This story is vividly and even-handedly told, based on impressive research... Bourke explores the implications with greater sophistication than almost anyone else

A thoughtful and scholarly work

Fluent and vivid... Inside this big, discursive book is an urgent call to look beneath appearances to underlying appearances, and it ought to be heeded

Richard Bourke’s background as a historian of ideas gives him an interesting philosophical perspective on an old problem and he strives nobly and intelligently to lift the debate above the lazy clichés employed by so many peace processors and commentators

Comprehensive ... Darwin's erudition allows him to skirt around the narrow orthodoxies of apologist v critic and provide an insightful account of Britain's unlikely period of global hegemony

John Darwin's Unfinished Empire surpasses even his own previous work to give an unmatched overview of imperial Britain's rise and fall

Uglow is being modest: her long and leisurely stroll through 2.000 years of British gardening is dense with the foliage of historical research, and highly decorated with literary references and colourful anecdotes

Enthralling...an elegant and witty gem

In this pacey retelling of a classic love story, Kate Williams has created a sparkling life worthy of Emma herself. A new biography for a new generation

Popular history at its best

Every intricate detail is laid out, and Kate Williams' writing is so immediate, you feel all but transported...

From Soho tart to glamour model, diplomatic wife in Naples to the most famous extra-marital passion in UK history: Emma Hamilton's amazing tale is hardly unfamiliar. Williams tells it shrewdly and well, with access to recently discovered letters and a sharp contemporary spin. In her skilled hands, Lord Nelson's lover, for all her "charisma, intelligence and charm" falls foul both of ingrained misogyny and a fledgling culture that both gave her stardom and exacted a fearsome price.

Lively, sympathetic and meticulously researched

Williams account is both balanced and evocative...[Emma Hamilton's] ruthless but romantic pursuit of celebrity is so close to our own time that the story barely needs contemporary parallels

Divertingly and instructively illuminates a time and culture both far away and intriguingly like our own, and resurrects a woman whose mingled vulnerability and resilience - to say nothing of her glamour - still have the power to fascinate

The first self-made superstar, the first manipulative media celebrity, dazzling Europe with her style and beauty as muse to artists and mistress to Nelson ... Emma famously gets her comeuppance, and her headlong flight to romantic destruction is told with novelistic dash

Rigorous and relevant

Pries open the most astounding archives to uncover what our recent ancestors tried to hide