Startlingly original... This is history at its most synoptic, weaving together disparate themes in a counterpoint of science and aesthetics, race and reclamation, hydrology and mythology

This book offers a fresh insight into this passage of German history and will interest engineers, ecologists, economists, politicians and historians alike

Sublimely good... Blackbourn has found an original and suggestive way into the history of both Germany's aggrandisement and its humility... far more than a good book on an out-of-the-way subject

David Blackbourn has written an entertainingly original history, rich in insights into man and nature and the German - in fact, the European - mind

Brilliantly conceived, David Blackbourn's thought-provoking exploration of the ambivalence built into past attempts to exploit the environment offers a wholly novel approach to understanding modern German history. His book is a tour de force in historical writing

A wide-ranging and highly original study... Blackbourn weaves elegantly among the disciplines, integrating the histories of science, technology, politics, diplomacy, culture and ecology into a nuanced and many-layered analysis of change

A significant contribution to new ways of writing about the past… magnificently compelling

One of the finest works of historical reconstruction I have ever encountered.

Her enthusiasm is exhilarating and contagious; her writing is clear and clean, sharply observant of tactile details and what they reveal about 16th-century life

Engagingly written and awash in the practicalities of life in the age, it presents a vivid, fascinating era of British history and reminds us that we're never as far from the past as we like to think

Immersive, engrossing

Written with such passion . . . will fascinate and inform anyone who is interested in Victorian ways of life

If we ever have a female Doctor Who, I shall forward Ruth Goodman's name for consideration, not least because the historian has already done so much time travelling

Wonderful, informative, startling . . . Goodman's unique selling proposition as a historian is that she walks the walk of her time period, even when that walk involves hard labor in a corset and a hoop skirt

Must-read!

Goodman's passion for her subject... comes across loud and clear

[A] rewarding biography… Roper brings him alive as a very human figure.

This is the book about Luther we’ve missed among all the holy books and the case studies: the whole engrossing story of a soul and a mind and the man who broke the old world and its old ways for ever. Lyndal Roper brings alive the struggle for ideas, adds a subtle sense of how human beings work, and distils a lifetime of scholarship to conjure Luther’s own world with its princes, demons, scandals and sheer brave defiance of a whole old order

Compelling and above all deeply honest biography.

This book will continue to bring the reformer and his theology to life for generations to come.

[An] excellent study.

*****

Roper’s Luther is an angry man: a renegade and a rebel… [She] paints a vivid picture of the political and economic context in Mansfeld, where Luther grew up, and of the situation of Wittenberg and its political governance. There are important findings here, particularly relating to Luther’s early life

Roper writes with the virtuosity of an unsurpassed archival researcher, the grace of an elegant stylist, and the compassion of a seasoned student of human nature. Her nuanced and insightful portrait brilliantly evokes the inner and outer worlds of the man Luther. The book is a complete triumph.

Magnificent and surely definitive – a work of immense scholarship, acute psychological insight and gloriously fluent prose. Lyndal Roper has got under the skin of her subject and the result is thrilling.

Roper’s scholarly strengths plus 10 years of careful research have yielded a richly contextualised biography of a man whose influence has been and remains enormous, for good or ill or both.

This is a helpful and insightful examination of Luther’s attitudes and relationships… Highly recommended.

Roper portrays a deeply flawed but fascinating human being to rival any of the major personalities of Tudor England.

I heartily commend Martin Luther… It is simply the best English-language biography of Luther I’ve read and I’d be amazed if its combination of rigorous scholarship and approachable tone is bettered.

[A] superb new biography… A challenging and deeply stimulating study of a major historical figure.

The work of a brilliant scholar, who had devoted years of research to the project, and it repays careful reading… There are rich treasures in the book, without a bout. Roper has a great gift for narrative… Roper’s exploration of the cultural and social world of the Saxon miners is masterly… Fascinating.

A probing psychological account.