The best true spy story ... a superbly cynical combination of truth, half-truth, falsehood and propaganda

...teeming with real-life tales of intrigue and espionage

A carefully crafted memoir of a carefully crafted life is a chilling portrayal of a man whose greatest loyalty was to his craft

[Tom Wolfe’s] gleeful use of punctuation and italics, along with entertaining asides and neologisms that often quickly cemented themselves into the English lexicon, helped Wolfe stand out from other journalists

[Wolfe] made literature fun and bores don’t like fun

This is a book that will be a sharp pleasure to reread years from now, when it will bring back, like a falcon in the sky of memory, a whole world that is currently jetting and jazzing its way somewhere or other

He impales trends and fads, pretensions and swaggerings, with needle-sharp wit

Might well be required reading in courses with names like American studies

Readers keen to live a Good Life – and prepare for a Good Death – should dive head first into this fount of ancient but still modern wisdom.

In this wise and delightful guide to the Grecian's teachings, Professor Edith Hall makes a highly convincing case for the ongoing relevance of ancient thinking

[Hall] peppers her account with stories from her own life in a frank, discursive style

Hall navigates her way through the Aristotelian oeuvre with elegant ease

A clear and frequently interesting survey of Aristotle’s thought

[The] conversational tone…suits her subject – recreating the congenial atmosphere of an Athenian symposium

[It is] mesmeric to hear Aristotelian wisdom freed from dusty, leather-bound volumes to be so emphatically applied to our every-day experience

Told in a light and humorous way, Elkin’s cultural meander provides plenty of food for thought.

A fascinating way to write about George Sand, Virginia Woolf and others, plus Elkin’s own artistic explorations of Paris, London, Venice and Tokyo. It makes us all want to be London wanderers.

Elkin delivers a prococative yet light and humorous read, mingling her own memories with those of the female artists she portrays.

With this book, Elkin hopes to track down the female equivalent – the flâneuse – to ‘see where a woman might fit into the cityscape’… It is a timely effort: in the Trump era of manspreading and male privilege, it is especially vital that we pay attention to notions of gendered space. Elkin’s prose is wry, insightful and saturated with detail

Delightfully meandering.

Elkin is a beguiling writer, and resolutely female, her sentences doing what Virginia Woolf wanted women's sentences to do, which is to "hold back the male flood"… Flâneuse is a riposte to all that macho stomping about… Flâneuse is so rich with shining trinkets and wise thoughts that not a single page disappoints or bores. It's that rare thing these days - a work of feminism which is enthused by literature and art and ideas rather than pop culture.

Elkin explores the history of people and places in astonishing detail. She writes with a passion and personality that creates the kind of familiarity which encourages us to believe that the women she studies were close friends of hers… Elkin's first person, colloquial yet witty style lets you into the recesses of her imagination and invites you to be her travel companion

Lauren Elkin is one of our most valuable critical thinkers – the Susan Sontag of her generation

The acclaimed historian of Russia sweeps the brittle high society of pre-Revolutionary St Petersburg, the terror-chilled jails of Stalin's purges and the secrets of 1990s Moscow archives into a tragic panorama.'

A seamlessly written and moving portrait of the soviet Union in miniature from the Revolution to the age of Yeltsin.

What is striking is how he has thrown himself heart and soul into the romance and emotion of his drama. The novel throbs with sex, maternal feeling, revolutionary fervour and terror ... Terrific stuff