This scholarly book shows how widespread fascism was before and in tandem with Mosley's New Party, the British Union of Fascists, half the Conservative Party and many royals

Pugh is one of the most well-respected, diligent and honest scholars working in British history today. This book deserves to be read

The link between a distinct wing of Conservatism and the Italian form of fascism is substantiated in this outstandingly revelatory book

Fascism did not just come from the East-End toughs. It also came from women, the countryside and from parts of the industrial North. Pugh explores these various strands with a keen eye for detail and a lively sense of the absurd

Superb

This book demonstrates for the first time the true spread and depth of fascist beliefs- and the extent to which they were distinctly British

Crisp and enjoyable

The book is tremendous . . . a fascinating concept and Shimmin makes the most of it . . . A Kill in the Morning is a thriller and thrills is what you get . . . the action is crisp, well-written, and intense

A great mix of pure pulp entertainment. Shimmin has combined a slightly campy Bond style hero with a pulp ‘Commando’ comic style and a twist that you won’t see coming . . . great fun

Genius . . . an exciting rollercoaster of a novel . . . successfully weaves classic spy adventure fiction with superbly researched main characters and wonderful attention to historical detail . . . my favourite book of the year

[A] fine scientific history, full of interesting nuggets.

[a] thrilling book…an absorbing, even exciting yarn.

Sweeping historical epic about a daring young woman forced to make a hard choice in Stalinist Russia

Excellent... the historical detail is strong. The characterisation is superb, with Sashenka being especially well drawn. With her unwanted beauty and charisma, her gentle nobility that transcends class or wealth and her earnest ideals which eventually cost her so much. Sashenka commands out total sympathy, and when she is forced apart from her children, the sadness is profound and hard to dispel. A powerful novel... with a heroine who lingers in the mind when the story is finished

Sashenka is grand in scale, rich in historical research, and yet never loses the flow of an addictive, racy, well-wrought plot. It combines a moving, satisfyingly just-neat-enough finale with a warning - that history has an awful habit of repeating itself

An epic novel... The suspense lasts until the final pages. There is no let-up. At the end of the book, you really feel that even though Sashenka is a fictional character, she has become one of the thousands of real people who haunt the Moscow archives that Montefiore knows so well

Nicholas Shakespeare has employed all his superb gifts as a writer to tell the picaresque tale of his aunt in wartime occupied France. Priscilla is a femme fatale worthy of fiction, and the author traces her tangled, troubled, romantic and often tragically unromantic experiences through one of the most dreadful periods of 20th century history

A thrilling story… an intimate family memoir, a story of survival and a quest for biographical truth

[An] extraordinary true story of the author's aunt. A life of dark secrets, glamour, adventure and adversity during wartime.

A tantalisingly original perspective of the Second World War…Shakespeare shines a moving, intriguing light on the moral quandaries faced by ordinary civilians

Priscilla is an unusual book, part biography, part family memoir, part detective story, but it reads like a novel and I found it impossible to put down. As an evocation of the period and the moral hypocrisy of the times, it could hardly be bettered (4 stars, Book of the Week)

The novelist and biographer relates the extraordinary wartime derring-doings of his glamorous aunt, whose hidden past he discovered when he stumbled across a box of her papers. Glamorous and morally ambiguous, she married a French aristocrat, escaped from a PoW camp and at the liberation of Paris, was having a relationship with a mysterious man called “Otto”. Woven into her life story is a wealth of detail about life in Occupied France. Obvious appeal for fans of Agent Zigzag, Antony Beevor and Sebastian Faulks but also Suite Française. I was enthralled by it

Assiduous archival research is blended with the flair and craft of an acclaimed novelist

A tender account of one woman's unpredictable, secretive and self-scarring wartime experiences... [Shakespeare is] a gifted novelist and biographer

An excellently researched, beautifully written and unflinching memoir

Gripping

The incredible story of the author's aunt, a young English woman in France during the Nazi occupation

Nicholas's research provides Priscilla with a full identity as a young, vulnerable woman whose heroism lay in being true to herself in terrifying times

As both a biographer and novelist, [Shakespeare] is admirably placed to tell such a curious but utterly compelling story

A story as haunting and improbable as any of the fictions of Modiano... Gripping

This is both a family memoir and meticulously researched historical account of the dangerous world of Nazi-occupied France... Shakespeare perfectly captures the perilous and precarious atmosphere, and provides insight into the complexity of women's lives at that time

A captivating travelogue.

A delightfully heady and beautifully written potpourri of a book.

A fascinating look at the debt we owe to Roman achievements

A fascination exploration

Highly readable but profoundly researched, The Trigger represents a bold exception to the deluge of First World War books devoted to mud, blood and poetry

a fascinating original portrait of a man and his country