Beautifully written … Drazin maps out his family’s past with endearing passion.

A worthy endeavour – a thoughtful, engaging, humane reflection on one family’s trek through some of the most extraordinary tangles of history .

[A] fascinating piece of family history …engaging and informative.

Artful... well-researched.

Drazin has composed a beautiful family tribute that at the same time salutes the Royal Engineers eloquently, and thoughtfully interrogates our tragic imperial history.

On fire with ideas and enthusiasm, excels at providing Donne with a living context

Highly readable, dashing as well as detailed

One of the many virtues of John Stubb's compendious, deeply researched and absorbing biography is that illuminates the events not just of Swift's life but of the world before and around him. ... In this superb biography, Stubbs succeeds in enabling us to understand the complexities and character of this greatest of writers

Stubbs is an ideal guide to the tortuous ins and outs of Swift's time, an age defined by its political and religious conflicts, and their effects on his writing. ... As a biographer, Stubbs is attuned to detail and aims to provide a scholarly account of Swift's life

Impressive [and] astoundingly readable

The unbelievable truth... Preston is a natural storyteller ... he provides the context for actions that seem unbelievable today

Wonderfully readable ... John Preston is the ideal author, having researched for years many minor characters and talked to dozens of well-known political and literary friends and enemies of Thorpe

Fluent, readable ... a vivid tableau of the players in Thorpe's long, tragic downfall

I spent a thrilling 48 hours reading it. The narrative is so vivid, the characterisation so brilliant... I thought I knew all about these events, but the full horror of them has only now become apparent

A gripping account of the Jeremy Thorpe case. The details make one laugh out loud or gasp with amazement

The whole affair is retold here compellingly and fluently, bringing to life the cast of characters with some verve

Nothing comes close to the eyepopping outrageousness of the gay murder shenanigans that engulfed and almost destroyed a Liberal leader. Reads like a comic thriller

This is the book about Luther we’ve missed among all the holy books and the case studies: the whole engrossing story of a soul and a mind and the man who broke the old world and its old ways for ever. Lyndal Roper brings alive the struggle for ideas, adds a subtle sense of how human beings work, and distils a lifetime of scholarship to conjure Luther’s own world with its princes, demons, scandals and sheer brave defiance of a whole old order

Compelling and above all deeply honest biography.

This book will continue to bring the reformer and his theology to life for generations to come.

[An] excellent study.

*****

Roper’s Luther is an angry man: a renegade and a rebel… [She] paints a vivid picture of the political and economic context in Mansfeld, where Luther grew up, and of the situation of Wittenberg and its political governance. There are important findings here, particularly relating to Luther’s early life

Roper writes with the virtuosity of an unsurpassed archival researcher, the grace of an elegant stylist, and the compassion of a seasoned student of human nature. Her nuanced and insightful portrait brilliantly evokes the inner and outer worlds of the man Luther. The book is a complete triumph.

Magnificent and surely definitive – a work of immense scholarship, acute psychological insight and gloriously fluent prose. Lyndal Roper has got under the skin of her subject and the result is thrilling.

Roper’s scholarly strengths plus 10 years of careful research have yielded a richly contextualised biography of a man whose influence has been and remains enormous, for good or ill or both.

This is a helpful and insightful examination of Luther’s attitudes and relationships… Highly recommended.

Roper portrays a deeply flawed but fascinating human being to rival any of the major personalities of Tudor England.

I heartily commend Martin Luther… It is simply the best English-language biography of Luther I’ve read and I’d be amazed if its combination of rigorous scholarship and approachable tone is bettered.

[A] superb new biography… A challenging and deeply stimulating study of a major historical figure.

The work of a brilliant scholar, who had devoted years of research to the project, and it repays careful reading… There are rich treasures in the book, without a bout. Roper has a great gift for narrative… Roper’s exploration of the cultural and social world of the Saxon miners is masterly… Fascinating.

A probing psychological account.