Author:Paul Ginsborg
In this long-awaited book (already a major bestseller in Italy) Ginsborg has created a fascinating, sophisticated and definitive account of how Italy has coped, or failed to cope, with the past two decades. Contemporary Italy strongly mirrors Britain - the countries have roughly the same extent, population size and GNP - and yet they are fantastically different. Ginsborg sees this difference as most fundamentally clear in the role of the family and it is the family which is at the heart of Italian politics and business. Anyone wishing to understand contemporary Italy will find it essential to have this enormously attractive and intelligent book.
A raw...subtle and moving book
—— IndependentPavel's Letters has a particularly haunting quality
—— Times Literary SupplementThis writer has more reason than most to publish a memoir
—— Independent on SundayThis is the deeply piercing story, both personal and political, of a generation. It is hard to imagine it can be surpassed
—— Tilman Krause , Die WeltMonika Maron makes other people's memories her own. She does so without moral outrage, telling the story straightforwardly, unsentimentally, not trying to show off her skill. The greatness of this book lies in this discretion: and Pavel's Letters is a great book
—— Rolf SchneiderThe best political diarist of our times
—— Malcolm Rutherford, Financial TimesReading 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