Author:Roy Porter
For generations the traditional focus for those wishing to understand the roots of the modern world has been France on the eve of the Revolution. Porter certainly acknowledges France's importance, but here makes an overwhelming case for consideringBritain the true home of modernity - a country driven by an exuberance, diversity and power of invention comparable only to twentieth-century America. Porter immerses the reader in a society which, recovering from the horrors of the Civil War and decisively reinvigorated by the revolution of 1688, had emerged as something new and extraordinary - a society unlike any other in the world.
Excellent mightily researched and readable. Absorbing through so many pages
—— ScotsmanSplendidly painstaking and enormously readable
—— Arthur Marshall , New StatesmanWith a keen sense of precedence and an admirable grasp of the British peerage system, he darts from duke to duke... racing up and down the genealogies
—— The EconomistMcLynn is an astonishingly prolific historian. His books are always elegantly written, highly opinionated and enormously enjoyable
—— Sunday TimesHas anybody done more – done as much – as Frank McLynn in writing intelligent, combative, thoroughly researched and thoroughly readable history?
—— IndependentThis new biography is of profound importance and will ... quickly establish itself as the standard work on Hitler and his regime
—— Thomas Childers , Boston GlobeReading A. N. Wilson's The Victorians provides ongoing pleasure in handsomely researched, beautifully written prose about an age which we have come to think disparagingly. We thought wrong
—— Clement Freud , Mail on SundayThe Victorians was one of the books that gave me greatest pleasure during the past year... A brilliant evocation of an age
—— Ian McIntyre , The TimesRarely have author and subject been found in such deep and contented harmony... Wilson's tour de force
—— Robert McCrum , ObserverWilson's panoramic survey is the best attempt so far to describe and explain what was happening in that fascinating time
—— Literary ReviewThe Victorians finds Wilson writing at the height of his powers
—— The IndependentI can't recall a history book furnishing so many laughs en route ... The Victorians is a work of scholarship, a labour of love, a persusasive polemic
—— John Sutherland , Mail on Sunday