The Devils' Alliance is a marvellous achievement. No event was more crucial to the outbreak of the Second World War than the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, and no one is better qualified to explore its grim implications than Roger Moorhouse

Superbly researched and academically impeccable, yet written with all the pace of a thriller, The Devils' Alliance shines a powerful beam into one of the undeservedly least known aspects of the Second World War

Meticulous and vividly readable… Moorhouse’s grim and compelling book could not be more topical

A highly enjoyable history written with verve and attention to detail

Superb

Authoritative and highly readable

Lucid and well-researched

Elegant

Moorhouse is the best guide now available to explain…the awful consequences for those caught in the unscrupulous coils of dictatorship

Thorough and eloquent... a scholarly yet accessible reminder of the frighteningly tangible costs of totalitarianism

Roger Moorhouse’s definitive book blends eyewitness accounts with an authoritative master narrative… The Devils’ Alliance is not just a good book, it’s an important one, making a significant contribution to our understanding of the two worst dictators of the 20th Century, and the calamitous conflict they both had a hand in causing

In this profoundly researched, briskly argued and wonderfully readable book, full of dramatic and darkly comic detail, Roger Moorhouse has done history a great service. He has rescued one of the Second World War’s dirtiest little secrets from the shadows into which the pro-Soviet bias of post-war historians had swept it and reveals in all its moral squalor the deal that made it possible for Hitler to go to war.

A terrifying account of cynical diplomacy, deceit, untrammelled power and the echoes that can be heard even now

Authoritative, highly readable account.

Intelligent, well-informed.

Has a lot more to offer than the usual facts and figures thrown together about a largely forgotten part of history… This has a certain amount of written fluidity… I have read any number of books about this subject and I have to say that this is one of the best researched that I have found… I found it a satisfying read throughout, I learnt a lot and filled in a few holes in my knowledge, an excellent book.

I am chilled to the bone and beyond ... the most extraordinary story ... absolutely fascinating

An accessible and anecdotal account of the battle and the men who waged it, full of colour and surprising detail

Fascinating, thought-provoking and entertaining. Explodes a number of self-serving myths

Fresh and provocative

A wonderfully incisive, superbly written history. What Dimbleby has nailed so brilliantly is what so many war historians miss: the big picture

I enjoyed this book immensely…This book fills a vast gap in our knowledge of history and I am glad to have read it.

This is a compelling book…It’s a story of endurance – of place as well as people – and ultimately, it’s uplifting.

A brilliant way of coming at the history of Berlin and Germany itself, which shows how people coped with the vicissitudes of the regime.

Harding has recorded the fate of the house and its inhabitants, from the Weimar republic until reunification. This is German history in microcosm ... as exciting as a good historical novel.

An inspirational read: highly recommended.

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.