This book is alive, a human soul lives in it, along with the unfolding ghastliness of the last century, which passed an inch away from Sebastian's nose. His prose is like something Chekov might have written - the same modesty, candour, and subtleness of observation. Here is a life, and an absurd death, whose spell will last a long time

This humane masterpiece deserves to be ranked alongside the diaries of Victor Klemperer for its quiet, and indeed humorous, insights into the nature of wickedness

A brilliantly haunting account of the rise of anit-Semitism and Fascism. At times it gives so intimate a feeling of fear that it is painful to read

Moving, perceptive and sharply observed...the journal is a valuable addition not just to the canon of wartime and holocaust literature, but to that of all humanity

Fascinating… Tinniswood’s main aim here is not, in the end, to prove an abstract argument, but to tell some very good stories – something he does extremely well, with a command of atmospheric detail and a fund of human sympathy.

Globalisation comes to mind when reading The Rainborowes.

Tinniswood’s exceptional account succeeds in bringing the idealistic, God-fearing and often violent Rainborowes to life, while at the same time exploring the perils involved in trying to build a new state in two very different but intimately connected societies.

A fascinating truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story.

A masterful history of Olde and New England during the turbulent years of the Civil War.

So impressive… Tinniswood writes in a fluent, engaging style, and has an impressive ability to recount a telling detail that simultaneously provides a larger historical perspective. The Rainborowes will appeal to a broad range of readers.

[Tinniswood] adopts many techniques of a historical novelist to give a vivid urgency to portraits of events and a richness and colour to descriptions of places... The book has a commendable honesty as well as high literary quality.

Atmospheric

This is a gripping account of an extraordinary period

Like the author's biography of Bruce Chatwin, this is, beneath the obvious drama, a subtle, masterfully written work

This absorbing book has many of the excitements of a thriller

Priscilla's is a remarkable story, teased out with great skill by her nephew, himself one of the best English novelists of our time

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

Fascinating and sobering

[A] fascinating and lively history

Very complex – but you will grasp it

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