Electric ... [a] magisterial and essential book

[A] tour de force ... wonderful ... brilliantly written history ... Townshend's book can only inspire admiration

Highly detailed and rich ... [a] magisterial and judicious narrative ... this must surely be one of the definitive texts on this period of Anglo-Irish history

Charles Townshend's monumental work [is] bold in ambition, scope and execution ... a work of broad and confident understanding, characterised by a uniform care in its approach to complex and controversial material ... An intensely compelling and often discomfiting narrative, which candidly explores four years of personal and intimate violence

Magisterial ... intensely gruelling but hugely impressive ... for people who prefer to know the facts ... [a] fine achievement of breathing new life into a subject that some historians might assume had already been done to death

For those interested in a reliable and empathetic introduction to the topic, this is now the best place to start

A great read ... it has certainly set a very high standard for others to measure up to

A well-sourced, severely objective account of the origins and courses of the wars that followed the Easter Rising

Charles Townshend's The Republic . . . nails the Irish revolutionary events of 1918-23 with his inimitable kind of forensic panache

Not the typical testosterone-driven account that plagues the war-memoir genre. His straightforward, unself-conscious writing paints an absorbing picture of war in the twenty-first century.

At times, The Long Walk...is almost unbearable to read. Not because the writing is bad — it’s often excellent. It’s unbearable because of Castner’s brutally vivid descriptions of the war and the way it tore apart his mind and his life.... An important book to read for anyone who wants to get some sense of the long-term human toll of the Iraq war. How many soldiers have been damaged as Castner has? How many lives and families have been destroyed — or will be — by the effects of TBI? The Long Walk brings home in a visceral way the hidden, personal burden of war that many veterans continue to carry.

A brutally honest, sharply observed account of life at war. Both harrowing and poignant - an intensely personal story.

The Long Walk is a powerful, intimate, disturbing look at the ways that war can infect the life of a soldier. By the end of the story...we’ve watched him fight a deftly drawn series of battles, from the physical, to the emotional, to the existential. Each one of these is more intense and wrenching than the last. The Long Walk is not for the faint of heart. Castner tells us what he is thinking and feeling at all times and has the magnificent ability to fill his scenes with the suspense of the moment. It is the ultimate show-not-tell.

Raw and entirely convincing. There are some extraordinarily tense set-pieces but, just as powerfully, the tales from Iraq are interspersed with what happened to Castner when he got home.

Intelligent, well-informed.

Has a lot more to offer than the usual facts and figures thrown together about a largely forgotten part of history… This has a certain amount of written fluidity… I have read any number of books about this subject and I have to say that this is one of the best researched that I have found… I found it a satisfying read throughout, I learnt a lot and filled in a few holes in my knowledge, an excellent book.