Shake Hands With The Devil is one of the saddest books I have ever read and one of the most heart-breaking eye-witness accounts.A kind of naive and painfully honest confession of the failure of an organisation, a meticulous description of one of the worst betrayals in the history of humanity.

indisputably the best account of the whole terrible Rwandan genocide

Although this is a deeply personal book, it is undoubtedly an important historical record of the UN's failure in Rwanda and an impassioned plea against the moral cowardice that allowed the genocide to happen.

A story of willful blindness masquerading as secret intelligence worthy of Somerset Maugham or Graham Greene

Bob Drogin is an ace newspaper man, who raked through the muck of so-called intelligence that was used to justify America's invasion of Iraq -- and struck journalistic gold in this story of a con-man who told his CIA handlers exactly what they wanted to hear. If this twisted tale of deception and credulity could be read simply as a thrilling farce it would be pure delight -- but much more importantly, it is a history of our time

Bob Drogin is a brilliant reporter; in Curveball, he has produced a riveting and important investigation, full of startling and carefully documented detail, laying bare the anatomy of an intelligence failure and its contribution to a catastrophic war

Bob Drogin accomplishes what only the best reporters can; he forces you to wonder how he could possibly know that! If you want to know how the CIA could have possibly been so wrong about Iraq, here is a big part of the answer. It is a case study in how even the most intelligent and capable people can, when determined enough, hear only what they wish to hear

A crucial study in the political manipulation of intelligence. Understanding how Curveball got us into Iraq will arm us for the next round of lies coming out of Washington

Curveball is a true story, marvelously reported, about a descent into the nether world of deceit and duplicity, where the lies of a single man in an interrogation cell in Germany grew like a malign spore in the dark. When it emerged, on the lips of the President and the Secretary of State, it infected the course of world events.

Here we go again: the self-deception, the corruption of intelligence, and the abuse of authority, amid a full cast of the usual suspects in the White House and the Pentagon. It's a crucially important story, and it comes wonderfully alive in Curveball. It would be almost fun to read if the message wasn't so important-and so devastating to the integrity of the American processes.

pacey, insightful and compelling

Miranda Carter writes with lusty humour, has a fresh clarifying intelligence, and a sharp eye for telling details. This is traditional narrative history with a 21st-century zing. A real corker of a book

A highly original way of looking at the years that led up to 1914

Carter deftly interpolates history with psychobiography to provide a damning indictment of monarchy in all its forms

A depiction of bloated power and outsize personalities in which Carter picks apart the strutting absurdity of the last emperors on the eve of catastrophe

Takes what should have been a daunting subject and through sheer wit and narrative élan turns it into engaging drama. Carter has a notable gift for characterisation