Exceptional...balances analysis, history and human compassion in a narrative that leaves one shaken

Almost impossible to put down

The Second World War is one of the most written-about episodes in all world history: every month sees a dozen new titles published. Yet, astonishingly, The Raj at War breaks new ground on almost every page

A striking example of people’s history, packed with anecdotes, memories and information about a shared but largely unwritten global past

Unprecedented in scope...rich both in detail and in its unique insights... Khan's history has paved the way for a more complex understanding of the Second World War as India's War

A fascinating, vividly written history full of surprises, some of them shocking

Yasmin Khan...offers a richly researched social history of wartime India that is peppered with fascinating detail

Remarkable Account… Compassionate, judicious and brilliantly readable, this is a compelling account of a dramatic, but little examined, aspect of history

This fascinating book tells the story of World War Two's impact on India: the shattering of the ordered relations which underpinned the Raj making its end inevitable. It's also a much needed reminder of India's contribution to that war

Epic and intimate

Masterly

[Has] brought undeservedly obscure histories into a powerful and startling light

an intricately detailed insight into an underexplored area of wartime history

[Khan marshals] a dazzling array of first-hand sources – soldiers and politicians, but also non-combatants such as nurses, refugees, peasants and prostitutes – to illustrate the effect the conflict had on South Asian society and politics

[an] important book

Khan’s research has been extensive and she combines it with a gift for storytelling. She is at her best and most original in bringing us the revealing perspectives of witnesses other historians might ignore.

An exhaustively researched history that uses a dazzling array of first-hand sources to illustrate the effect the Second World War had on South Asian society and politics

[Khan] shows convincingly how Indians could no longer be fooled, or fool themselves, that the British presence was either benign or irreversible

Revelatory study… Khan balances analysis, history and human compassion in a narrative that leaves one shaken.

Khan has written a first class book... Exceptionally well told facts throughout the book, I was staggered at her revelations … It is a bitter, sweet story throughout … Overall, the book enlightened me in many ways, perhaps it makes me regard the Indian in a different light today. It certainly has made me look up other deeper facts about various matters pertaining to the era of the Second World War, and that has to be a good inducement to read the book.

A delightful read about the ebb and flow of thoughts in one extraordinary man’s mind

Drawing on [Aubrey’s] manuscripts and letters, [Ruth Scurr] has fashioned, as chronologically as possible, an autobiography in the form of the diary that Aubrey never wrote. It fits him perfectly… Ms Scurr has done him proud

Aubrey was a delightful, self-deprecating man ... A conventional biography of Aubrey could easily have become a portrait of the time through which he had lived, allowing the man himself to be overshadowed ... Instead, Ruth Scurr has invented the diary Aubrey might have written, incorporating his own chaotic, sometimes scrappy literary remains to form a continuous narrative. ... lucky him to have been accorded a biography as whimsical as his own self

Scurr’s book illuminates and poignantly captures the voice of a man more often a “ghostly record keeper” in his own writing

John Aubrey brilliantly reconfigures the art of biography

Bold and imaginative recreation of the diary of the 17th-century antiquary. It shows how close a scrupulous and unselfregarding biographer can come to the savour of a life

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.