Kilvert has touched and delighted and (mildly shocked) readers of his diaries ever since they were first published. New readers are in for a treat

One of the most enchanting portraits of English rural life ever written...Kilvert's lyrical nature writing is recognised for its Wordsworthian sensibility

One of the best books in English

Funny, lyrical, witty and wise, Robert Kilvert’s diaries are a treasure-house of vital fieldwork and social observation. Parochial is the best sense, he joyed in the natural wonders of his parish, recording the trials and splendours of his day-to-day. As such, the diary is a marvel of observance; a hybrid hymn to a world now lost and a vibrant counterpoint to fellow poet-cleric, Gerard Manley Hopkins

The best picture of quiet vicarage life in Victorian England that has yet been given to us

Each page, each entry is luxurious and at the end of reading these nearly 500 pages, the book is already battered with folded corners marking passages that are so warming or funny or beautiful that I want to read them again. Instead of being shelved with the nature writers, Robert Kilvert now sits tightly on my poetry shelf near to John Clare and Edward Thomas where he belongs and where he is available to be dipped into over and over again. It is beautiful.

Diarist, churchman, nature lover, and neighbour, Francis Kilvert inhabited a time and a place unlike any other. From the pages of his carefully crafted diaries emerges a world of shepherds and parlour maids, aristocrats and hermits. A snapshot of rural Britain at the height of the Victorian period, acutely observed and lovingly told.

When we read Kilvert’s Diary today, we can imagine ourselves restored to a vanished Arcadia, to a world of beauty and peace, where only the threshing machine and steam engine puncture the countryside’s silence, to a society where the ties of community are still interdependent and strong… The diary is the best example I know of a literary panacea. Its spirit is imbued with the joy that Kilvert found in his surroundings, a feeling of wonder

[A] stirring and intelligent second book... Oh Happy Day brings a veritable mine of information. Whether she's detailing the rise of the Chartists, the daily grind of the stockinger families, the horrors of the prison hulks, or ruminating on Britain's obsession with flagellation, Callil certainly knows her stuff.

Thought-provoking.

[A] poignant mixture of the personal and the political... a stirring, opinionated account.

Judith Herrin's Ravenna is an erudite but wonderfully readable over-view of the life of a city that is often ignored, forgotten or misplaced.

Herrin is a superb historian who tells us that she's tethered to the tangible evidence of primary sources. Praise the Lord, I thought. Someone's still doing history the right way.

A sweeping and engrossing history ... an accessible narrative that brings to life the men and women who created the city during this period and who fashioned its hybrid Christian culture of Latin, Greek and Gothic elements. The narrative is periodically elevated by discussions of the city's most famous attractions and its glorious churches, brilliantly illustrated in the book's 62 color plates. It is also enlivened by recurring digressions on daily life in the city at each phase in its history.

a fascinating dive into Late Roman/Byzantine history, rich with improbable but true stories

Judith Herrin, a Professor at King's College London, is already Britain's best-known living Byzantinologist. Learned and witty, her books and articles have brought her subject out of shadow into a daylight where the dealings of emperors, exarchs and bishops become comprehensible, often lively, often concerned with issues acute in our own times ... She is original in wider ways, too: not only in her painstaking reconstruction of social and economic life in Ravenna from often fragmentary documents, but in her broad take on the whole period from about the fourth to the ninth century ... the gorgeous, plentiful illustrations help the reader to grasp the sheer scale of Herrin's triumphant history. This book is a master-work of scholarship and sharp intelligence.

a sumptuously produced and beautifully written account of how the city on the Po was the beleaguered last capital of the Roman Empire but managed to grow into the centre of Byzantine power in Italy and the key pivot between East and West at the dawn of the early modern period. This is a fascinating read and a fabulous book, from the gold sheen of its cover to the vibrant colours of the magnificent illustrations.

Andrew Roberts superb revisionist biography George III ... Incapable of writing a dull sentence, Roberts deploys deep scholarship and impeccable analysis to exonerate the 'Farmer' King of both stupidity and tyranny.

Andrew Roberts's George III is a wonderful revisionist portrayal of the monarch who presided over the high point of architecture and the loss of America. Obviously meticulously, majestically done - but also a total joy to read.

Judith Herrin's Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe crowns the long career of a deeply learned historian ... a wonderful book, beautifully written and beautifully illustrated.

the city was "the melting pot of Europe" ... the hinge between the old Roman empire, the refounded Rome of Byzantium and the second new Rome of Charlemagne, who plundered its monuments for his capital at Aachen. Herrin's book ... is a welcome addition to a golden era of scholarship devoted to late antiquity and the early Middle Ages in Europe

Judith Herrin's Ravenna aims to set the mosaics, the buildings they ennoble and the urban landscape they inhabit back within a meaningful historical context. It's a worthy project that surprisingly has not really been attempted before ... it takes a scholar of Herrin's brilliance to bring events to life within a meaningful evocation of a time and a place. That skill, and a wonderfully pellucid prose style, ensures that even readers frustrated by the archaic narrative will find a great deal to admire and indeed learn from.

An ambitious, rewarding and detailed history of the city of Ravenna, spanning the period from its designation as imperial capital in the early fifth century to its Carolingian spoliations in the ninth. ... This book is a comprehensive, detailed and glittering history of the city within its Mediterranean context. It will attract the casual reader while also carrying sophisticated new arguments that will appeal to specialists.

Judith Herrin tells its fascinating history and presents a parade of forceful and creative characters with great insight and a wonderfully light touch, in a book as beautifully produced as it is profoundly researched.

Reviews for Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire

Others in recent years have made worthy efforts to interest us in the Byzantine achievement, but none has made it live in quite the way that Herrin does ... Free from portentousness and pretentiousness, she doesn't insist on her subject's importance or relevance: the freshness and enthusiasm of her book is its real point. Not just an important work of scholarship but a delight to read, this study works a minor miracle in raising Byzantium, Lazarus-like, from its dusty grave.

She presents Byzantium as a vibrant, dynamic, cosmopolitan reality which somehow escaped the constraints of its official ideology

A collection of fascinating, well-researched and vividly told biographies of women who made tangible contributions to the lives we live now… Lewis’ book is challenging, punchily written and refreshing in equal measure, and a joy to read.

A lesson modern progressives would be remiss to ignore.

Any one of these women could fill a book on her own, but Lewis deftly threads their lives together into an irresistibly rumbustious account of this movement; sometimes affecting, sometimes very funny (the footnotes are a sass-filled joy) and sometimes shocking.

[Difficult Women] is meticulously researched and intelligently argued whilst also being extremely readable. Unusually for a non-fiction book, it is a page-turner. Lewis' style is playful and engaging, and after each chapter you find yourself turning the page asking eagerly "but what happened next?”… Interspersed with personal anecdotes and often funny footnote asides, she deals with the serious alongside the light-hearted in a way which demonstrates her talent as a writer, researcher and journalist

This history of feminism eschews feelgood, empowering clichés and goes in search of the 'difficult women' who shaped the fight for gender equality.

Engaging and witty, this history of feminist fights will keep you gripped to the last page.

This often hilariously funny book taught me about the women who fought for my freedoms. Unlike in so many accounts, these women are not canonised but written as they are, imperfect.

Helen Lewis is one of the very few journalists whose every word I will read.