A bravura examination of political power ... Clark displays [his] brilliance and bracing intellect to exhilarating effect ... The pleasure of Clark's writing is that it embraces an impressive spectrum of thought, without ever losing sight of the historical truth, or of the difficulty in reaching it.

A resounding success ... [Clark] has a knack for writing accounts of the past that make waves in the present. In Prisoners of Time, Clark brings the same complexity to the subject of history itself ... Erudite.

House of Dudley is a full-blooded affair, as good on the horrors of war as it is on the soft power of the Dudley women, and written in a lively, episodic style that presents each Dudley as a foil to the monarch they served

Breathes new life into an old and familiar Tudor story. [She] negotiates the labyrinth of Tudor politics with skill, producing a book much more comprehensible and illuminating than others I've read . . . It's delightful, a joy to read

I am hugely impressed by The House of Dudley and by the depths of research.
This is a pacy narrative, vividly written, that makes you want to read on and on.
Joanne Paul is a major new talent in the field and I eagerly await her next book

This is riveting stuff: death, desire, power and scandal. Paul has made the most of it, producing a well written and historically grounded page-turner . . . Game of Thrones looks tame compared with the real-life machinations of the Dudleys and the Tudors

A twist on the Tudors . . . Enormously entertaining - a sheer joy to read

A hugely entertaining history of three generations of the Dudley family, who dominated the Tudor court

A thrilling and deeply researched study of power and conspiracy: the rise and fall of the other Tudor dynasty. The House of Dudley illuminates the fascinating men and women who almost became kings and queens in their own right

Vivid, innovative and authoritative. I could not recommend The House of Dudley more highly. It's a real lesson in how to revitalise the writing of Tudor history

Joanne Paul's account of this family is rich and compelling. She manages to hit that sweet spot where scholarly history overlaps with dramatic storytelling; she conjures up the look and feel of Tudor life, down to the clothes, the medicines and the furniture, while also being a skilful filler-in of political background . . . Whether or not you have ever succumbed to Mantelmania, you will find yourself drawn in, fascinated, and richly informed

An enthralling read told by Paul with great verve and an eye for the telling detail . . . The family's complex history is concisely and compellingly related

Visceral and illuminating. The extraordinary House of Dudley is the Tudor Game of Thrones. Paul has produced a painstakingly detailed first book with spirit and verve

Captivating and thought-provoking . . . Sheds immense light onto this often-overlooked family

The crowning jewel in its genre . . . I can't recommend this book enough. Unputdownable

When reading Joanne Paul's lively history of the house of Dudley, it is impossible not to be reminded of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy . . . Paul uses the experiences of the Dudleys to light up odd corners and backroom spaces of Tudor palace life

Joanne Paul chronicles the meteoric rise and deadly fall of the Dudleys

Joanne Paul reveals how the might of the Tudor dynasty was built on the blood and sweat of three generations of another family - the Dudleys

Hugely entertaining

Fascinating

Praise for Joanne Paul's monograph on Thomas More

Brilliant and lucid. This is an original and illuminating work that should be compulsory

Fascinating. Paul shows an impressive mastery

A powerful and thought provoking memoir . . . wonderfully human, it is a story of missed opportunities, disillusionment and hope that ultimately invites readers to ask themselves what it means to be free

This vivid rendering of life amid cultural collapse is nothing short of a masterpiece

Remarkable and highly original . . . Both an affecting coming-of-age story and a first-hand meditation on the politics of freedom

A probing personal history, poignant and moving. A young life unfolding amidst great historical change - ideology, war, loss, uncertainty. This is history brought memorably and powerfully to life

Unique, insightful, and often hilarious. . . Albania on the cusp of change, chaos and civil war is the setting for the best memoir to emerge from the Balkans in decades

A lyrical memoir, of deep and affecting power, of the sweet smell of humanity mingled with flesh, blood and hope

Free is astonishing. Lea Ypi has a natural gift for storytelling. It brims with life, warmth, and texture, as well as her keen intelligence. A gripping, often hilarious, poignant, psychologically acute masterpiece and the best book I've read so far this year

Lea Ypi's teenage journey through the endtimes of Albanian communism tells a universal story: ours is an age of collapsed illusions for many generations. Written by one of Europe's foremost left-wing thinkers, this is an unmissable book for anyone engaged in the politics of resistance

This extraordinary coming-of-age story is like an Albanian Educated but it is so much more than that. It beautifully brings together the personal and the political to create an unforgettable account of oppression, freedom and what it means to acquire knowledge about the world. Funny, moving but also deadly serious, this book will be read for years to come

A new classic that bursts out of the global silence of Albania to tell us human truths about the politics of the past hundred years. . . It unfolds with revelation after revelation - both familial and national - as if written by a master novelist. As if it were, say, a novella by Tolstoy. That this very serious book is so much fun to read is a compliment to its graceful, witty, honest writer. A literary triumph

Illuminating and subversive, Free asks us to consider what happens to our ideals when they come into contact with imperfect places and people and what can be salvaged from the wreckage of the past

A young girl grows up in a repressive Communist state, where public certainties are happily accepted and private truths are hidden; as that world falls away, she has to make her own sense of life, based on conflicting advice, fragments of information and, above all, her own stubborn curiosity. Thought-provoking, deliciously funny, poignant, sharply observed and beautifully written, this is a childhood memoir like very few others -- a really marvellous book

Free is one of those very rare books that shows how history shapes people's lives and their politics. Lea Ypi is such a brilliant, powerful writer that her story becomes your story

Lea Ypi is a pathbreaking philosopher who is also becoming one of the most important public thinkers of our time. Here she draws on her unique historical experience to shed new light on the questions of freedom that matter to all of us. This extraordinary book is both personally moving and politically revolutionary. If we take its lessons to heart, it can help to set us free

I haven't in many years read a memoir from this part of the world as warmly inviting as this one. Written by an intellectual with story-telling gifts, Free makes life on the ground in Albania vivid and immediate

Lea Ypi has a wonderful gift for showing and not telling. In Free she demonstrates with humour, humanity and a sometimes painful honesty, how political communities without human rights will always end in cruelty. True freedom must be from both oppression and neglect

A funny and fascinating memoir

A rightly acclaimed account of loss of innocence in Albania from a master of subtext . . . Precise, acute, often funny and always accessible

A remarkable story, stunningly told

A vivid portrayal of how it felt to live through the transition from socialism to capitalism, Ypi's book will interest readers wishing to learn more about Albania during this tumultuous historical period, but also anyone interested in questioning the taken-for-granted ideological assumptions that underpin all societies and shape quotidian experiences in often imperceptible ways

A classic, moving coming-of-age story. . . Ypi is a beautiful writer and a serious political thinker, and in just a couple hundred readable pages, she takes turns between being bitingly, if darkly, funny (she skewers Stalinism and the World Bank with equal deadpan) and truly profound

Beguiling. . . the most probing memoir yet produced of the undefined 'transition' period after European communism. More profoundly a primer on how to live when old verities turn to dust. Ypi has written a brilliant personal history of disorientation, of what happens when the guardrails of everyday life suddenly fall away. . . Reading Free today is not so much a flashback to the Cold War as a glimpse of every society's possible pathway, a postcard from the future