An extraordinary achievement ... a brilliant exercise in historiography ... Kochanski neither debunks nor sensationalises. She has no ideological axe to grind, and makes balanced use of family experience and interview material as against the official record and a handed-down sentimental consensus. The truth is far more powerful than the legend. It's great history writing

A superb account of Poland during the second world war ... The Eagle Unbowed serves to illuminate the political sickness that caused a nation to vanish from the map of Europe ... The pain and loss ... is poignantly evoked by Kochanski ... The Eagle Unbowed, a model history, conveys with harrowing immediacy the plight of the Polish people in the conflict

[A] remarkable book ... Kochanski succeeds in drawing together all the disparate strands of this terrible story into a coherent account of what happened to Poland and her citizens between 1939 and 1945. She brings to the subject not only an impressive grasp of the military and political context, but also a balance, neutrality and honesty few could manage, combined with the intelligence, imagination and empathy necessary to grasp the true depth of the experience she recounts ... This book is history at its best. It tells the whole story, and tells it well, with just the right mixture of detachment and empathy, in crisp, readable prose. But it also speaks to the imagination and makes the reader think - and not just about the subject in hand

Until Halik Kochanski's "The Eagle Unbowed" nobody had written a comprehensive English-language history of Poland at war. A British-born historian whose own family's experiences dot her pages, she weaves together the political, military, diplomatic and human strands of the story ... Ms Kochanski gives admirably clear accounts of the battlefield. She unpicks other tangles too: the tense relationship between the impatient, ill-informed underground leadership in Poland and the divided, ill-led exiled government in London, sidelined and then dumped by the allies as the Soviet armies marched west.
She has a keen eye for the striking quote ... She uncovers details that will surprise even history geeks ... Ms Kochanski marshals an impressive and comprehensive array of English and Polish material

An informative, authoritative and wide-ranging account of the tragedy that befell Poland and its inhabitants, Gentiles and Jews, during the war and its aftermath. The less well-known story of the Poles deported to the Soviet Union is particularly vivid and moving. An engaging and important book

Poland's war was so terrible as to almost defy summary ... this book is opinionated, fluid and forceful

A monumental new volume ... Revelatory, even revolutionary ... Clark has done a masterful job explaining the inexplicable

Superb ... One of the great mysteries of history is how Europe's great powers could have stumbled into World War I ... This is the single best book I have read on this important topic

A meticulously researched, superbly organized, and handsomely written account

Clark is a masterly historian ... His account vividly reconstructs key decision points while deftly sketching the context driving them ... A magisterial work

This compelling examination of the causes of World War I deserves to become the new standard one-volume account of that contentious subject

A brilliant contribution

Clark is fully alive to the challenges of the subject ... He provides vivid portraits of leading figures ... [He] also gives a rich sense of what contemporaries believed was at stake in the crises leading up to the war

In recent decades, many analysts had tended to put most blame for the disaster [of the First World War] on Germany. Clark strongly renews an older interpretation which sees the statesmen of many countries as blundering blindly together into war