Elegaic... Her books are carefully wrought acts of restoration... In The Pulse Glass, Tindall, reflects on a lifetime's interest in historical recovery

Tindall writes with affecting precision... Reading this book feels like looking out of the window on a long train journey. One is lulled by the rhythms into deep reflection and inexplicable nostalgia for the lives and landscapes of others

An excellent suite of essays on transience and remembrance... Gillian Tindall is a high-minded Autolycus, devoted not merely to snapping up the “unconsidered trifles” of past lives but holding them to the light to glean the stories they might conceal

Tindall specialises in the overlooked, the underappreciated. She is very much a local historian, if you take that to mean that everything local can become universal; that the stories of ordinary people are as worth telling as the grand, the famous, the notorious... Tantalising... Tindall is a fine historian and writes with a wryness of everyday human foibles

Gillian Tindall has a richly furnished mind, as full of pigeonholes and secret drawers as an old-fashioned Victorian desk… Tapping at floorboards, exploring cellars, leafing through yellowing love letters…she unearths what she can about the worlds we have lost

Unambiguously and successfully an antidote to the cliché of the 'Dark Ages' as a millennium of stagnation and regression . . . Falk's approach is to explain the things we share with our medieval forebears and the things we differ on: to reveal how they saw the universe

Riveting. . . a brilliant study of medieval astronomy and learning . . . I agree with Falk. We need to give more respect to the giants of the Middle Ages on whose shoulders we stand

Fascinating . . . the Dark Ages were anything but dark; Falk's book is a lucid and eloquent reproof to anyone who says otherwise

Seb Falk lays out the wonders of medieval science. . . The mechanical clock, spectacles, advances in navigation, a grasp of tides and currents - these were among the achievements of the Middle Ages

A wonderful book, as at home bringing to life the obscure details of a Hertfordshire monk as it is explicating the infinite reaches of space and time. Required reading for anyone who thinks that the Middle Ages were a dark age

Compulsive, brilliantly clear, and superbly well-written, The Light Ages is more than just a very good book on medieval science: it's a charismatic evocation of another world. Seb Falk uses the monk John of Westwyk to weld us into the medieval ways of imagining as well as thinking. And there are surprises galore for everyone, no matter how knowledgeable they may think they are. I can't recommend it highly enough

If you think the term 'medieval science' is a contradiction then you should read this hugely enlightening and important book

Like a fictional scientist cloning dinosaurs from wisps of DNA, Seb Falk takes barely surviving fragments of evidence about an almost forgotten astronomer in a storm-chilled, clifftop cell to conjure the vast, teeming world of scientific research, practice and invention in the late Middle Ages. Profoundly scholarly, wonderfully lucid and grippingly vivid, The Light Ages will awe the pedants and delight the public

Seb Falk has framed a fascinating book around his personal quest to understand how scientific thinking flourished. The Light Ages reveals the intellectual sophistication that flourished against a backdrop of ritual and liturgy. It offers for most of us a novel perspective on a 'dark' historical era, and should fascinate a wide readership

Long before the word 'scientist' was coined, John of Westwyk devised a precision instrument to explore the universe and our place in it. Falk recreates the schooling of this ordinary (if gadget-obsessed) medieval monk in loving detail. There's a world of science on every page