A blow-by-blow account of the fateful day. I couldn't put it down.

‘Gripping … The hour-by-hour account is packed with fascinating and often poignant vignettes'

Kershaw writes well and makes sense of the battle ... a clear and straightforward military view.

Shows us the battle at its grittiest and bloodiest, but through it all manages to maintain a grip on the bigger picture.

So where does this leave Robert Kershaw’s 24 Hours at Waterloo? Very simply, in a class of its own ... brings the events to life with judiciously chosen first-hand accounts ... there could be no better companion to the battlefield than Kershaw’s.

A gripping piece of narrative history which moves almost with the same speed as Schwieger's torpedo.

Larson has an eye for haunting, unexploited detail...illuminating...suspenseful.

The master of popular non-fiction...a gripping account.

Larson's page turner brings the disaster to life.

Larson's approach to history resembles a novelist's... a rattling read.

Gripping...absorbing...however, it is when dealing with the aftermath of the tragedy, along with the attendant conspiracy theories, that Larson breaks new ground. I found it very hard to put down.

Larson . . . writes non-fiction books that read like novels, real page-turners. This one is no exception . . . thoroughly engrossing

A fascinating travelogue taking the reader from Joseph Conrad’s Congo to the Fukushima Nuclear Plant disaster of 2011, via New Mexico… a learned and compelling history of man trying to control the elements. It’s also a clarion call to arms to save ourselves and the planet

When he wrote this book, Patrick Marnham was compared to Bruce Chatwin, and I can see why

As simultaneously delicate and hard-edged as his poetry.

Turner’s eloquent rendering illuminates both the shared space and the painful divide between poet and soldier, mission and memory, war and peace.

The marriage of [Aubrey’s] words and Scurr’s is so smoothly achieved that I have no idea where one leaves off and the other intervenes

Scurr’s imaginative feat of retrieval has produced a perfect book for dipping into when you want a taste of what it was like to be alive in the 17th century

It is a testament to [Scurr’s] skill that you quickly stop thinking about technique and instead slip happily into the company of the character she has created. The wealth of research and the seams between imagination and reality disappear from view. This is truly selfless biography

A game-changer in the world of biography

A delightful read about the ebb and flow of thoughts in one extraordinary man’s mind

Drawing on [Aubrey’s] manuscripts and letters, [Ruth Scurr] has fashioned, as chronologically as possible, an autobiography in the form of the diary that Aubrey never wrote. It fits him perfectly… Ms Scurr has done him proud

Aubrey was a delightful, self-deprecating man ... A conventional biography of Aubrey could easily have become a portrait of the time through which he had lived, allowing the man himself to be overshadowed ... Instead, Ruth Scurr has invented the diary Aubrey might have written, incorporating his own chaotic, sometimes scrappy literary remains to form a continuous narrative. ... lucky him to have been accorded a biography as whimsical as his own self

Scurr’s book illuminates and poignantly captures the voice of a man more often a “ghostly record keeper” in his own writing

John Aubrey brilliantly reconfigures the art of biography

Bold and imaginative recreation of the diary of the 17th-century antiquary. It shows how close a scrupulous and unselfregarding biographer can come to the savour of a life

A genuinely remarkable work of biographical innovation.

I’d like to reread Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey every Christmas for at least the next five years: I love being between its humane pages, which celebrate both scholarly companionship and deep feeling for the past

Ruth Scurr’s innovative take on biography has an immediacy that brings the 17th century alive

Anyone who has not read Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey can have a splendid time reading it this summer. Scurr has invented an autobiography the great biographer never wrote, using his notes, letters, observations – and the result is gripping

A triumph, capturing the landscape and the history of the time, and Aubrey’s cadence.

A brilliantly readable portrait in diary form. Idiosyncratic, playful and intensely curious, it is the life story Aubrey himself might have written.

Scurr knows her subject inside out.

The diligent Scurr has evidence to support everything… Learning about him is to learn more about his world than his modest personality, but Scurr helps us feel his pain at the iconoclasm and destruction wrought by the Puritans without resorting to overwrought language.

Acclaimed and ingeniously conceived semi-fictionalised autobiography… Scurr’s greatest achievement is to bring both Aubrey and his world alive in detail that feels simultaneously otherworldly and a mirror of our own age… It’s hard to think of a biographical work in recent years that has been so bold and so wholly successful.