Refreshing and invigorating, full of fascinating fact

This is an extraordinary little book, unputdownable, written in the most lyrical, flowing style which paints vivid pictures and, at the same time, punches into place hard facts that stop you dead in your tracks. A compulsive read

Crisply and elegantly written - piques the appetite and sharpens the senses

A rich stew about every salt-influenced concoction and creation, from the first sausages and cured hams and fish sauces to the invention of parmesan, tomato ketchup and Tabasco sauce

An entertainingly anecdotal and lovingly partisan history.

Keates has a dry humour that is very modern and I loved his relish for the subject

A fast-moving, well-researched and readable account of a dramatic slice of European history

... This bright, engaging and breezy book ... suits the tenor of our times.

A remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness...an unfolding literary event

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in 'drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust'

A quiet triumph, moving and simple - impossible to describe accurately, and impossible to achieve in any medium but comics

All too infrequently, a book comes along that' s as daring as it is acclaimed. Art Spiegelman's Maus is just such a book

A remarkable work, awesome in its conception and execution... at one and the same time a novel, a documentary, a memoir, and a comic book. Brilliant, just brilliant

Maus is a masterpiece, and it's in the nature of such things to generate mysteries, and pose more questions than they answer. But if the notion of a canon means anything, Maus is there at the heart of it. Like all great stories, it tells us more about ourselves than we could ever suspect

Spiegelman's Maus changed comics forever. Comics now can be about anything

Reading [his work] has been an amazing lesson in storytelling

It can be easy to forget how much of a game-changer Maus was.