Evocative and passionate ... [Romer] has a command of material and of language that makes this a fascinating tale ... Magisterial

Knight explores her own family’s history and, in parallel, the intimate history of women in the 20th century… The politics of being a modern woman are revealed through changing fashions… In Knight’s hands, buttons – the humblest of everyday objects – become portals into the past, charting our progress along that road.

Charming book… Knight’s brilliant notion is to use the button box she inherited from her grandmother as a way of delving into the fabric, literal and metaphorical, of the women who wore them… A patchwork of memory, anecdote and deft quotation.

Inspired by her own shimmering box of toggles, clasps and buckles, Knight takes us on an ingenious tour of domestic and social history over the last century… From this core of very personal material, Knight writes more generally of ordinary women’s lives and changing prospects over three generations, of clothes as self-expression, as defiance, as entertainment, as evidence of frugality and frivolity all rolled into one.

The drama of women’s lives from the 19th to the mid-20th century was hidden in plain sight among the brightly coloured buttons that rattled so enticingly in [Knight’s] grandmother’s Quality Street tin… Fascinating social history.

An unusual and irresistibly delightful account of more than a century’s worth of women’s lives… This is a book to make you smile, a story luminous with nostalgia… Delicious gem of a book.

[Knight] quotes like a dream, cherry-picking bon mots from sources far, wide and delightful... There are plenty of curious and quirky details.

A sweeping look at how women’s clothing has developed as our place in society has evolved… A delight.

Broader social history is approached through the rich, vivid stories… These buttons…tell an intimate story of changing times.

Each trinket of the past comes to life, giving a nice nostalgic and informative look into the history of fashion, the Great War and even a few comical anecdotes on sex and relationships.

Lively trip through haberdashery history.

I found this a great read for all ages and a genuine insight into the social history of different times.

Knight is a lively minded writer… Knight trims her story with wonderful arcane clothes-related information.

If ever there was a case for book groups to abandon fiction… [This] is it… Irresistible.

If you spent many happy hours as a child messing about with buttons, you’ll love The Button Box

A box which contains the buttons of three generations of women in Lynn Knight’s family is at the centre of this book, and is both ordinary and remarkable, prosaic and magical… The only illustrations of the buttons and clothes in the book appear on the dust jacket and at the start of each chapter, yet through Knight’s prose we are able to vividly picture them and ourselves rummaging through an old button box, imagining the dresses and the lives that they once belonged to

He writes beautifully.

In the historian Barnabas Calder’s marvellous Raw Concrete, he tries to persuade us to love the architecture of the 1960s. Not just wonderfully well-researched and beautifully well-written, it’s also the story of a conversion, as Calder himself comes to value buildings he, too, once disliked.

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.