The brevity of this remarkable book belies the amount of work that went into it. One can only marvel at how well Professor Simms has gone through the original sources - the surviving journals, reminiscences and letters of the individual combatants - to produce a coherent and gripping narrative

A superb little book that is micro-history at its best

Mr. Simms's fluent and meticulously researched narrative provides enough context to engage not only specialists, but also readers unfamiliar with the broader historical background...by focusing upon a particular episode, rather than the bigger picture, Mr. Simms manages to reflect the grim reality of Waterloo better than some more comprehensive surveys

[Simms] tells more about realities of boots-on-the-ground combat than any other Waterloo book I have encountered. A five-gun read.

Larson's irresistibly pacey narrative moves between the various scenes of action, conjuring them up in vivid detail...the sources are remarkable...[his] detailed conversational endnotes are an added bonus.

A gripping piece of narrative history which moves almost with the same speed as Schwieger's torpedo.

Larson has an eye for haunting, unexploited detail...illuminating...suspenseful.

The master of popular non-fiction...a gripping account.

Larson's page turner brings the disaster to life.

Larson's approach to history resembles a novelist's... a rattling read.

Gripping...absorbing...however, it is when dealing with the aftermath of the tragedy, along with the attendant conspiracy theories, that Larson breaks new ground. I found it very hard to put down.

Larson . . . writes non-fiction books that read like novels, real page-turners. This one is no exception . . . thoroughly engrossing

Riveting

Thought-provoking

Superb study

[A] riveting account of how these ordinary Germans experienced and sustained the war

Places a flashlight inside the heads of “ordinary” Germans… Thought provoking

well written and human account of a period of madness and how individuals sought to make sense of it

Nicholas Stargardt spotlights the surprising twists and turns in the popular embrace of both the war and Nazi racial extremism. He explains—as few have—why the German people fought to the finish, whereas even the supposedly fanatical Japanese surrendered before an invasion of the homeland

Ambitious and absorbing new book.

[A] revelatory book.

I enjoyed this book immensely…This book fills a vast gap in our knowledge of history and I am glad to have read it.

This is a compelling book…It’s a story of endurance – of place as well as people – and ultimately, it’s uplifting.

A brilliant way of coming at the history of Berlin and Germany itself, which shows how people coped with the vicissitudes of the regime.

Harding has recorded the fate of the house and its inhabitants, from the Weimar republic until reunification. This is German history in microcosm ... as exciting as a good historical novel.

An inspirational read: highly recommended.

A genuinely remarkable work of biographical innovation.

I’d like to reread Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey every Christmas for at least the next five years: I love being between its humane pages, which celebrate both scholarly companionship and deep feeling for the past

Ruth Scurr’s innovative take on biography has an immediacy that brings the 17th century alive

Anyone who has not read Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey can have a splendid time reading it this summer. Scurr has invented an autobiography the great biographer never wrote, using his notes, letters, observations – and the result is gripping

A triumph, capturing the landscape and the history of the time, and Aubrey’s cadence.

A brilliantly readable portrait in diary form. Idiosyncratic, playful and intensely curious, it is the life story Aubrey himself might have written.

Scurr knows her subject inside out.

The diligent Scurr has evidence to support everything… Learning about him is to learn more about his world than his modest personality, but Scurr helps us feel his pain at the iconoclasm and destruction wrought by the Puritans without resorting to overwrought language.

Acclaimed and ingeniously conceived semi-fictionalised autobiography… Scurr’s greatest achievement is to bring both Aubrey and his world alive in detail that feels simultaneously otherworldly and a mirror of our own age… It’s hard to think of a biographical work in recent years that has been so bold and so wholly successful.