It's perceptive, moving and excruciatingly funny. A treasure

Collins' easygoing charm is hard to resist. A welcome visitor into any home that houses a Nick Hornby or a Tony Parsons

Beautifully observed, cleverly narrated and very readable, it's like being part of the great unwashed again

Entertaining and surprisingly familiar read ... Even for those of us who were still in pre-school at the time, the joys and lows are all given an added relevance via the author's emulation of Nick Hornby's self-deprecating humour. Like High Fidelity, if it had been written by a teenage Rob Fleming

Under Another Sky should be on every shelf in the UK. Part travelogue, part handbook and part revisionist history, it is a personal and vivid encounter with landscapes, artefacts and people… Beautifully considered and written.

A delightful, effortlessly engaging handbook to the half-lost, half-glimpsed world of Roman Britain... Under Another Sky is an utterly original history, lyrically alive to the haunting presence of the past and our strange and familiar ancestors.

In her gentle, fine prose, [Higgins] suggests convincingly that Britain was thoroughly changed by its two Roman invasions, and that modern Britain is still built on a Roman skeleton.

Charming, intriguing and not-infrequently elegiac... What is most impressive here, rather than either the erudition of the endeavour, is simply the writing.

Charlotte Higgins looks at what Roman Britain meant to those who, from medieval mythographer Geoffrey of Monmouth to W.H. Auden, subsequently thought about it.

Lyrical, haunting look at Roman Britain and its echo in our culture.

Delightful... There is much here to inform and amuse.

Part travelogue, part history, part archaeology, this multi-faceted book seeks out what is familiar – and what is not… This is an enriching and eclectic book.

A thoughtful and entertaining reminder that, long before the Anglo-Saxons, the Romans gave an identity to "a land as ferocious as its people".

It’s a compelling travelogue and Higgins’s passion for discovery shines out.

[She] is witty, rangy, unapologetically goofy and erudite at once.

This book will be of interest to those who want to see and learn more about a significant period in British history.

Higgins wears her considerable erudition lightly and nimbly hops between her knowledge of the classics and the changing perception of the ancients by the British of the past few centuries.

A very personal encounter with Roman Britain… Invites us to see our landscape and history as the Romans first imagined and wrote about them – strange and exotic islands, perched on the edge of the known world.

[Higgins] is as sharp and sensitive an observer of the latest version of Britannia as she is of the earliest one… Each chapter is not just a regional itinerary but also a brilliantly constructed and often exhilaratingly poetic treatment of wider themes.

Records [Higgins’] own travels around the island in search of Roman traces. She includes plenty of anecdotes about the continuing fascination with the Roman past and its penetration of the present.

Higgins produced another remarkable British travelogue… that was at once thoughtful, learned, witty and superbly written.

Filled with passion and personal interest… Higgins walks us around the landscape of this country as it would have been 2,000 years ago, and in doing so she ably captures the spirit of Britain now, Britain then and Britain in between.

Whether at Hadrian’s Wall or in a car park in the City, she [Higgins] shows how Roman traces are woven through British life.

A fascinating look at how we have viewed Rome's presence in these islands and what a debt we still owe to Roman achievements.

Part history, part travelogue, [Higgins] also brings to life the eccentric archaeologists who have tried to recapture that lost civilisation.

A fresh and readable account

Under Another Sky is not only a work of personal history, it is more personal than that... It is conversational, anecdotal, in a way that makes it easy for [Higgins] to slip in quite a lot of information

A delightful, effortlessly engaging handbook to the half-lost, half-glimpsed world of Roman Britain... The result is an utterly original history, lyrically alive to the haunting presence of the past and our strange and familiar ancestors

The beauty of this book is not just in the elegant prose and in the precision with which [Higgins] skewers her myths. It is in the sympathy she shows for the myth-makers.

Evocative...a keen-eyed tour of Britain.

Packed with fascinating and thought-provoking insights.

A captivating travelogue.

A delightfully heady and beautifully written potpourri of a book.

A fascinating look at the debt we owe to Roman achievements

One of those fantastical novels that tells us more about the realities of being human than most realist novels do…the most thrilling and moving experience fiction has to offer this year.

Kate Atkinson's audacious novel plays a virtuoso game with the nature of fiction...her best book to date and a worthy winner of a Costa Prize.