'Fascinating...a breathtaking blend of memoir, investigative research and imagination'

'Skillfully weaving personal and archival history, The Last Mission gives us a haunting glimpse of just how close we came to the brink of waging a final desperate war on Japanese soil'

'The Last Mission is an exciting, highly readable, minute-to-minute account of the last air raid on Tokyo, which, according to co-author Jim Smith, a participant in the attack, foiled a Japanese army attempt to prevent the emperor from surrendering to the Allies and a Soviet plan to occupy Japan'

The Black Jacobins is one of the great books of the twentieth century ... one that wrote the history of a people supposedly without history.

James is, quite simply, the outstanding West Indian of the twentieth century.

A starting point and an intellectual inspiration ... a classic of masterly historical writing.

James is not afraid to touch his pen with the flame of ardent personal feeling - a sense of justice, love of freedom, admiration for heroism, hatred for tyranny - and his detailed, richly documented and dramatically written book holds a deep and lasting interest.

Revolutionarily, the book abandoned the old narrative of black victimhood in favour of accenting the agency of the formerly enslaved who, fuelled by a desire for liberty, fought to achieve autonomy.

The standard and the main text through which the Haitian revolution is studied ... a book I've read back to back many times ... An incredibly brilliant book, an undeniably magnificent contribution to scholarship.

Reading and rereading The Black Jacobins, I am struck by its incredible wit and humanity, and James' determination to write a history of slavery in the Caribbean in which people of African descent appear as thinking, feeling human agents - in other words, as the protagonists of their own history and not background characters in an essentially European story.