A monumental new history

This is a huge and hugely impressive book, mighty in scale as its subject, elegantly written and rigorous in its research

Magnificent...a narrative masterpiece. The settings are exotic, the cast of thousands full of the most eccentric, egotistical, paranoid, swashbuckling players you are likely to meet in any history

A provocative, marvellously readable account

Brilliant... A masterpiece of historical narrative. No review can hope to do justice to the depth of Brendon's research, the balance and originality of his conclusions, or the quality and humour of his prose. Our imperial story has been crying out for a top-flight historian who can write. Now it has one

In recent years the British Empire has been the subject of fresh scrutiny... Now Piers Brendon brings his own sharp eye to the debate... This he does superbly: with brio and panache and, often, a mordant wit...This is a real achievement and an important one

The conquest of one quarter of the world's surface was, as Piers Brendon shows in disturbingly entertaining fashion, a story of massacre, famine, rape, torture and loot on a grand scale....Brendon with an acute eye for detail and the tragic-comic bon mot, serves up a veritable gorefest in which all sides slake their lusts

As with her previous book The Italian Boy, Sarah Wise is superb on statistical detail... In every respect this is a note-perfect work of social history, thoroughly researched, charitable in its sympathies, and sadly still embodying lessons for today

Carefully researched... a wide-ranging study

Her achievement is remarkable... This engrossing work shines a light not only on a turbulent period in London's history, but on humanity itself. Only the best histories can claim as much

Spilling facts, lives, conditions, intolerable burdens and the spirit expressed by spontaneous dancing in the streets, The Blackest Streets is a little masterpiece

Extraordinary scholarship and rare sensitivity

Sarah Wise mines the archives to bring the local inhabitants back to life, and makes particularly brilliant use of the interviews that historian Raphael Samuel conducted in the 1970s with Arthur Harding.

As in her wonderful book The Italian Boy, she explores a milieu that was hungry, dirty, threadbare and exploited

Sarah Wise animates the horrors in fascinating detail