This insightful and visionary study, treading a perfect line between imagination and scholarship, is as readable and necessary as a fine novel. Ted Hughes, another mythographer, would have loved it

Ann Wroe has an acute eye for pastoral detail...and takes a novelist's care in exploring character and evoking atmosphere... [Orpheus] will leave you dancing

This is a most remarkable book... most rewarding... [a book] that will surely enhance Ann Wroe's already considerable reputation

Orpheus: The Song of Life is a book of wonders, learned, playful and passionate...For all her studies, her wide reading, her historical dilligence, Wroe's method is instinctive, as she searches for inspirations and connections across the millennia

Curious... there are moments of sublime writing

strange, original

This one really is a song ... It evokes, but it also embodies, its subject

a dense, vigorous portrait

Manages, in prose both rhapsodic and precise, to convey the allure of the legendary bard from ancient Greece to modern times. This myth has flowered into truth

If this doesn't win a major book prize, I will eat my sola topi ... Beautifully counterpoints the spiritual travel experiences of the soon-to-be-famous nurse fleeing an arranged marriage, with the much more lubricious ones of the then-unpublished novelist.

In 1849, Florence Nightingale and author Gustave Flaubert visited Egypt. Anthony Sattin's book recreates the transformative steps towards fame these two took as they simultaneously travelled around Egypt

Highly readable and illuminating ... Mishra's analysis of Muslim reactions is particularly topical

Enormously ambitious but thoroughly readable, this book is essential reading for everyone who is interested in the processes of change that have led to the emergence of today's Asia

Sophisticated ... not so much polemic as cri de coeur, motivated by Mishra's keen sense of the world, East and West, hurtling towards its own destruction

Outstanding ... Mishra wears his scholarship lightly and weaves together the many strands of history into a gripping narrative ... The insights afforded by this book are too many to be enumerated ... Mishra performs a signal service to the future - by making us read the past in a fresh light

[Full of] complexity and nuance

Subtle, erudite and entertaining

Mishra allows the reader to see the events of two centuries anew, through the eyes of the journalists, poets, radicals and charismatics who criss-crossed Europe and Asia

A vital, nuanced argument ... prodigious