‘The best interpreter of Italian ways in Italy’

‘Parks is more than just an effortless raconteur: he offers detailed cultural observation, witty yet eagle-eyed, of what makes Italians so Italian’

‘All Italy is here, its history, its character, its flaws’

Refreshingly brilliant... Parks skilfully shows how the rules and the maneuverings within Italian university life mirrors those at work in Italian society... illuminating and entertaining. When Parks takes his reader behind the scenes and into a murky world of favouritism and nepotism, back-scratching and back-stabbing, collusion and exclusion, his narrative cracks up a gear and becomes gripping

A satisfyingly truthful, entertaining and provocative comedy that lays bare Italy's difference, as a nation and as a joyful, warm, ever changeable people, tractable by temperament, immovably stubborn in its traditions

Few foreigners have written more or better about contemporary Italy than Park, and his familiarity with all things Italian makes for agreeable reading... Often humorous, it is also...a chilling fable about a country that still lives by habits and expectations laid down many decades ago

This book is a radical, necessary indictment of the racist structures that produced the current anti-Black world order. Historically rigorous and deeply researched, Kehinde Andrews writes with lucidity about the global tactics of Western imperialism, centuries ago and at present. His clear-eyed analysis insists upon the revolutionary acts of freedom we will need to break out of these systems of violence

Professor Andrews never misses. And this is a compelling account of European Empires and the cost of their plunder

Uncompromising and intelligent. Kehinde is taking the conversation deeper and further - exactly where it needs to go.

Destined to serve as a kind of primary text for a new generation of students of antiracism looking to get to grips with the violence of our imperial inheritance

Open and engaging. . . Obama writes with candour about the good times and bad

Of course, Becoming is Michelle Obama's story, of how she moved from a girl on the South Side of Chicago to becoming one of the most powerful women in the world. But in the final pages of the book, Obama writes, "It's all a process, steps along a path. Becoming requires equal parts patience and rigor." Here, Obama is pushing us to reckon with our own becomings - to realise our own story and to have the power to tell it

She's a woman we've all fallen in love with because she radiates joy and wisdom, and Becoming encapsulates this perfectly. It's also deeply honest - reading it makes you feel as though she's your close friend opening up to you

[A] polished pearl of a memoir

Obama writes with a refreshing candor

This beautifully written memoir... Twenty-five years ago she fell in love with a driven idealist, a man determined not to accept the world as it was. She feared his forceful intellect and ambition might swallow hers; instead, she found her voice

Becoming serenely balances gravity and grace, uplift and anecdote.... Becoming is frequently funny, sometimes indignant or enraged, and when Michelle describes her father's early death from multiple sclerosis it turns rawly emotional

This is a vivid and interesting account and all of that is to her credit. I certainly thought better of her by the end: she has put her heart into this

This is undeniably a political book, both a fierce critique of Donald Trump's administration's politics of hatred and a powerful remind of a better, more compassionate America

Candid, engaging. . . To read her reflections is to recall and hope for a better America. Mrs Obama pulls back the curtains around their lives in a way she could not while Mr Obama was in office. Besides her lovely turn of phrase, she is a gifted and empathetic observer

Deeply moving. . . Becoming is fundamentally about how to be a person in the world, how to live a purposeful life, and how to use the chances you have been given

Her wonderful candid and affecting autobiography, Becoming. . . brims over with such emotional truthfulness. . .what a tale. With its generosity of spirit, self-knowledge and hope, it is the perfected antidote to the man who now lives in the White House. A plangent, defiant, honest and uplifting book

What a memoir. What a woman.

This brilliantly written and emotionally authentic memoir fills in some important gaps...not just a fascinating read but a genuinely moving one too

I did enjoy the Chips Channon diaries, the new first volume. My most pleasurable reading experiences are diaries and letters. History unfiltered, not refracted through a historian's imagination. The Chips Channon diaries bring alive a section of society in the 20s and 30s with great vividness.

Chips Channon wrote witheringly about everyone-except Hitler. But his diaries still make for strangely addictive reading . . . [Simon Heffer] has done a superb job.

These unabridged, risqué, waspish, snobbish, social-climbing diaries have been worth the wait . . . All credit to Simon Heffer for his masterly editing and annotation.

The diaries are indeed indispensable for anyone seriously interested in the political and social history of interwar Britain.

Brilliantly and painstakingly edited by Simon Heffer. The enlarged Channon diaries have rightly attracted a great deal of attention . . . they are more detailed and more frank, and maybe more honest, about the opinions and sexual escapades of some of the leading figures in British politics and high society in the years between the world wars.

It sounds perverse to say that Channon's snobberies and prejudices make the diaries, but the unabashed exposure of these failings gives you an oddly impressive picture of a person in the setting of his time - the picture, I mean, is absorbing, whatever the subject's shortcomings. And though this colossal self-portrait describes much that's misguided, vain, and idiotic, it prompts you too to imagine those perishable qualities that history and biography so often fail to capture: the charm, generosity, personal magnetism, and brilliance of conversation that must have explained and sustained Chips's progress, the "success after success" that the diaries record and celebrate.

One of the most talked about books of this year . . . compelling and significant.

Channon's jaw-dropping account, lovingly curated by the historian and former Mail writer Simon Heffer, is compelling.

Delicious, dangerous and utterly compulsive.

Dripping with bons mots, anecdote and scandal, [these] are addictive, even if they elicit repulsion as well as delight.

A momentous publishing event. Candid, unabashed, vivid and manifold. They will be prized for their powerful evocation of social milieux . . . Heffer's footnotes are always informative, just and accurate, often amusing, and can seldom be faulted.

An unadulterated masterpiece . . . A larder of quotable treats.

Scintillating wit, memorable descriptions and compelling gossip. Heffer has done a magnificent job. Riveting.

Whatever you think of him Channon ranks among the great diarists. He is at turns brilliant, witty, trivial and spiteful, with observations about some figures whose names have stood the test of time. Simon Heffer has done an excellent job as editor and his copious footnotes are often as entertaining as the diaries.

An inspired diarist. After devouring this volume readers will be salivating for the next.