fascinating history

This book is a marvellous illustration of the often forgotten fact that people in history were real, with real ambition, real passion and real rage. All these women took life by the throat and shook it. It’s a wonderful read, and a powerful reminder of the significance of our matrilineal descent

Juliet Nicolson's book will engage the hearts and minds of daughters and sons everywhere. She has turned my attention to much in my life, and I am full of admiration for her clarity and gentleness

I loved A House Full of Daughters. I was initially intrigued, then gripped, and then when she began writing about herself, deeply moved and admiring of the way in which she charted her own journey. An illuminating book in which she charts the inevitability of family life and the damage and gifts that we inherit from the previous generations

A fascinating, beautifully written, brutally honest family memoir. I was riveted. This is a book to read long into the night

I was riveted... She is so astute about mother/daughter relationships and the tenderness of fathers and daughters. She deeply understands the way problems pass down through generations... I congratulate her on her fierce understanding.

Juliet Nicolson’s writing is so confident and assured. She combines the magic of a novelist with the rigour of a historian, and the result is thrilling and seriously powerful

Once I started it was impossible to stop. I was totally absorbed by Juliet Nicolson's large-souled approach to family memoir down the generations, drawing the reader into lives that reverberate with achievement and suffering... movingly original

A moving and very revealing account of seven generations of strong and yet curiously vulnerable mothers and daughters

An outstanding book about a gifted, unconventional family told through the female line. Insightful, painfully honest, beautifully written and full of love, wisdom, compassion, loss, betrayal and self-doubt. A House Full of Daughters will resonate down the years for all who read it

An engaging memoir in which Nicolson lays bare discoveries about herself, but also gives a fascinating inside take on her renowned, and already much scrutinized, forebears. She also has much that is thought-provoking to say about mothers and daughters, marriage and the way in which damaging patterns can repeat down generations.

Nicolson is perceptive on difficult mother-daughter relationships.

A fascinating personal look at family, the past and love.

Beautifully written history… She has as easy and elegant a style as her many writer relations, so this book is seductively readable. It could be described as a late addition to the ‘Bloomsbury’ shelves, but that should not put off anyone who feels enough has been said about that particular group. I found it touching and fascinating. In admitting that Nigel Nicolson was a friend, I can say with confidence that he would have been painfully proud of his daughter’s candid confession.

Highly readable, no-holds barred tale.

Nicolson has written a poignant and courageous history.

The most enjoyable book to take on holiday would undoubtedly be Juliet Nicolson’s A House Full of Daughters… It is ideal holiday reading.

A simple premise looking at seven generations of women in one family, but it's got all the juicy bits of several novels in one

[An] ambitious memoir.

An entrancing book… A poignant, well-written memoir-cum-social history

A fine family memoir.

This engrossing book charts seven generations of a family who were obsessive documenters of their lives through diaries, letters, memoirs and autobiographical novels… Interwoven with the personal is a portrait of society’s changing expectations of women, and the struggle to break free from patriarchy. Here, brilliantly laid bare, are both the trials of being a daughter and of documenting daughterhood in all its complexity.

A charming book about the female side of Nicolson’s family tree.