cogently expressed and scrupulously documented ... The Enlightenment, he believes, has an urgent message for our time

the book is written out of genuine curiosity and palpable enthusiasm. Robertson's range allows him to make many illuminating comparisons and some provocative juxtapositions ... This is surely the best and most up to date single-volume study of the Enlightenment that we currently possess. It will inform the general reader while also often provoking, delighting and surprising the specialist.

The Enlightenment by Ritchie Robertson is a fine examination of how the enlightenment changed the world in different ways in different places - scintillating.

a work that is at once readable, authoritative and wide-ranging ... a handsome single volume, complete with nearly 30 images from the great first editions of the period. The author is a professor of German literature and thought at Oxford University, but whatever the specific subject addressed, the quality of scholarship is uniformly high.

learned, capacious and gloriously rich ... "The first Quality of an Historian," David Hume wrote to a friend, "is to be true and impartial; the next to be interesting." Judged by such a standard, Robertson must be reckoned a historian of very high quality indeed. His book is not just learned and balanced, it is also - in the noblest tradition of the Enlightenment itself - principled and humane.

Mr. Robertson is a splendid writer, astoundingly versed in European letters and gifted at vividly sketching the views of the "Enlighteners." ... Mr. Robertson, armed with a prodigious knowledge of the Enlightenment's literary output, has captured the tone and spirit of this milieu.

Mr. Robertson is a splendid writer, astoundingly versed in European letters and gifted at vividly sketching the views of the "Enlighteners" ... [who] has written a fitting tribute to his subject ... Often characterized as a great philosophical movement, it is better understood as a style, a set of shifting public habits and attitudes. Mr. Robertson, armed with a prodigious knowledge of the Enlightenment's literary output, has captured the tone and spirit of this milieu.

Masterly...[an] epic survey of Enlightened minds, ideas and policies across Europe and the Americas...Mr Robertson sweetens erudition with humanity, much as his subjects did. Science and statecraft, which are amply chronicled, yield to compassion, sympathy and a self-critical outlook that welcomes experimentation and changes of mind. Not least among its lessons for today, The Enlightenment shows how its sages learned "to manage even Disputes with Civility".

A thoroughly satisfying history of an era that was not solely about reason but was "also the age of feeling, sympathy and sensibility." ... a magisterial history of Europe and the West, featuring more than 100 chapters ... An entirely absorbing doorstop history of ideas.

The analyst has to stick to the ideas. Robertson does this expansively and lucidly, not just reporting them, but arguing them out in admirable thumbnail sketches, rich in detail, of literary as well as philosophical and also scientific works.

A professor of German language and literature, Robertson knows that writing good history means clearing away easy preconceptions. His work implies that to understand the Enlightenment, or perhaps any period, it is less useful to distil a set of theses than to identify a group of questions that people agreed were important, even if they furnished very different answers. Thus he avoids sweeping generalizations and focuses on the particular: he has an eye for revealing anecdotes and memorable quotations. ... When he portrays the major figures of the period itself and identifies the complex questions they raised, Robertson transports us to the past as only a master historian can, allowing us to empathize with perspectives different from our own. As a comprehensive study of the period itself, Robertson's The Enlightenment towers over all others I have encountered.

An enthralling read told by Paul with great verve and an eye for the telling detail . . . The family's complex history is concisely and compellingly related

Visceral and illuminating. The extraordinary House of Dudley is the Tudor Game of Thrones. Paul has produced a painstakingly detailed first book with spirit and verve

Captivating and thought-provoking . . . Sheds immense light onto this often-overlooked family

The crowning jewel in its genre . . . I can't recommend this book enough. Unputdownable

When reading Joanne Paul's lively history of the house of Dudley, it is impossible not to be reminded of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy . . . Paul uses the experiences of the Dudleys to light up odd corners and backroom spaces of Tudor palace life

Joanne Paul chronicles the meteoric rise and deadly fall of the Dudleys

Joanne Paul reveals how the might of the Tudor dynasty was built on the blood and sweat of three generations of another family - the Dudleys

Hugely entertaining

Fascinating

Praise for Joanne Paul's monograph on Thomas More

Brilliant and lucid. This is an original and illuminating work that should be compulsory

