The European Union: A Citizen's Guide by Chris Bickerton is a good place to find out how Europe works: the European council, the council of Europe and the Byzantine committee structure that operates in virtual secrecy... My advice is this. Use Bickerton... to learn how the EU works... And then, whatever Cameron says, you can make up your own mind about the future

An unlikely bestseller

A lucid, helpful guide to the EU's structures and operating methods

An indispensable book for these times

Provocative

A timely account of the EU's byzantine bureaucratic procedures and political rules

Cruickshank’s history laments the City’s encroachment on Spitalfields and the attendant growth there of estate agents, internet companies, fashion outlets and beardy hipster capitalists bent on having their slice of East End exotica.

A delight to read . . . Teaches one how to use one's eyes more intelligently.

Particularly interesting is the story of Elder Street viewed through architectural sources, taxes and censuses. It acts as a microcosm showing the changes Britain faced over the centuries.

This is an elegy to a place changing beyond recognition . . . Cruickshank is an appealing, sympathetic writer.

For history lovers, this is an excellent read . . . Cruickshank's meticulous research is breathtaking.

[Spitalfields'] raffish vitality is derived from the area's long history of embracing immigrants . . . Cruickshank warns that the greatest threat to Spitalfields comes from the ever-encroaching march of tower blocks.

French Protestants in the 17th century, Irish journeymen in the 18th, Russian Jews in the 19th, Bengalis in the 20th and international hipsters in the 21st have settled in Spitalfields, an area either side of London's Commercial Street that must be, square metre for square metre, among the most migrated-to places in the world. It is so dense with stories that Dan Cruickshank's 750-page history of this 'handful of streets', published last year, feels too short.

Roper…has an extraordinary talent for making complex theological issues not just clear but entertaining.

Beautifully written… Among the most interesting, provocative and original biographies of Luther to appear in recent years… This unfailingly inventive and compelling account is a welcome gust of fresh air… Anyone seriously interested in one of the most influential figures of the last half-millennium will need to make time to read this one.

[It is] fresh and captivating… A closely focused and compellingly intimate study of Luther’s perceptions.

[A] rewarding biography… Roper brings him alive as a very human figure.

This is the book about Luther we’ve missed among all the holy books and the case studies: the whole engrossing story of a soul and a mind and the man who broke the old world and its old ways for ever. Lyndal Roper brings alive the struggle for ideas, adds a subtle sense of how human beings work, and distils a lifetime of scholarship to conjure Luther’s own world with its princes, demons, scandals and sheer brave defiance of a whole old order

Compelling and above all deeply honest biography.

This book will continue to bring the reformer and his theology to life for generations to come.

[An] excellent study.

*****

Roper’s Luther is an angry man: a renegade and a rebel… [She] paints a vivid picture of the political and economic context in Mansfeld, where Luther grew up, and of the situation of Wittenberg and its political governance. There are important findings here, particularly relating to Luther’s early life

Roper writes with the virtuosity of an unsurpassed archival researcher, the grace of an elegant stylist, and the compassion of a seasoned student of human nature. Her nuanced and insightful portrait brilliantly evokes the inner and outer worlds of the man Luther. The book is a complete triumph.

Magnificent and surely definitive – a work of immense scholarship, acute psychological insight and gloriously fluent prose. Lyndal Roper has got under the skin of her subject and the result is thrilling.

Roper’s scholarly strengths plus 10 years of careful research have yielded a richly contextualised biography of a man whose influence has been and remains enormous, for good or ill or both.

This is a helpful and insightful examination of Luther’s attitudes and relationships… Highly recommended.

Roper portrays a deeply flawed but fascinating human being to rival any of the major personalities of Tudor England.

I heartily commend Martin Luther… It is simply the best English-language biography of Luther I’ve read and I’d be amazed if its combination of rigorous scholarship and approachable tone is bettered.

[A] superb new biography… A challenging and deeply stimulating study of a major historical figure.

The work of a brilliant scholar, who had devoted years of research to the project, and it repays careful reading… There are rich treasures in the book, without a bout. Roper has a great gift for narrative… Roper’s exploration of the cultural and social world of the Saxon miners is masterly… Fascinating.

A probing psychological account.