Brilliantly entertaining… Richly detailed, impeccably researched… Written with a light touch and full of human sympathy… A landmark royal biography

This is not only the best biography of King Edward VII; it’s also the best book about royalty ever published… Vivid, detailed and original

Paints the story of Edward VII and his long, hectic life as Prince of Wales in vivid colours: no scandal is left unturned, and yet the depth and authenticity of the research make it clear that this is a serious, even magesterial work

Hugely entertaining from first page to last... It is also scholarly and revealing

A model of how royal biographies should be written... impeccably researched, with much new material, balanced, sensible, disrespectful without being offensive, funny, and a vivid portrait of one of Britain’s most underrated and understudied monarchs

Ridley has written a marvellous biography. Her book is racy and pacy, filled with delicious descriptions of grand Edwardian shooting parties, cutting-edge fashion and, of course, a string of beautiful society women. But she is never trivial, and nor is her Bertie

A fascinating and compulsively entertaining biography... Ridley’s research is woven through the book, often with considerable humour, illuminating not only the life of a king, but those of his family, friends and lovers... A vibrantly atmospheric portrait

Profoundly learned and a cracking good read

Richly colourful and wittily observed

Wendy Lower's book interweaves the experiences of 13 ordinary women who went to work in the East... for some of these women, violence and murder became part of a rich brew of new-found power... Lower argues, they collectively show the role of women in the Holocaust has been underplayed; obscured by their later stereotypes as heroic 'rubble women' clearing up the mess of Germany's past, victims of Red Army rapists, or flirtatious dolls who entertaned American GIs

The Nazi regime is synonymous with men. The horrors of the Holocaust were, in the main, perpetrated by males. But there were tens of thousands of German women who took part in the Nazis' monstrous and murderous activities on the Eastern Front. The stories are told in Wendy Lower's new book

builds a picture of a morally lost generation of young women, born into a defeated, post-WW1 Germany, and swept up in the fervour of the Nazi movement

Lower shifts away from the narrow focus on the few thousand female concentration camp guards who have been at the center of previous studies of female culpability in Nazi crimes and identifies the cluster of professions—nurses, social workers, teachers, office workers—that in addition to family connections brought nearly one-half million women to the German East and into close proximity with pervasive Nazi atrocities. Through the lives of carefully researched individuals, she captures a spectrum of career trajectories and behavior. This is a book that artfully combines the study of gender with the illumination of individual experience.

Hitler’s Furies is a long overdue and superb addition to the history of the Holocaust. The role of women perpetrators during the Final Solution has been too much glossed over. Wendy Lower’s book provides an important and stunning corrective. It is a significant addition to our understanding of the role of ordinary Germans in the Reich’s genocide.

Hitler's Furies is the first book to follow the biographical trajectories of individual women whose youthful exuberance, loyalty to the Führer, ambition, and racism took them to the deadliest sites in German-occupied Europe. Drawing on immensely rich source material, Wendy Lower integrates women perpetrators and accomplices into the social history of the Third Reich, and illuminates them indelibly as a part of post-war East and West German memory that has been, until this book, unmined

Stomach-churning

Compelling... Lower's careful research proves that the capacity for indifferent cruelty is not reserved for men – it exists in all of us

Lower’s impressive analysis is a painful but transfixing read

A consistently brilliant survey… The conception of 1913 can thus be described as a smart idea. Its consummation is, frankly, astonishing… A world that was about to embrace death is brought to life with wit, sharpness and occasional delicacy

This ambitious panorama of a world on the brink throws up comparisons that are constantly provocative and fascinating

1913 has narrative verve and insight

What emerges is a rich portrait and an important set of ideas

[Emmerson] takes the reader on a fascinating trip to the brash, bustling cities of North America, before heading off to places as diverse as Buenos Aires and Bombay

Magnificent

[Emmerson’s] entertaining tour d’horizon is both witty and charming.

A wonderful portrayal of a world before it was cataclysmically changed, a world very different from ours but with some frightening similarities

Brings the fantasies, anxieties and passions of city-dwellers immediately prior to the First World War eloquently to life

Emmerson provides a real sense of 1913 by combining details of individual lives with sweeping international trends: one of the great pleasures of this book is to see parallels between then and now

Unique... A high-definition snapshot of the world as it stood a century ago

A series of vivid vignettes... Offers fascinating glimpses of everyday life

A wonderful portrayal of a world before it was cataclysmically changed by war

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