Fascinating. Paul shows an impressive mastery

A powerful and thought provoking memoir . . . wonderfully human, it is a story of missed opportunities, disillusionment and hope that ultimately invites readers to ask themselves what it means to be free

This vivid rendering of life amid cultural collapse is nothing short of a masterpiece

Remarkable and highly original . . . Both an affecting coming-of-age story and a first-hand meditation on the politics of freedom

A probing personal history, poignant and moving. A young life unfolding amidst great historical change - ideology, war, loss, uncertainty. This is history brought memorably and powerfully to life

Unique, insightful, and often hilarious. . . Albania on the cusp of change, chaos and civil war is the setting for the best memoir to emerge from the Balkans in decades

A lyrical memoir, of deep and affecting power, of the sweet smell of humanity mingled with flesh, blood and hope

Free is astonishing. Lea Ypi has a natural gift for storytelling. It brims with life, warmth, and texture, as well as her keen intelligence. A gripping, often hilarious, poignant, psychologically acute masterpiece and the best book I've read so far this year

Lea Ypi's teenage journey through the endtimes of Albanian communism tells a universal story: ours is an age of collapsed illusions for many generations. Written by one of Europe's foremost left-wing thinkers, this is an unmissable book for anyone engaged in the politics of resistance

This extraordinary coming-of-age story is like an Albanian Educated but it is so much more than that. It beautifully brings together the personal and the political to create an unforgettable account of oppression, freedom and what it means to acquire knowledge about the world. Funny, moving but also deadly serious, this book will be read for years to come

A new classic that bursts out of the global silence of Albania to tell us human truths about the politics of the past hundred years. . . It unfolds with revelation after revelation - both familial and national - as if written by a master novelist. As if it were, say, a novella by Tolstoy. That this very serious book is so much fun to read is a compliment to its graceful, witty, honest writer. A literary triumph

Illuminating and subversive, Free asks us to consider what happens to our ideals when they come into contact with imperfect places and people and what can be salvaged from the wreckage of the past

A young girl grows up in a repressive Communist state, where public certainties are happily accepted and private truths are hidden; as that world falls away, she has to make her own sense of life, based on conflicting advice, fragments of information and, above all, her own stubborn curiosity. Thought-provoking, deliciously funny, poignant, sharply observed and beautifully written, this is a childhood memoir like very few others -- a really marvellous book

Free is one of those very rare books that shows how history shapes people's lives and their politics. Lea Ypi is such a brilliant, powerful writer that her story becomes your story

Lea Ypi is a pathbreaking philosopher who is also becoming one of the most important public thinkers of our time. Here she draws on her unique historical experience to shed new light on the questions of freedom that matter to all of us. This extraordinary book is both personally moving and politically revolutionary. If we take its lessons to heart, it can help to set us free

I haven't in many years read a memoir from this part of the world as warmly inviting as this one. Written by an intellectual with story-telling gifts, Free makes life on the ground in Albania vivid and immediate

Lea Ypi has a wonderful gift for showing and not telling. In Free she demonstrates with humour, humanity and a sometimes painful honesty, how political communities without human rights will always end in cruelty. True freedom must be from both oppression and neglect

A funny and fascinating memoir

A rightly acclaimed account of loss of innocence in Albania from a master of subtext . . . Precise, acute, often funny and always accessible

A remarkable story, stunningly told

A vivid portrayal of how it felt to live through the transition from socialism to capitalism, Ypi's book will interest readers wishing to learn more about Albania during this tumultuous historical period, but also anyone interested in questioning the taken-for-granted ideological assumptions that underpin all societies and shape quotidian experiences in often imperceptible ways

A classic, moving coming-of-age story. . . Ypi is a beautiful writer and a serious political thinker, and in just a couple hundred readable pages, she takes turns between being bitingly, if darkly, funny (she skewers Stalinism and the World Bank with equal deadpan) and truly profound

Beguiling. . . the most probing memoir yet produced of the undefined 'transition' period after European communism. More profoundly a primer on how to live when old verities turn to dust. Ypi has written a brilliant personal history of disorientation, of what happens when the guardrails of everyday life suddenly fall away. . . Reading Free today is not so much a flashback to the Cold War as a glimpse of every society's possible pathway, a postcard from the future