I was riveted: this is a fascinating social history.

A magnificent book… what a story this is. Endlessly fascinating.

This story of the family behind the Lyons Corner Houses and many other ventures, its rise and its business demise, is endlessly fascinating and hard to put down. I read it all in one sitting, enjoying the colour and grandeur, whilst spitting with fury at how women were kept out of the financial loop. Full of character and characters, this is a tour de force.

Enthralling... fascinating. Nearly half a century on, the Lyons name and Corner Houses have faded, quite forgotten. I dream of them still.

Five stars. History on a scale at once intimate and grand… extremely readable.

‘A satisfying slab of dynastic history... a brisk, accessible account of how one Anglo-Jewish dynasty provided twentieth-century Britain with the materials it required to imagine itself fondly as a land of cosy comfort.

Written with love and imagination… a masterclass in historical empathy.

Ably combines his story with British political and social history... [an] affectionate and colourful family history.

A monumental history of the rise and fall of the Lyons empire… It’s a terrific story and Harding is surely right to describe the Glucksteins and Salmons as “pioneers, democratising luxury and globalising taste”.

Legacy is the biography of the extraordinary family who put the respectable teashop on the corner, the hamburger on the high street, plus the cuppa and Ready Brek on your breakfast table... Thomas Harding is a researcher of the first rank. Nobody quite stirs the soup of historical detail like Harding.

This extraordinarily rich and meticulously researched history of modern Britain is a tour de force. It’s a paean to the immigrant contribution to our nation.

Have a cuppa and enjoy this rich tale of an old favourite... Fascinating… Harding is to be congratulated on this panoramic history of an institution that was as British as Victoria sponge.

An affectionate family history, deftly sandwiched in the rise and fall of empires, two world wars, and two centuries of social and political change.

In this fascinating history of the dynasty that founded and developed J. Lyons & Company, Thomas Harding provides his readers with an illuminating insight into the lives of the founders and their descendants. This is an impressively researched account of one of Britain’s most well known corporations, one which dominated the business scene from the 1920s through to the 1980s. Yet this book is much more than a family saga. Through the lens of the Salmons and Glucksteins, the author provides authoritative accounts of the changing social, economic and political landscape both in Britain and further afield. It is a book to be recommended to all those who are interested in family and business histories and to those who are keen to learn more about the changing face of Britain in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It’s easy to forget now how the British catering empire Lyons and Company (of Corner House fame) dominated British taste and consumer habits for generations. It was the world’s biggest food retailer for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and its genius lay in the ability of one family to anticipate what British consumers wanted before they knew themselves. Thomas Harding has excavated his own family history. It begins with his ancestor Lehmann Gluckstein arriving in the east end of London as a penniless refugee. It culminates in a business empire that dominated every high street in the country, catering to an emerging middle class that had, for the first time, money in its pocket and wanted to dine out affordably. This is the family that democratised consumer spending and defined British taste for generations. It is an astonishing story, beautifully and lovingly told, of powerful family patriarchs, of love stories and business feuds, of family tragedies and commercial triumphs, and of a rags-to-riches journey through risk, jeopardy and fortitude. It is a rich and telling portrait of the immigrant contribution to the character of Britain. And above all it is a compelling tale of family members, conscious of their foreign origins and outsider status, driven more than anything by their loyalty toward and love for each other.

A meticulously-researched rags-to-riches tale

The story of the J Lyons food empire, once ubiquitous, […] and the families who founded and nurtured the business, colourfully told.

Haunting, ironic and poetic in its resonance, this slender volume is a must-read

What makes a good life? What is a good death? The answers to these questions shimmer elusively just below the surface of The Swimmers

Otsuka's slender, stylistically ambitious third novel is a marvel, capturing the hypnotic rhythm of lane-swimming and the devastating decline of memory and connection as dementia takes hold...Heartbreakingly powerful

Three formidable volumes have appeared, admirably edited by Simon Heffer displaying considerable scholarship . . . Channon, for all his misjudgements, ingratiating behaviour and bigotry, is revealing about public and private life, society and sexuality, and honest about himself to a degree that makes these Diaries a weird kind of masterpiece.

Wickedly entertaining . . . scrupulously edited and annotated by Simon Heffer. Genuinely shocking, and still revelatory.

Among the most glittering and enjoyable [diaries] ever written.

The greatest British diarist of the 20th century. A feast of weapons-grade above-stairs gossip.

