An epic tale of human folly and endeavour, beautifully told and researched

Matthew Parker has picked a fascinating subject and written a book worthy of it ... It is peopled with a host of characters, some heroic, others corrupt, almost all out of the ordinary. There isn't a dull page

Parker's epic story, from the 18th century to the present day, is awesome

Parker has written the Panama story for a new generation. He quotes extensively from letters and diaries of ordinary workers writing home to their families. And it is their heartfelt views on the conditions in which they lived and worked that really bring this book to life

Parker's great forte in Panama Fever is to bring this complex story to life through a succession of vivid characters

Parker guides readers through the complicated story with a sure sense of both the larger narrative and the telling detail

Excellent... the story is an epic one, and Parker has brilliantly done justice to every aspect of a complex episode

The essence of Parker's rather remarkable achievement in this altogether entertaining history is to show just how much more than an engineering triumph the construction of the canal really was... This is exemplary history, vigorously told with a respect for complexity that enriches rather than obscures the pleasure of a great story

The extraordinary story of western man's compulsion to wrestle with nature in the central American swamps and rainforests

Matthew Parker intertwines the various strands of the story - personal and national, political and financial, geographical and technological - with finesse ... Best of all, his prose somehow manages to infect the reader with the Panama fever itself. It is no mean achievement

Today other armies of impoverished workmen build Dubai, Shanghai or the Three Gorges Dam with barely a murmur of the real price paid by them and by nature. It is a shame. We need writers capable of depicting these epic projects with the same skill Parker brings to portraying the 19th century's great engineering dream

Impresses with its scholarship and literary craft

Truly, he has written London’s biography. I began rereading it as soon as I finished, and I urge you to read it as soon as possible, so that you can begin rereading it as well

A fat and filling feast: pretty much everything of interest about the capital is crammed into the eight-hundred pages. One cannot but marvel at Ackroyd’s erudition, his energy in marshalling minutiae, his ear for quotation, his flair for dazzling juxtapositions, his vibrant imagination and sheer exuberance

An erudite labour of love, a fan-letter to a fabulous city, and a book one suspects Ackroyd was destined to write. It illuminates the English character, and is darkly humorous in its detail, tumbling through centuries crowded with legendary events and eccentric observations, as exuberant, energetic and alarming as the city itself

A masterpiece

Spellbinding

A sharp, beautifully written but above all truthful account of London…This is the kind of writing that gives intellectuals a good name