A magnificent book - a tremendous achievement, a thing of beauty and a volume that should have a place on every church lover's shelves

Astonishing and beautifully photographed... The 365 examples chosen for full-page illustration and commentary here are the clotted cream of the milk of human mortality. Newham has visited 9,000 country churches in the past few years for his stupendous project of photographing every rural church in England. His travels with a camera make Cobbett's Rural Rides seem like a bank-holiday jaunt... Newham's pictures are a revelation

This is a true labour of love and one of the most wonderful books I have ever seen

A tour de force... Erudite... Church monuments may at first appear niche, but the subject matter deserves an audience beyond church crawlers or taphophiles. Funeral art provides a powerful insight into the culture and beliefs that they sprang from... Country Church Monuments is a treasure trove of sites just waiting to be discovered.

Brilliant

A life-affirming survey

An excellent book... Its outstanding quality, however, is its photographs. Only someone who has craned their
neck in semi-darkness to discern the contours of an effigy lying at eye level can appreciate, even if they cannot explain, the expertise of Cameron Newham's technique. In many cases perfect images are provided of recumbent figures taken from directly overhead, often defying the actual space above them.... A wonderful selection, warmly recommended

The wonderful result of 25 years of meticulously chronicling over 8,000 rural English and Welsh churches - and the effigies, marbles, monuments and brasses inside them. Newham has picked out 365 of the best monuments he has found - a feast of the celebrated and the obscure and an enthralling map of our aesthetic and social history

What fortunate isles are these, to boast thousands of local sculpture galleries scattered through towns and villages, nearly all accessible for free: churches that host funeral monuments and memorials spanning more than a millennium. Newham's book is an incomparable means of sampling the very best across England and Wales - a personalised visit for every day of the year, in superb photography and informed commentary

This beautifully produced gazetteer invites us to look inside our extraordinary wealth of parish churches and see afresh the impressive, the touching, the beautiful and the downright sinister in their monuments, from the fourteenth-century obsession with mortality and the cadaver or the flourishes of baroque new men to the vainglorious fanfares or sentimental doggerel of the nineteenth century. Knights lying with their faithful dogs or wives, busts coolly neoclassical or lavishly periwigged are all accommodated in miniature showhouses in the architectural style of their period. A happy bedfellow for Nicholas Pevsner

An enthralling testament to our ceaseless human striving for eternity

Antiquarian CB Newham's book might seem more melancholy than merry. But it is a life-affirming survey of Britons through the ages

An impressively researched account, bringing to life the fears and preoccupations of obscure and humble people, and setting them in the context of their time and place.

Powerfully evocative, a grimly compelling morality tale with more than one unexpected twist ... an outstanding achievement, haunting, revelatory and superbly written - a strong contender for the best history book of 2021.

A pulsating history of sorcery and superstition ... an academic feat but reads like a Stephen King thriller - and it's just right for our conspiracy-laden times.

A riveting micro-history, brilliantly set within the broader social and cultural history of witchcraft. Drawing on previously neglected source material, this book is elegantly written and full of intelligent analysis.

If the Stuarts are having their time in the sun at last, then Leanda de Lisle is one of the reasons they are. Masterful and pleasurable about a transformative century and a neglected, underestimated woman's role in it -- what more can one want from history?

A fascinating book about a fascinating woman -- Henrietta Maria's story deserves to be better known, and this book brings her completely alive

Henietta Maria's perspective allows this book to become something much more than mere analysis of politics and war. De Lisle understands that history is a story of people; she possesses a visceral understanding of the emotions that swirled inside Henrietta Maria

[A] thrilling story... a revisionist life of one of the most compelling and controversial women in British history... a book, like a life, should be measured against its own mission. And in this - to tell the story of Henrietta Maria's extraordinary life from her own perspective - Leanda de Lisle triumphs where her subject could not

Lucid, entertaining and combative revisionist biography

A triumph of a book which will revise opinion of this 'reviled' queen

Thanks to Leanda de Lisle's new biography, Henrietta Maria can finally answer the charges laid against her. In debunking and deconstructing these myths de Lisle gives an account of the politics of the time

The much-maligned Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, is thrillingly reassessed in de Lisle’s lyrical biography

Harrowing but excruciatingly funny

[A] blazing debut... Electric from page one

Scabrously funny... Were his account a novel, you might accuse it of being too far-fetched

His remarkable, funny, arrestingly well-written memoir brings to mind Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels, but is also entirely, exhilaratingly its own thing

Original Sins is a memoir that reads like a novel; a brilliant one. Matt Rowland Hill's struggle to overcome the perfect storm of his upbringing and addiction makes for a great story, but it's the blend of artistry, wit and skilfully timed stabs of brutality that make it such a vivid and thrilling experience. It's not that I didn't want to put the book down, more that it wouldn't release me from its grip

Brilliant... lively, engaging and extremely well written - scrupulously, painfully honest... sharply funny