As much a social history as the story of the bridge, this entertaining book is packed with facts but its light, sprightly tone makes bricks and mortar a source of human interest.

[Elborough] is a charming, wry companion, who wears his considerable learning lightly.

Wonderfully detailed… A fitting testament to the folly and wonder of human endeavour.

Elborough’s book is a fascinating mix of social and architectural history, travelogue and pop culture, but it is his ability to bring to life the disparate and often eccentric characters involved in the story that stands out.

An entertaining cultural historian of the Bill Bryson school…very interesting, and crammed with historical trivia.

A style perfectly poised between the flourishes of fiction and simple matters of fact… On the evidence of London Bridge in America, it would probably be justifiable now to proclaim Elborough one of Britain’s finest pop cultural historians.

Travis Elborough tells this glorious story with warmth and humour and a great wide-open spirit… Delightful.

Civil engineering has never been so much fun.

Elborough tells this whole strange story well, populating it with a cast of oddballs, cheats and chancers.

The book is an elegant structure, its joins hidden.

A fun, light-hearted read.

A splendid pontine read.

A delightful and informative romp.

As a chronicle of social and architectural history, this is an informative and fun read

Absorbing… Chang has a novelist’s eye for small detail… Chang weaves a suspenseful, anecdote-laden tale.

One of those rare non-fiction books that reads like a novel without compromising the quality of research – we couldn’t put it down

One of the most important authors of our age, in that she has shown China to the world.

This is an electrifying description of the birth of modern China and an intimate portrait of an extraordinary woman

Chinese political history can be a tough nut to crack, but Chang weaves in and out of Cixi’s biography with an ease that is almost as astounding as the events themselves

Records [Higgins’] own travels around the island in search of Roman traces. She includes plenty of anecdotes about the continuing fascination with the Roman past and its penetration of the present.

Higgins produced another remarkable British travelogue… that was at once thoughtful, learned, witty and superbly written.

Filled with passion and personal interest… Higgins walks us around the landscape of this country as it would have been 2,000 years ago, and in doing so she ably captures the spirit of Britain now, Britain then and Britain in between.

Whether at Hadrian’s Wall or in a car park in the City, she [Higgins] shows how Roman traces are woven through British life.

A fascinating look at how we have viewed Rome's presence in these islands and what a debt we still owe to Roman achievements.

Part history, part travelogue, [Higgins] also brings to life the eccentric archaeologists who have tried to recapture that lost civilisation.

A fresh and readable account

Under Another Sky is not only a work of personal history, it is more personal than that... It is conversational, anecdotal, in a way that makes it easy for [Higgins] to slip in quite a lot of information

A delightful, effortlessly engaging handbook to the half-lost, half-glimpsed world of Roman Britain... The result is an utterly original history, lyrically alive to the haunting presence of the past and our strange and familiar ancestors

The beauty of this book is not just in the elegant prose and in the precision with which [Higgins] skewers her myths. It is in the sympathy she shows for the myth-makers.

Evocative...a keen-eyed tour of Britain.

Packed with fascinating and thought-provoking insights.

A captivating travelogue.

A delightfully heady and beautifully written potpourri of a book.

A fascinating look at the debt we owe to Roman achievements

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