After World War Two I served as a British member of the 'Monuments' section in Germany. Our task, I believe, was truly important - we were restoring to Europe evidence of its own civilization, which the War seemed virtually to have destroyed - and I was lucky to have had a chance to participate. It is excellent that Mr Edsel has now recorded this remarkable episode, and I am grateful to him for devoting so much energy to telling the stories of those involved.

Highly Readable ... a remarkable history

Engaging and inspiring

An engaging, absorbing work...a welcome Christmas stocking filler

A moving look at the harrowing stories behind a century of names inscribed on the war memorial of a small and sleepy Devon village

His book is at once a touching tribute to ordinary lives hallowed by the horrible accident of bring brutally cut off long before their allotted time; and a vivid testimony to why memory - personal and collective - matters so much both to individuals, and to our increasingly fissiparous and fractured nation

Cha demonstrates an intimate familiarity with the regime’s contradictions... The thesis is clear: the world’s most closed-off state needs to open up to survive, but breaking its hermetic seal may well precipitate its demise

An up-close, insightful portrait... The Impossible State is a clearheaded, bold examination of North Korea and its future

This is a useful book on how much of the outside world sees North Korea, and what North Korea sees of the outside world

Bailey's fascinating book takes us to the heart of a family tragedy ... this is a horrifying story of love, despair, intrigue, snobbery and upper class eccentricity which reads like fiction but is amazingly - and shockingly - real

The mysterious death of a Duke and a castle full of treacherous goings-on make The Secret Rooms a gripping read for fans of Downton Abbey. As thrilling as any fiction, Catherine Bailey uncovers the darkest depths of a family with plenty of skeletons in its closet

A brilliant contribution

Clark is fully alive to the challenges of the subject ... He provides vivid portraits of leading figures ... [He] also gives a rich sense of what contemporaries believed was at stake in the crises leading up to the war

In recent decades, many analysts had tended to put most blame for the disaster [of the First World War] on Germany. Clark strongly renews an older interpretation which sees the statesmen of many countries as blundering blindly together into war

A warm, affectionate portrait of the ballet world, and of success tinged with sadness

Thrilling

Utterly fascinating, and grippingly well-written. With extraordinary skill Wade Davis manages to weave together such disparate strands as Queen Victoria's Indian Raj, the 'Great Game' of intrigue against Russia, the horrors of the Somme, and Britain's obsession to conquer the world's highest peak

Davis’ descriptions of the trenches – the bodies, the smell, the madness – are some of the best I’ve ever read

Sheds new light on history that we thought we knew... meticulously detailed and very readable

The miracle is that there isn’t a dull page. As it moves towards its deadly climax, the story hangs together as tightly as a thriller. Into the Silence is as monumental as the mountain that soars above it; small wonder that it won the 2012 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction … Once you start wandering the snowy passes with Mallory and the lads, you won’t want to come down again. There can be no better way, surely, to spend a week in winter

He sees the climbers as haunted dreamers, harrowed by their desperate experiences in the First World War, living amid romantic dreams of Imperial grandeur and the elemental, sublime grandeur of the mountain

This is the awesomely researched story of Mallory, Irvine and the early Everest expeditions. It puts their efforts and motivations into the context of Empire and the first world war in a way I don’t think previous books have ever managed

A vivid depiction of a monumental story…Wade Davis’ passion for the book shines through and I can only hope that his next book doesn’t take as long to write as I will certainly be reading it