Sacco has produced a work that improbably manages to combine rare insight into what the war in Bosnia felt like on the ground with a mature and nuanced political and historical understanding of the conflict... Of the myriad books that have appeared about Bosnia, few have told the truth more bravely than Sacco. He is an immense talent, from whom we will hear a great deal more.

Harrowing and bleakly humorous, Sacco's account of life during the Balkan conflict is a timeless portrait of ordinary people caught in desperate circumstances. It's also a work of genius in an unlikely genre: journalism in comic book form.

Like Art Spiegelman's Maus, Sacco's book juxtaposes the pop style of comics with human tragedy, making the brutality of war all the more jarring.

Can comics do hard-hitting journalism? That’s the question asked – and answered – by this wonderful piece of long-form reporting

[Robertson's] forensic intelligence can penetrate where professional historians have not reached

The writer who got closest to the human truth about our long-serving senior royals

This immense book is part masterpiece, part sheer exhaustion. The masterpiece part lies chiefly in its breathtaking invention

Everywhere he goes, Mak is quietly ruthless in unmasking the acts of forgetting, selective amnesia, myth-making and historical obfuscation that persist...Mak is a truly cosmopolitan chronicler of shame and self-deceptions

His genius as a historian is his instinct for human stories... At moments in this monumental work... Mak is the history teacher everyone should have had

How eloquently Mak rails against the alliance of consumerism and bureaucracy! ... He has a great eye for telling detail... Only a powerful, humane and serious mind could give coherence to mass detail which, however arresting piece by piece, would otherwise soon become wearying... as much a journey around Geert Mak's head as it is a journey around Europe

Fascinating