The Classical World is a more epic epic than any toga-clad celluloid epic to date... Mr Lane Fox's brilliant book, where soldiers, poets and orators fight for attention in a story that is never cluttered and always stimulating.

witty, ferociously learned, enormously well read

an ambitious and exhilarating volume...The Classical World is so replete with insight and anecdote that I would love to see it in every school library.

we are in the hands of an author who knows that an epic can only be driven by big characters such as Pericles, Demosthenes, Philip, Cicero, Pompey, Caesar and Cleopatra...Here lies the author's mastery, matching a lifelong familiarity with his subject to the basic needs of a newly arrived apprentice

[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