An astonishing act of investigation and documentation. In the face of lies, denial and massive indifference, Bikont has established exactly what happened ... The result is a terrifying and necessary book, unsparing in its detail, but deeply heartening as an act of historical reclamation.

Scrupulously objective and profoundly personal.

A powerful and important study of the poisonous effects of racism and hatred within a community.

A masterpiece of historical journalism … A must read for anyone interested in the Holocaust and its aftermath.

A hauntingly plausible contemporary history, tactfully delivering truths that we might all do well to contemplate.

Humane, measured and painstakingly researched ... It is a hard-won testament to the importance of historical truth.

Beautifully written, devastating and very important.

One of the most important and most dramatic books of the last decade.

Magisterial... meticulous in its procedures, absolute in its commitment to truth. Bikont's book is a book about forgetting, about the pollution of memory, about the conflict between the easy, convenient truth and the awkward, harder truth. It is a work that grows from its journalistic manner and origins into the most powerful writing of necessary history.

The Crime and the Silence deserves to be read by everyone interested in the fraught politics of apology and the ongoing struggle of nations and communities to ascertain and accept difficult historical truths.

Writing with uncompromising honesty and fine-tuned sensitivity, Bikont gives us intimate insight into the sources of neighbourly violence – and the rare courage needed to resist it. A wrenching, humane, necessary book.

The Crime and the Silence is a masterpiece of historical journalism. Combining remarkable archival study and courageous reportage, Anna Bikont reconstructs the context of the Jedwabne murder story, a wave of killings of Jews by their neighbours in the Polish countryside. A fascinating and deeply researched book, it is a must read for anyone interested in the Holocaust and its aftermath.

As she investigates the case of mass murder that transformed her home country’s entire national myth, Anna Bikont combines the persistence and energy of a journalist with the humanity and care of a poet. The result is a hauntingly plausible contemporary history, tactfully delivering truths that we might all do well to contemplate.

The Crime and the Silence is an astonishing act of investigation and documentation. In the face of lies, denial, and massive indifference, Anna Bikont has established exactly what happened – before, during, and after in a small but atrocious massacre in Eastern Poland in July 1941. The subsequent decades – long silence is as shocking as the initial crime. The result is a terrifying and necessary book, unsparing in its detail, but deeply heartening as an act of historical reclamation.

This is one of the saddest books I have ever read – written by the most sanguine person I know.

The Crime and the Silence tells the story of a massacre; it also lays bare the work of an investigative journalist. Ms Bikont meticulously checked facts and corroborated testimonies. She struggled with the ethics of persuading witnesses to appear under their own names, when she could offer them no protection. She struggled, too, with the ethics of disguising her own identity so as to persuade people to talk to her. Time after time, residents of the town slammed doors in her face… Ms Bikont did not give up; the quality of her journalism is something very special. An extraordinary interviewer, she developed relationships with the most unlikely cast of characters… This book leaves the reader haunted.

A full account of the Polish church’s involvement with the massacre, with German permission, of the Jewish population of a town in Poland. A perfect example of the small instance standing for a whole, very Christian country’s denial of its enthusiasm for killing neighbours.

Bikont bravely penetrated the curtain of oblivion cloaking the crime, and denounced it

A dreamy narrative which slips effortlessly from past to present and allows the voices of those who were there to shine

Khan has written a first class book... Exceptionally well told facts throughout the book, I was staggered at her revelations … It is a bitter, sweet story throughout … Overall, the book enlightened me in many ways, perhaps it makes me regard the Indian in a different light today. It certainly has made me look up other deeper facts about various matters pertaining to the era of the Second World War, and that has to be a good inducement to read the book.

A delightful read about the ebb and flow of thoughts in one extraordinary man’s mind

Drawing on [Aubrey’s] manuscripts and letters, [Ruth Scurr] has fashioned, as chronologically as possible, an autobiography in the form of the diary that Aubrey never wrote. It fits him perfectly… Ms Scurr has done him proud

Aubrey was a delightful, self-deprecating man ... A conventional biography of Aubrey could easily have become a portrait of the time through which he had lived, allowing the man himself to be overshadowed ... Instead, Ruth Scurr has invented the diary Aubrey might have written, incorporating his own chaotic, sometimes scrappy literary remains to form a continuous narrative. ... lucky him to have been accorded a biography as whimsical as his own self

Scurr’s book illuminates and poignantly captures the voice of a man more often a “ghostly record keeper” in his own writing

John Aubrey brilliantly reconfigures the art of biography

Bold and imaginative recreation of the diary of the 17th-century antiquary. It shows how close a scrupulous and unselfregarding biographer can come to the savour of a life

A genuinely remarkable work of biographical innovation.

I’d like to reread Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey every Christmas for at least the next five years: I love being between its humane pages, which celebrate both scholarly companionship and deep feeling for the past

Ruth Scurr’s innovative take on biography has an immediacy that brings the 17th century alive

Anyone who has not read Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey can have a splendid time reading it this summer. Scurr has invented an autobiography the great biographer never wrote, using his notes, letters, observations – and the result is gripping

A triumph, capturing the landscape and the history of the time, and Aubrey’s cadence.

A brilliantly readable portrait in diary form. Idiosyncratic, playful and intensely curious, it is the life story Aubrey himself might have written.

Scurr knows her subject inside out.

The diligent Scurr has evidence to support everything… Learning about him is to learn more about his world than his modest personality, but Scurr helps us feel his pain at the iconoclasm and destruction wrought by the Puritans without resorting to overwrought language.

Acclaimed and ingeniously conceived semi-fictionalised autobiography… Scurr’s greatest achievement is to bring both Aubrey and his world alive in detail that feels simultaneously otherworldly and a mirror of our own age… It’s hard to think of a biographical work in recent years that has been so bold and so wholly successful.