A remarkable book ... Essential reading for the centenary of the first world war

One of the most candid self-portraits of a poet, warts and all, ever painted

We see the dark heart of the book even more clearly, and hear it beating even more loudly, in this original edition than we do in the comparatively careful and considered terms of the later one

Lloyd's brisk and thoroughly engrossing book leaves no doubt that the Germans were beaten fair and square where it really mattered - on the battlefield

There is a grim fascination to the endgame, as the hopes still nursed by the Germans were finally extinguished and the Allies won a victory that in seemed inevitable in retrospect

Gives the reader an insight into the raw emotions of the period and lends immediacy to the more sober narrative

Compelling, very readable

As Nick Lloyd's account of the great Allied counter-offensives of summer 1918 convincingly shows, the Allies had learned (if painfully slowly) how to win battles . . . the German army was absolutely, totally defeated in the field

Hundred Days is a bracing re-dramatization of the horrors that were most fresh in the minds of all concerned when those days were over

Very well-researched and well-written. Reminds us just how important this crushing endgame was

Conveys the epic sweep of events, as the allied troops relentlessly pushed the German divisions back, with staggering losses . . . Lloyd also gives the worm's eye-view of what it was like for the men on the ground. He is expert at bringing to life, in a few lines, the characters of the top brass

Larson . . . writes non-fiction books that read like novels, real page-turners. This one is no exception . . . thoroughly engrossing

A fascinating travelogue taking the reader from Joseph Conrad’s Congo to the Fukushima Nuclear Plant disaster of 2011, via New Mexico… a learned and compelling history of man trying to control the elements. It’s also a clarion call to arms to save ourselves and the planet

When he wrote this book, Patrick Marnham was compared to Bruce Chatwin, and I can see why

As simultaneously delicate and hard-edged as his poetry.

Turner’s eloquent rendering illuminates both the shared space and the painful divide between poet and soldier, mission and memory, war and peace.

The marriage of [Aubrey’s] words and Scurr’s is so smoothly achieved that I have no idea where one leaves off and the other intervenes

Scurr’s imaginative feat of retrieval has produced a perfect book for dipping into when you want a taste of what it was like to be alive in the 17th century

It is a testament to [Scurr’s] skill that you quickly stop thinking about technique and instead slip happily into the company of the character she has created. The wealth of research and the seams between imagination and reality disappear from view. This is truly selfless biography

A game-changer in the world of biography

A delightful read about the ebb and flow of thoughts in one extraordinary man’s mind

Drawing on [Aubrey’s] manuscripts and letters, [Ruth Scurr] has fashioned, as chronologically as possible, an autobiography in the form of the diary that Aubrey never wrote. It fits him perfectly… Ms Scurr has done him proud

Aubrey was a delightful, self-deprecating man ... A conventional biography of Aubrey could easily have become a portrait of the time through which he had lived, allowing the man himself to be overshadowed ... Instead, Ruth Scurr has invented the diary Aubrey might have written, incorporating his own chaotic, sometimes scrappy literary remains to form a continuous narrative. ... lucky him to have been accorded a biography as whimsical as his own self

Scurr’s book illuminates and poignantly captures the voice of a man more often a “ghostly record keeper” in his own writing

John Aubrey brilliantly reconfigures the art of biography

Bold and imaginative recreation of the diary of the 17th-century antiquary. It shows how close a scrupulous and unselfregarding biographer can come to the savour of a life

A genuinely remarkable work of biographical innovation.

I’d like to reread Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey every Christmas for at least the next five years: I love being between its humane pages, which celebrate both scholarly companionship and deep feeling for the past

Ruth Scurr’s innovative take on biography has an immediacy that brings the 17th century alive

Anyone who has not read Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey can have a splendid time reading it this summer. Scurr has invented an autobiography the great biographer never wrote, using his notes, letters, observations – and the result is gripping

A triumph, capturing the landscape and the history of the time, and Aubrey’s cadence.

A brilliantly readable portrait in diary form. Idiosyncratic, playful and intensely curious, it is the life story Aubrey himself might have written.

Scurr knows her subject inside out.

The diligent Scurr has evidence to support everything… Learning about him is to learn more about his world than his modest personality, but Scurr helps us feel his pain at the iconoclasm and destruction wrought by the Puritans without resorting to overwrought language.

Acclaimed and ingeniously conceived semi-fictionalised autobiography… Scurr’s greatest achievement is to bring both Aubrey and his world alive in detail that feels simultaneously otherworldly and a mirror of our own age… It’s hard to think of a biographical work in recent years that has been so bold and so wholly successful.