The greatest living historian of the Mediterranean

A towering achievement. No review can really do justice to the scale of Abulafia's achievement: in its epic sweep, eye for detail and lucid style.

Brocaded with studious observation and finely-tuned scholarship, the overall effect is mesmerising.

A memorable study, its scholarship tinged with indulgent humour and an authorial eye for bizarre detail.

The story is teeming with colourful characters, and Abulafia wears his scholarship lightly, even dashingly.

Deeply researched and gripping...it makes for harrowing reading

An illuminating look at an area of social history that inspired Wilkie Collins among others

Excellent... One often feels as if one is actually present at the scenes she describes. There can be no higher praise... Inconvenient People is as interesting a work of social history as you are ever likely to read.

Fascinating and chilling, Inconvenient People reads like a series of Victorian novels in brief - only all the tales are true

This superlative study opens the door on the cruelty of the quacks who locked up lost souls

Several riveting cases Sarah Wise has unearthed for this fine social history of contested lunacy in the 19th century... Wise has given us a fascinating book that teems with rich archival research. The pictorial sources are an added boon and make for a wonderfully illustrated addition to the history of the 19th century

Rich, gripping and moving mix of social history, psychiatry and storytelling

A dark and disturbing investigation...trenchant and disturbing book

There is so much to interest and entertain in this book, which is enhanced by over eighty informative illustrations

A wonderfully engaging book

Fascinating book (4 stars)

Wise reopens 12 uncontested lunacy cases from the 1800s, meticulously exploring the details of each and recreating the stories with a page-turning eye for a great narrative

Sarah Wise knows how to grab the reader’s attention with phrases that would have done Bulwer-Lytton proud. But the book’s readability does not disguise its scholarship. This is a valuable contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century

I thrilled to Sarah Wise’s Inconvenient People, an enthralling study of those who fell foul of Victorian mad-doctors and greedy relatives

It makes for a harrowing read, but much of it is also hilarious, and as gripping as the most lurid Victorian melodramatic novel. Yet again, one closes a book with the impression that beneath the polished mahogany surfaces and shimmering silks of Victorian interiors lurked Hell itself

1913 has narrative verve and insight

What emerges is a rich portrait and an important set of ideas

[Emmerson] takes the reader on a fascinating trip to the brash, bustling cities of North America, before heading off to places as diverse as Buenos Aires and Bombay

Magnificent

[Emmerson’s] entertaining tour d’horizon is both witty and charming.

A wonderful portrayal of a world before it was cataclysmically changed, a world very different from ours but with some frightening similarities

Brings the fantasies, anxieties and passions of city-dwellers immediately prior to the First World War eloquently to life

Emmerson provides a real sense of 1913 by combining details of individual lives with sweeping international trends: one of the great pleasures of this book is to see parallels between then and now

Unique... A high-definition snapshot of the world as it stood a century ago

A series of vivid vignettes... Offers fascinating glimpses of everyday life

A wonderful portrayal of a world before it was cataclysmically changed by war

Fascinating and sobering

[A] fascinating and lively history

Very complex – but you will grasp it

A fascination exploration

Highly readable but profoundly researched, The Trigger represents a bold exception to the deluge of First World War books devoted to mud, blood and poetry

a fascinating original portrait of a man and his country