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The House By The Thames
The House By The Thames
Oct 17, 2024 7:58 PM

Author:Gillian Tindall

The House By The Thames

Just across the River Thames from St Paul’s Cathedral stands an old and elegant house. Over the course of almost 450 years the dwelling on this site has witnessed many changes. From its windows, people have watched the ferrymen carry Londoners to and from Shakespeare’s Globe; they have gazed on the Great Fire; they have seen the countrified lanes of London’s marshy south bank give way to a network of wharves, workshops and tenements – and then seen these, too, become dust and empty air.

Rich with anecdote and colour, this fascinating book breathes life into the forgotten inhabitants of the house – the prosperous traders; an early film star; even some of London’s numberless poor. In so doing it makes them stand for legions of others and for a whole world that we have lost through hundreds of years of London’s history.

Reviews

Mesmeric... This book is not just for London enthusiasts. Tindall has demonstrated a genius for a certain kind of social history that, in shining a light on one small place, illuminated a huge amount around... A rare instance of a history book that, in its optimism about the indomitable spirit of the place, raises the hairs on the back of your neck.

—— Sinclair McKay , Sunday Telegraph

Fascinating... Gillian Tindall brilliantly deploys contemporary observations to bring the centuries alive.

—— Christopher Howse , Tablet

Delightful... Tindall's story is truthful and unexaggerated, combining elegantly elegiac prose with imaginative empathy and descriptive power.

—— Jessica Mann , Literary Review

William Dobson is that rare thinker who combines a gift for storytelling with a farsighted understanding of how the world works. He is one of the best new voices writing about global politics today

—— Fareed Zakaria

A brilliant and original analysis of the nature of modern authoritarianism

—— Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag

It is hard to imagine a timelier book than this one... Anyone seeking to make sense of the extraordinary tide of revolutions and protests sweeping around the world will find [this] an indispensable read

—— Anne-Marie Slaughter, Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University, and former Director of Policy Planning, U.S. State Department

An astute analysis

—— Sunday Business Post

Timely

—— Big Issue in the North

Fascinating

—— Good Book Guide

Absorbing

—— Daily Mail

A glorious read!

—— Mojomums

A splendid pontine read.

—— Londonist

A delightful and informative romp.

—— Richard Boon , N16

As a chronicle of social and architectural history, this is an informative and fun read

—— Bookbag

Tindall transforms bricks and mortar into fascinating social history

—— Christopher Hirst , Independent

The interest here lies in the accurate and plausible portrait of a whole society, from top to bottom… The details are fascinating

—— Guardian

The avowed aim of this fascinating history of neighbours is to explore the delicate balance between people’s determination to protect their privacy and their simultaneous wish to cultivate contact with those who live close by

—— Good Book Guide

A very personal encounter with Roman Britain… Invites us to see our landscape and history as the Romans first imagined and wrote about them – strange and exotic islands, perched on the edge of the known world.

—— UK Regional Press

[Higgins] is as sharp and sensitive an observer of the latest version of Britannia as she is of the earliest one… Each chapter is not just a regional itinerary but also a brilliantly constructed and often exhilaratingly poetic treatment of wider themes.

—— Emily Gowers , Times Literary Supplement

Records [Higgins’] own travels around the island in search of Roman traces. She includes plenty of anecdotes about the continuing fascination with the Roman past and its penetration of the present.

—— Oldie

Higgins produced another remarkable British travelogue… that was at once thoughtful, learned, witty and superbly written.

—— William Dalrymple , Observer

Filled with passion and personal interest… Higgins walks us around the landscape of this country as it would have been 2,000 years ago, and in doing so she ably captures the spirit of Britain now, Britain then and Britain in between.

—— Dan Jones , Telegraph

Whether at Hadrian’s Wall or in a car park in the City, she [Higgins] shows how Roman traces are woven through British life.

—— Financial Times

A fascinating look at how we have viewed Rome's presence in these islands and what a debt we still owe to Roman achievements.

—— Good Book Guide

Part history, part travelogue, [Higgins] also brings to life the eccentric archaeologists who have tried to recapture that lost civilisation.

—— Robbie Millen , The Times

A fresh and readable account

—— Fachtna Kelly , Sunday Business Post

Under Another Sky is not only a work of personal history, it is more personal than that... It is conversational, anecdotal, in a way that makes it easy for [Higgins] to slip in quite a lot of information

—— Nicholas Lezard , Guardian

A delightful, effortlessly engaging handbook to the half-lost, half-glimpsed world of Roman Britain... The result is an utterly original history, lyrically alive to the haunting presence of the past and our strange and familiar ancestors

—— Christopher Hart , Sunday Times

The beauty of this book is not just in the elegant prose and in the precision with which [Higgins] skewers her myths. It is in the sympathy she shows for the myth-makers.

—— Peter Stothard , The Times

Evocative...a keen-eyed tour of Britain.

—— Christopher Hirst , Independent

Packed with fascinating and thought-provoking insights.

—— Herald

A captivating travelogue.

—— Helena Gumley-Mason , Lady

A delightfully heady and beautifully written potpourri of a book.

—— BBC History Magazine

A fascinating look at the debt we owe to Roman achievements

—— Good Book Guide

One of those fantastical novels that tells us more about the realities of being human than most realist novels do…the most thrilling and moving experience fiction has to offer this year.

—— TIME (Top 10 Fiction Books of Year)

Kate Atkinson's audacious novel plays a virtuoso game with the nature of fiction...her best book to date and a worthy winner of a Costa Prize.

—— Daily Telegraph
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