I learned things from the script I didn't know. I just thought, "Can that be right? Were we that perilously close?" And so it just grabbed me.

This is history written with the verve of a novel. Compelling and provocative

Pacy, refreshing, intimate and clear-eyed

Impeccably researched, provocative and absolutely thrilling. I couldn't put it down.

Engrossing... a bold and hugely readable story about doubts, decision and the power of words that vividly conveys the man and the moment.

Darkest Hour has the panache, pace, wit and authenticity of its place and time...a concise and convincing distillation of the events of May 1940.

It is quite simply brilliantly well done. Gary Oldman's performance is nothing short of a masterpiece and Kristin Scott Thomas is remarkable. At one moment in the film I closed my eyes and I thought it was my grandmother speaking. It is also extremely moving - what my mother used to call a "two-handkerchief film"

Books about the causes and course of the Second World War continue to pour off the presses. Yet there are far fewer books about the world wide geopolitical, economic and personal effects of the most catastrophic event of the 20th century. So Keith Lowe's concise, lucid and highly readable book, which also includes the testimony of individual memories of the immediate years after the end of the War and their hopes of a cleansed new world of social justice and prosperity, is to be welcomed. In Lowe's opinion, the reconfiguration and realignment of nations that followed the War, led ultimately to Brexit, with Europe once again divided in a potentially dangerous and certainly disruptive way

This powerful book serves as a timely reminder of what our forefathers forged out of the ashes of the Second World War - an international order based on cooperation and interdependence together with a bold, fearless domestic agenda that set about creating a new society

Lowe's book is a compelling work of historical scholarship - but, more than that, it is an intimate portrait of how human beings carry on when their world has changed for ever

Intelligent and far-reaching . . . he blessedly forgoes the banal literalism of conventional history by considering the mythological, philosophical and psychological consequences of the war . . . Lowe brilliantly reveals how, when trapped between freedom and fear, people tether their emotional and intellectual states to world events

Overflowing with insights and ideas and steeped in curious and evocative detail . . . A very fine work of history

This is an important book, impossible to summarise, profound in its humanity, bold in its confrontation of sacred myths

Ceaselessly insightful, this masterpiece of historical inquiry - the fruit of five years' labour - dissects the impact of the war on society, politics, urban planning and much else besides

Few historians could be better placed to investigate this subject than Keith Lowe . . . riveting

Magisterial. The biography of Maclean we have all been waiting for

Admirable… [a] compassionate, absorbing book

[A] persuasive and polished biography

Roland Philipps illuminates, in both broad and subtle strokes

Philipps does an admirable job of piecing together the spy’s tale

Philipps’s telling of the tale is masterly. He weaves a complex web of professional, psychological and marital themes into a wonderful fluent, coherent and compelling narrative

Elegant, thorough and surprisingly exciting

[A] superbly told tale

In A Spy Named Orphan Roland Philipps’s description of Donald Maclean’s psychological make-up chimes with what I have always felt about the Cambridge spies (Philby excepted) – namely, that their romance with the Soviet Union partook of patriotism as much as it did of espionage… Philipps makes the story and the slow uncovering of his treachery a gripping narrative and an overwhelmingly sad one