Vinen's biography of the city is a spirited attempt at uncovering the mystery of how Birmingham, in his view, has managed for so long to stand at the centre of Britain's modern industrial, economic, political and cultural history without anyone noticing... This absorbing book shows us how we did it.

Richard Vinen's new history of his native city explains everything ... Vinen has written a history of Birmingham, but it is also a theory of Birmingham. And also, perhaps, a theory of England. I buy it.

[A] sweeping history ... There's a much better story to be told [about Birmingham] - and it's revealed between the covers of this book.

A superb retort to [the] slings and arrows of derision ... Birmingham's very mutability ... is the key to its survival.

Absorbing ... There is unlikely to be a fuller or more informative history of Birmingham than Vinen's.

Birmingham's ordinariness has prevented us from seeing what is extraordinary in its history. Brummies shaped our everyday world ... Vinen's book provides a template for how we might level up the way we write about England's northern and Midland cities.

Second City makes the case that Brum is, for all its amorphousness, England's second city, and rightly pays tribute to Joe Chamberlain for transforming it through his progressive policies in the 1870s.

A key text for understanding our times ... Highly recommended, truly thought provoking.

PRAISE FOR NATIONAL SERVICE: Written with compassion and insight, Vinen's book brilliantly recreates the atmosphere of postwar Britain.

I can't recall ever having read so unexpectedly fascinating a book... every single page has something of great interest on it.

he does his scholarly homework. This is a compendious product of intricate investigation. Roberts has read everything ... It is a magnificent achievement.

Andrew Roberts makes a strong revisionist case for the generally maligned George III in this engrossing, brilliant biography

As his outstanding books on Halifax, Salisbury and Churchill also demonstrate, he is a master of the biography. ... Roberts systematically, cogently and helpfully reinterprets his subject's role and reputation.

In this mammoth and meticulous biography, Andrew Roberts presents a compelling case for the defence of George III.

Such is Roberts's persuasive interpretation, supported by a wide range of sources and argued with keen insight into political realities. ... It must be hoped that Andrew Roberts's important, serious and timely book plays an appropriate role in the rethinking that can now hardly be avoided.

magnificent ... In Andrew Roberts, George has found his Boswell, but one with the wit and erudition of a Johnson. Britain's most misunderstood monarch he may have been, but this biographer has entered into this conscientious king's troubled mind with more than customary empathy.

Roberts harnesses a truly extraordinary amount of archival information to offer a comprehensive grasp of a rather tragic, thoroughly misunderstood king.

This outstanding new biography of George III is timely. The first of the Hanoverians to identify as British was mocked, slandered and vilified during his lifetime and is still regularly cited in the American media as the epitome of tyranny. Over the past two centuries historians have dismissed him as incompetent and despotic. Andrew Roberts has no time for such ill-founded nonsense. ... George has found a true champion in Andrew Roberts, who has ridden up gallantly to challenge unfounded prejudice. ... This impressively researched and scholarly account of the King's life and travails is compulsively readable and, in its tragic end, deeply moving. It is full of fascinating detail, insightful vignettes and vivid local colour.

Andrew Roberts's mighty Life, drawing on masses of unseen papers locked up in Windsor Castle, turns on its head the lazy idea of George III as a tyrant halfwit...every page is entertaining

This hefty book - elegantly written, the fruit of extensive research - is the case for the defence of Britain's "most misunderstood monarch".

Deeply researched, it ranges with equal authority from his private life to the military history of the American War of Independence; its tenacious fairness towards its subject gives it the sort of polemical edge that one finds in revisionist history at its best.

No other writer, except possibly Alan Bennett, has set out to make us love King George more. Or admire him more ... What makes Roberts's massive biographies so distinctively rewarding is that he provides the reader with enough evidence to undermine his own conclusions.

The book which impressed me most, and which I most enjoyed, this year is Andrew Roberts's George III. It is based on such astonishingly wide-ranging and original research that I felt I was reading about the period for the first time. Unknown facts and wonderful anecdotes had me turning the pages with a curiosity I seldom feel when reading about supposedly familiar events. Andrew Roberts is remarkably even-handed, and there is no special pleading on behalf of this genuinely misunderstood and wilfully misrepresented monarch who did his best to be a good constitutional ruler during a very choppy period in British history.

meticulously researched ... an eye-opening portrait of the man and his times

A deep, expansive study not only of George III but also of the political and social complexities of England and the United States during his reign.

a deeply textured portrait of George III [and] a capacious, prodigiously researched biography from a top-shelf historian.

an outstanding and surprisingly moving portrait of a misunderstood king, distinguished by refreshing revisionism but also illuminated by deep humanity.

Roberts is in a rich vein of form at present; after bestselling books on Napoleon and Churchill, yet another masterpiece has tumbled from his pen.

Roberts has been justly acclaimed as one of his generation's leading historians ... His new biography seeks to challenge popular myths about the monarch. ... Roberts, employing the same flair for original research and ability to convey historical context and vivid prose that he used in previous books ... thoroughly debunks all the assumptions most people have about the king.

exhaustively researched and written in accessible, non-jargony prose. Meticulous and forensic, it sometimes reads like a defense counsel's case for his client ... Roberts's defense of George III, though, is the fullest, the clearest, and likely to be the most definitive.

Roberts has painted a masterful portrait of a patriotic, diligent and cultivated monarch. ... This new biography is a treasure-house of detail. ... George III is an engaging, humane and at times beautiful testament to the importance of giving our ancestors a fair hearing.