The larger than life story of one of the West's most productive Cold War counter-intelligence agents - a man who to the CIA's embarrassment turned out also to be a bigamist and a romancer who claimed publicly to be the last descendent of the Russian Czar and heir to his fortune. A made for Hollywood page turner, it's a fascinating read and highly recommended.

Totally gripping . . . a masterpiece. Tate lifts the lid on one of the most important and complex spies of the Cold War, who passed secrets to the West and finally unmasked traitor George Blake.

A brilliant and gripping exploration of one of the last great espionage enigmas of the twentieth century. Unputdownable.

A wonderful and at times mind-boggling account of a bizarre and almost forgotten spy - right up to the time when he's living undercover in Queens, New York and claiming to be the last of the Romanoffs.

A highly readable and thoroughly researched account of one of the Cold War's most intriguing and tragic spy stories.

A dark history of nostalgia... a timely book... Woods selects and deploys her material well, persuading the reader, in the course of an enjoyable book, that a feeling full of sweetness and sadness is also a dark and dangerous force

Woods is a sharp, iconoclastic writer... A great book

Eye-opening and thoughtful... Woods has a bright future ahead of her

A must read for anyone wanting to see current events and ideologies in light of the past, and understand where the roots of our sense of a nation originated

Fascinating and timely, Rule, Nostalgia is an eye-opening history of Britain's enduring fixation with its own past

I heartily recommend Rule, Nostalgia. [It] helps explain where we are, as well as where we came from

I love this book, a witty, acerbic but warm look at how our national character is built on yearning for a glorious past that is just gone, and actually probably never existed. Nostalgia ain't what it used to be

Our national story is so much stranger than we think: this book brilliantly insists that we look at it afresh

Well-argued, timely and hugely entertaining. A great piece of popular history

A great, scholarly history, and so searingly relevant

An utterly eye-opening and enthralling debut, clearly laying out our uniquely British obsession with nostalgia. Required reading for anyone who wants to use the term 'culture war'... I absolutely loved it

A smart, entertaining and meticulously researched backwards look (quite literally) at Britain's history of looking over its shoulder. Deconstructs the lure of the fictitious 'good old days' and how they have been weaponised throughout history. Excellent

Outstanding. A thrilling, elegant and highly original interrogation of how we use our pasts

Nostalgia was once considered a terminal condition. Hannah Woods suggests that the culture needs to book itself in for a check-up. Provocative and well-argued, Rule, Nostalgia offers the diagnosis that might lead us to a cure

A triumphal backwards tour through the history of Britain's relationship with its own past. This funny, sad, wise and brilliantly informative book is a crash course in the many pasts that have made our presents

Rule, Nostalgia is radiant with an enthusiast's passion for their subject, and makes a convincing case that Britain's history is sufficiently weird, fascinating and marvellous, without rewriting it into comforting fables

Rule, Nostalgia is a triumphal backwards tour through the history of Britain's relationship with its own past, a chronicle of our state of perpetual longing for a paradise just gone. Woods' eye is ironic, but never without sympathy as she teases apart the nested structures of mourning and nostalgia on which out national identity is built. This funny, sad, wise and brilliantly informative book is both a plea for historiographical literacy and a crash course in the many pasts that have made our presents

Bold and original, with a cool intelligence, and so very truthful about the colonialist structure of British society: how it has poisoned even our language, making its necessary dismantling almost the stuff of dreams. I take hope from Assembly, not just for our literature but also for our slow awakening

Mind-bending and utterly original. It's like Thomas Bernhard in the key of Rachel Cusk but about black subjectivity

Brilliantly sharp and curiously Alice-like... It centres on a gifted and driven young Black woman navigating a topsy-turvy and increasingly maddening modern Britain... Her indictment is forensic, clear, elegant, a prose-polished looking glass held up to her not-so-post-colonial nation. Only one puzzle remains unsolved: how a novel so slight can bear such weight

A piercing, cautionary tale about the costs of assimilating into a society still in denial about its colonial past. Brown writes with the deftness and insight of a poet

Bold, elegant, and all the more powerful for its brevity, Assembly captures the sickening weightlessness which a Black British woman, who has been obedient to and complicit with the capitalist system, experiences as she makes life-changing decisions under the pressure of the hegemony

This is a stunning achievement of compressed narrative and fearless articulation

One of the most talked-about debuts of the year . . . you'll read it in one sitting

Thrilling... Brown gets straight to the point. With delivery as crisp and biting into an apple, she short-circuits expectation... This is [the narrator's] story, and she will tell it how she wishes, unpicking convention and form. Like The Drivers' Seat by Muriel Spark, it's thrilling to see a protagonist opting out and going her own way

A nuanced, form-redefining exploration on class, work, gender and race

Across 100 lean pages, Brown deftly handles a gigantic literary heritage... Her style rivals the best contemporary modernists, like Eimear McBride and Rachel Cusk; innocuous or obscure on a first reading, punching on a second... Assembly is only the start

There's something of Isherwood in Brown's spare, illuminating prose... A series of jagged-edged shards that when accumulated form an unhappy mirror in which modern Britain might examine itself

A debut novel as slender and deadly as an adder

A razor-sharp debut... This powerful short novel suggests meaningful discussion of race is all but impossible if imperialism's historical violence remains taboo

Bold, spare, agonisingly well-observed. An impressive debut

Excoriating, unstoppable... The simplicity of the narrative allows complexity in the form: over barely a hundred pages, broken into prose fragments that have been assembled with both care and mercilessness

Beguiling and beautifully written, this is the work of an author with a bright future

Coruscating originality, emotional potency, astonishing artistic vim... This signals the arrival of a truly breathtaking literary voice... A scintillating tour de force

Fierce and accomplished, Assembly interrogates the high cost of surviving in a system designed to exclude you

I was blown away by Assembly, an astonishing book that forces us to see what's underpinning absolutely everything

Coiled and charged, a small shockwave... Sometimes you come across a short novel of such compressed intensity that you wonder why anyone would bother reading longer narratives... [Assembly] casts a huge shadow

A masterwork . . . it contains centuries of wisdom, aesthetic experimentation and history. Brown handles her debut with a surgeon's control and a musician's sensitivity to sound

An extraordinary book, and a compelling read that had me not only gripped but immediately determined to listen again... Highly recommended

'As utterly, urgently brilliant as everyone has said. A needle driven directly into the sclerotic heart of contemporary Britain. Beautiful proof that you don't need to write a long book, just a good book'

Every line of this electrifying debut novel pulses with canny social critique

Devastatingly eloquent, bold, poignant

An achievement that will leave you wondering just how it's possible that this is only the author's very first work... Brown packs so much commentary and insight inside of every single sentence... Original and startling all at once. After reading Assembly, I cannot wait to see what Natasha Brown does next

[Brown's] work is like that of an excellent photographer - you feel like you are finally seeing the world sharply and without the common filters. That is hypnotising

A brilliantly compressed, existentially daring study of a high-flying Black woman negotiating the British establishment