Gripping… Stirring witchcraft, politics and sexual perversity into the cauldron of a superstitious age, Tracy Borman seasons her brew with suggestions of poisoning and the black arts.

Tracy Borman has written a thorough and beautifully researched social history of the early 1600s, taking in everything from folk medicine to James I’s sex life.

Spellbinding

Tracy Borman has written a superb history of the witchcraze in early modern Europe focusing around this one case. Her book is enthralling and accurate… In many respects this is a triumph of popular historical writing.

A tantalising history... A panoramic survey of the witch craze that swept through Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Moving and spirited.

Excellent.

Borman provides a fascinating account of the circumstances surrounding the case.

This is an entertaining piece of research that brings back to life three women who had the misfortune to live during a period that was terrified of the unknown and sought to tame that fear by turning it into a handful of dust.

As a work on the horrific treatment of witches throughout history, in particular the 16th and 17th centuries, it is shocking and illuminating.

Fascinating history of witchcraft in England… An immensely readable and never less than gripping account of a society in flux and the women who suffered to enable its stability.

Absorbing.

This is history at its most disturbing, and yet also most interesting.

Tracy Borman tells this strange, compelling and ultimately inconclusive story.

Borman’s enthusiasm and diligence keeps the history in place, while the central story, and the mysteries, lies and obfuscations that surround it, add a flavour of the detective novel.

The interest here lies in the accurate and plausible portrait of a whole society, from top to bottom… The details are fascinating

The avowed aim of this fascinating history of neighbours is to explore the delicate balance between people’s determination to protect their privacy and their simultaneous wish to cultivate contact with those who live close by

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.