Through interviews and personal experience, Katja Hoyer brings a new understanding to a country that has now vanished ... A fresh look at what life was like for average people in East Germany ... intriguing and surprising

With Beyond the Wall, Katja Hoyer confirms her place as one of the best young historians writing in English today. On the heels of her superb Blood and Iron, about the rise and fall of the Second Reich, comes another masterpiece, this one about the aftermath of the Third Reich in the East. Well-researched, well-written and profoundly insightful, it explodes many of the lazy Western cliches about East Germany

Utterly brilliant. This gripping account of East Germany sheds new light on what for many of us remains an opaque chapter of history. Authoritative, lively and profoundly human, it is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand post-WW2 Europe

A gripping and nuanced history of the GDR from its beginnings as a separate German socialist state against the wishes of Stalin to its final rapprochement with its Western other against those of Gorbachev. Beyond the Wall is a unique fresco of everyday reality in East Germany. Elegantly moving between diplomatic history, political economy and cultural analysis, this is an essential read to understand not only the life and death of the GDR but also the parts of it that still survive in the emotions of its former citizens.

Superb, totally fascinating and compelling, Katja Hoyer's first full history of East Germany's rise and fall is a work of revelatory original research - and a gripping read with a brilliant cast of characters. Essential reading

A beyond-brilliant new picture of the rise and fall of the East German state. Katja Hoyer gives us not only pin-sharp historical analysis, but an up-close and personal view of both key characters and ordinary citizens whose lives charted some of the darkest hours of the Cold War. If you thought you knew the history of East Germany, think again. An utterly riveting read

A fantastic, sparkling book, filled with insights not only about East Germany but about the Cold War, Europe and the forging of the 20th and 21st centuries

The joke has it that the duty of the last East German to escape from the country was to turn off the lights. In Beyond the Wall Katja Hoyer turns the light back on and gives us the best kind of history: frank, vivid, nuanced and filled with interesting people

A refreshing and eye-opening book on a country that is routinely reduced to cartoonish cliché. Beyond the Wall is a tribute to the ordinary East Germans who built themselves a society that - for a time - worked for them, a society carved out of a state founded in the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism

A colourful and often revelatory re-appraisal of one of modern history's most fascinating political curiosities. Katja Hoyer skilfully weaves diverse political and private lives together, from the communist elite to ordinary East Germans

Katja Hoyer is becoming the authoritative voice in the English speaking world for all things German. Thanks to her, German history has the prominence in the Anglosphere it certainly deserves.

Katja Hoyer brilliantly shows that the history of East Germany was a significant chapter of German history, not just a footnote to it or a copy of the Soviet Union. To understand Germany today we have to grapple with the history and legacy of its all but dismissed East

Katja Hoyer's return to discover what happened to her homeland - the old East Germany - is an excellent counterpoint to Stasiland by Anna Funder

Beguiling and beautifully written, this is the work of an author with a bright future

Coruscating originality, emotional potency, astonishing artistic vim... This signals the arrival of a truly breathtaking literary voice... A scintillating tour de force

Fierce and accomplished, Assembly interrogates the high cost of surviving in a system designed to exclude you

I was blown away by Assembly, an astonishing book that forces us to see what's underpinning absolutely everything

Coiled and charged, a small shockwave... Sometimes you come across a short novel of such compressed intensity that you wonder why anyone would bother reading longer narratives... [Assembly] casts a huge shadow

A masterwork . . . it contains centuries of wisdom, aesthetic experimentation and history. Brown handles her debut with a surgeon's control and a musician's sensitivity to sound

An extraordinary book, and a compelling read that had me not only gripped but immediately determined to listen again... Highly recommended

'As utterly, urgently brilliant as everyone has said. A needle driven directly into the sclerotic heart of contemporary Britain. Beautiful proof that you don't need to write a long book, just a good book'

Every line of this electrifying debut novel pulses with canny social critique

Devastatingly eloquent, bold, poignant

An achievement that will leave you wondering just how it's possible that this is only the author's very first work... Brown packs so much commentary and insight inside of every single sentence... Original and startling all at once. After reading Assembly, I cannot wait to see what Natasha Brown does next

[Brown's] work is like that of an excellent photographer - you feel like you are finally seeing the world sharply and without the common filters. That is hypnotising

A brilliantly compressed, existentially daring study of a high-flying Black woman negotiating the British establishment