Outstanding. Enormously enjoyable to read - exciting, lively, funny, and admirably tolerant and objective in its opinions. It is hard to see how it could have been better done

Held me gripped by every page and I was impatient at any interruption. The details of this book are spellbinding, often frightening and sometimes funny

Skilfully balances historical narrative with social analysis, and tempering the appalling with the absurd

This book, like the city it discusses, oscillates satisfyingly between blunt history and roistering gossip

To understand France today you should read this book about France yesterday . . . a wonderfully enjoyable picture. It is compulsive reading

There is hardly any aspect of French life during that period which the authors do not explore, always with compelling liveliness and omniverous zeal. . . I shall return gratefully to it again and again

A rich and intriguing story which the authors disentangle with great skill

A perceptive portrait of Paris in its heyday

A beautifully written book about a vast tapestry of military, political and social upheaval. Remarkably well-researched, wise, balanced, very funny at times . . . I was a witness to events in Paris in the first desperate, glorious, mad weeks, and this is just how it was

A dashing, multi-dimensional story. This book covers all aspects of life - diplomacy, strategy, rationing, politics and politicking (from Churchill, Pétain's and de Gaulle's point of view), the international theatricals and the tourist invasion, blitzkrieg and Ritzkrieg - to create a lovely tapestry, threaded with facts and figures

Absorbing . . . a rich, many-layered account, selecting from official documents, private archives, memoirs and histories with a wonderful lightness of touch, so that the most complex events become clear

Amazing fresh and immediate . . . absolutely honest, it is an extraordinarily gripping and powerful story

Weimar Germany… was arty, tolerant, and forward-looking. But other forces lurked. Hett explains these forces, and their devastating effects, superbly well.

Chilling reading … Serves as a warning to the West’s imperilled democracies … Faced with jingoist politicians who resort to poisonous lies, [Hett’s] book fairly proclaims, the forces of democracy can prevail only if they muster courage, resolve and cooperative spirit.

Histories of Nazi Germany can be overwhelming. The Death of Democracy is carefully focused on the conditions and cynical choices that enabled Nazism, in just a few years turning one of the world’s most advanced and liberal societies into a monstrosity. Its author is also that rarity, a specialist who writes lucidly and engagingly. In this post-truth, alternative-facts American moment, The Death of Democracy is essential reading.

The story of how Germany turned from democracy to dictatorship in the fifteen years following World War I is not a simple one. But the moral lessons are exceptionally clear. Benjamin Carter Hett honours that complexity in this account while never straying from the path of moral clarity. An outstanding accomplishment.

Hett’s brisk and lucid study offers compelling new perspectives inspired by current threats to free societies around the world… It is both eerie and enlightening how much of Hett’s account rings true in our time. The larger story he tells resonates, too.

A first-rate history lesson with a surprisingly prescient message for the world of today... Hett's sharp prose and careful use of newfound material not only sets the work apart from that of his peers, but also effectively draws significant (and particularly scary) parallels with current socio-political climates.

Inspirational

Powerful ... hard to put down.

Comparisons to Man's Search for Meaning are natural but this work has the potential to be even more bold.

The distressed fabric of the author's traumatic past becomes a beautiful backdrop for a memoir written with integrity and conviction...A searing, astute study of intensive healing and self-acceptance through the absolution of suffering and atrocity.

A splendidly colourful read ... an enthralling and resonant story of populist politicians, and religious war, and the reshaping of nations

This book’s fascination is as a joint portrait of the royal couple, the most human of historical actors in England’s greatest political drama.

A highly intelligent, fair and sympathetic biography.

[ An] absorbing biography of Charles I

This is a striking insight into both developing contemporary thought and religious controversies

White King is a lively attempt to make him [Charles I] flesh and blood