Mallinson uncovers a litany of rivalry and miscalculation. With the Great War's centenary commemorations on the horizon, he has produced a must-read for anyone who wants to know how Britain practically stumbled into one of the bloodiest conflicts in history.

Formidable and page-turning . . . Mallinson's clinical examination of the 'what ifs' is as compelling as his account of the death of a small but professional army, sacrificed to the incuriosity of our politicians and disinclination of military leaders to countenance any challenge to what they believed were best laid plans.

Compelling and rigorously researched...paints a vivid picture. . . this is not dry military history. He tells the story through many eyes of those on the frontline, from general to Tommy. It's recounted through regimental histories and underpinned with his deep understanding of tactics . . . offers unique insights on the planning, 'politicking' and fighting.

In the deluge of books to mark the centenary of the start of the Great War, it is refreshing to find one written by a former soldier who is also an accomplished military historian . . . a vivid picture . . . with his soldier's grasp of tactics and strategy, Mallinson describes with clarity and authority the opening weeks of the war.

Mallinson writes with an exciting pen and a cool head and he understands war.

This is one of the few new books on the war to be written by a former soldier, and it benefits greatly from the author's tactical knowledge, strategic expertise and understanding of how an army really functions.

This is a unique collection of contemporary accounts – and just as compelling as the work of any historian.

Reflecting civic life as well as life in the trenches, the accessible style allows you to dip in and out as you please, exploring a world unknown to most.

As Bostridge shows in this beautifully written and detailed book, 1914 was a 'fateful year', England was truly never the same again

Vivid, finely drawn

As mesmerising as a great historical novel

Authoritative, wide-ranging and thoroughly readable.

The Good War…can feel one step away from the action but is no less compelling or valuable. His is a chronology of a war of our time; it holds one’s attention and he has done his research.

This year saw one of the most audacious biographies I can remember reading: Ruth Scurr's John Aubrey: My Own Life... What we are presented with is a wonderful artificial composite: a fascinating patchwork made up of extracts from Aubrey's notebooks, journals and letters, chronologically rearranged with consummate editorial and novelistic artfulness by Scurr. The result is haunting, memorable and, in the field of non-fiction, unprecedented.

Scurr wrote the biography Aubrey didn't write - Aubrey's own - in a biographical form that is unique, new and gripping

For me, the academic historian, Scurr’s experimental “act of scholarly imagination” has already modified significantly my own historical understanding

The marriage of [Aubrey’s] words and Scurr’s is so smoothly achieved that I have no idea where one leaves off and the other intervenes

Scurr’s imaginative feat of retrieval has produced a perfect book for dipping into when you want a taste of what it was like to be alive in the 17th century

It is a testament to [Scurr’s] skill that you quickly stop thinking about technique and instead slip happily into the company of the character she has created. The wealth of research and the seams between imagination and reality disappear from view. This is truly selfless biography

A game-changer in the world of biography

A delightful read about the ebb and flow of thoughts in one extraordinary man’s mind

Drawing on [Aubrey’s] manuscripts and letters, [Ruth Scurr] has fashioned, as chronologically as possible, an autobiography in the form of the diary that Aubrey never wrote. It fits him perfectly… Ms Scurr has done him proud

Aubrey was a delightful, self-deprecating man ... A conventional biography of Aubrey could easily have become a portrait of the time through which he had lived, allowing the man himself to be overshadowed ... Instead, Ruth Scurr has invented the diary Aubrey might have written, incorporating his own chaotic, sometimes scrappy literary remains to form a continuous narrative. ... lucky him to have been accorded a biography as whimsical as his own self

Scurr’s book illuminates and poignantly captures the voice of a man more often a “ghostly record keeper” in his own writing

John Aubrey brilliantly reconfigures the art of biography

Bold and imaginative recreation of the diary of the 17th-century antiquary. It shows how close a scrupulous and unselfregarding biographer can come to the savour of a life

A genuinely remarkable work of biographical innovation.

I’d like to reread Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey every Christmas for at least the next five years: I love being between its humane pages, which celebrate both scholarly companionship and deep feeling for the past

Ruth Scurr’s innovative take on biography has an immediacy that brings the 17th century alive

Anyone who has not read Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey can have a splendid time reading it this summer. Scurr has invented an autobiography the great biographer never wrote, using his notes, letters, observations – and the result is gripping

A triumph, capturing the landscape and the history of the time, and Aubrey’s cadence.

A brilliantly readable portrait in diary form. Idiosyncratic, playful and intensely curious, it is the life story Aubrey himself might have written.

Scurr knows her subject inside out.

The diligent Scurr has evidence to support everything… Learning about him is to learn more about his world than his modest personality, but Scurr helps us feel his pain at the iconoclasm and destruction wrought by the Puritans without resorting to overwrought language.

Acclaimed and ingeniously conceived semi-fictionalised autobiography… Scurr’s greatest achievement is to bring both Aubrey and his world alive in detail that feels simultaneously otherworldly and a mirror of our own age… It’s hard to think of a biographical work in recent years that has been so bold and so wholly successful.