Impeccable... Magris, a guide of enormous modesty, has not only read everything: he has been everywhere, met everybody

There is so much to praise about this extraordinary book... Irresistably enjoyable

Not simply a masterpiece of travel; it is an odyssey... A splendid book, beautifully translated

A uniquely stimulating and individual portrait of the heart of Europe

This book is full of wonder and delights...Magris writes beautifully; he seems to have read everything. His reading has not made just clever but wise. On almost every page there are passages that make the heart life... Danube is a masterpiece

This is the best introduction to the culture of central Europe, its genius and its tragedy...a work of great originality, which builds up to a mosaic of spectacle, incident and reflection from which the personalities of the narrator and the Danubian lands emerge

Erudite and original

Magris proves a gracious, erudite, engaging and fair-minded companion on a journey no reader will forget

His forte is a wealth of literary and historical allusions from Austrian, French, Italian and German sources, which makes this book not only a treasure chest but also a profoundly perceptive study of central European history... wonderfully stimulating and constantly surprising

Like the river itself, Magris carries all along with him. Philosophy, war, natural history and politics are blended together with a mixture of curiosity, stylishness and all-encompassing knowledge

Italo Calvino described a classic as a book to which one can return and always find something new. Such a book is Magris’s Danube. In another 30 years we will find the same words and yet another book, fresh revelations divining a different world, a river that never ends, forever lighting out for the mythical territory of freedom.

Written with such passion . . . will fascinate and inform anyone who is interested in Victorian ways of life

If we ever have a female Doctor Who, I shall forward Ruth Goodman's name for consideration, not least because the historian has already done so much time travelling

Wonderful, informative, startling . . . Goodman's unique selling proposition as a historian is that she walks the walk of her time period, even when that walk involves hard labor in a corset and a hoop skirt

Must-read!

Goodman's passion for her subject... comes across loud and clear

[A] rewarding biography… Roper brings him alive as a very human figure.

This is the book about Luther we’ve missed among all the holy books and the case studies: the whole engrossing story of a soul and a mind and the man who broke the old world and its old ways for ever. Lyndal Roper brings alive the struggle for ideas, adds a subtle sense of how human beings work, and distils a lifetime of scholarship to conjure Luther’s own world with its princes, demons, scandals and sheer brave defiance of a whole old order

Compelling and above all deeply honest biography.

This book will continue to bring the reformer and his theology to life for generations to come.

[An] excellent study.

*****

Roper’s Luther is an angry man: a renegade and a rebel… [She] paints a vivid picture of the political and economic context in Mansfeld, where Luther grew up, and of the situation of Wittenberg and its political governance. There are important findings here, particularly relating to Luther’s early life

Roper writes with the virtuosity of an unsurpassed archival researcher, the grace of an elegant stylist, and the compassion of a seasoned student of human nature. Her nuanced and insightful portrait brilliantly evokes the inner and outer worlds of the man Luther. The book is a complete triumph.

Magnificent and surely definitive – a work of immense scholarship, acute psychological insight and gloriously fluent prose. Lyndal Roper has got under the skin of her subject and the result is thrilling.

Roper’s scholarly strengths plus 10 years of careful research have yielded a richly contextualised biography of a man whose influence has been and remains enormous, for good or ill or both.

This is a helpful and insightful examination of Luther’s attitudes and relationships… Highly recommended.

Roper portrays a deeply flawed but fascinating human being to rival any of the major personalities of Tudor England.

I heartily commend Martin Luther… It is simply the best English-language biography of Luther I’ve read and I’d be amazed if its combination of rigorous scholarship and approachable tone is bettered.

[A] superb new biography… A challenging and deeply stimulating study of a major historical figure.

The work of a brilliant scholar, who had devoted years of research to the project, and it repays careful reading… There are rich treasures in the book, without a bout. Roper has a great gift for narrative… Roper’s exploration of the cultural and social world of the Saxon miners is masterly… Fascinating.

A probing psychological account.