[A] brilliant and perceptive book about a part of the world, as [Shore] explains, ‘where the past is palpable and heavy’ ... part memoir, part reportage, a treatise on the philosophy of history, and part romance written with lyrical beauty in places…there’s an interesting and original idea on almost every page.

Part-memoir, part-intellectual history, Shore’s book follows her journey into the heart of the Polish and Czech intelligentsia, exploring their reactions to and involvement in the Holocaust, the purges and the revolutions that dominate 20th century Eastern European history….poignant and thought-provoking.

Her fine book is a very personal account of the people that she came to know in eastern Europe after the end of Soviet domination in 1989… The novelty of Shore’s approach lies in her focus on the families of Poland’s Stalinists.

[Shore’s] kaleidoscope book of reminiscences and encounters gives an authentic feel to the difficulties that outsiders often have in making sense of this intricate history…Ms Shore…does an excellent job of bringing to life the still rancorous relations between Jews of rival persuasions.

Beautifully written, brilliantly perceptive and often moving… With the opening of the archives, many excellent histories of communist eastern Europe have appeared in recent years… but I cannot think of any that succeed so well as this. In combining subtle historical judgements with literary flair, Shore has produced a masterpiece.

The Taste of Ashes is about more than the floodwaters of history; it's the story of those who learned to swim, those who didn't, and those still adapting to an era of accelerated change. This is a brilliant, lyrical and gripping book, one woven from stories that will linger in the minds of readers for years to come.

With deep respect for what the historian can and cannot know and what the witness can and cannot share, Marci Shore has achieved something rare: a narrative history that is also a philosophy of history. Her subject is Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Stalinism, but her stories of people and places - tragic, ironic, carnavalesque - have a universal appeal.

Marci Shore has written a one-of-a-kind book - a personal, intellectual, literary and historical tour of contemporary Central Europe - with something in it for everyone who wants to understand this fascinating part of the world.

Shore … writes first rate reportage in these cool-eyed but warm-hearted dispatches from the former Soviet bloc.

Shore is attentive to the ethnic strife unleashed by the ‘Pandora’s Box’ of one-party dictatorship as well as to the sinister propaganda of fundamentalist Christians.

Gripping…[Shore] describes her travels and expresses her feelings so openly and engagingly.

Part travelogue, part history, part archaeology, this multi-faceted book seeks out what is familiar – and what is not… This is an enriching and eclectic book.

A thoughtful and entertaining reminder that, long before the Anglo-Saxons, the Romans gave an identity to "a land as ferocious as its people".

It’s a compelling travelogue and Higgins’s passion for discovery shines out.

[She] is witty, rangy, unapologetically goofy and erudite at once.

This book will be of interest to those who want to see and learn more about a significant period in British history.

Higgins wears her considerable erudition lightly and nimbly hops between her knowledge of the classics and the changing perception of the ancients by the British of the past few centuries.

A very personal encounter with Roman Britain… Invites us to see our landscape and history as the Romans first imagined and wrote about them – strange and exotic islands, perched on the edge of the known world.

[Higgins] is as sharp and sensitive an observer of the latest version of Britannia as she is of the earliest one… Each chapter is not just a regional itinerary but also a brilliantly constructed and often exhilaratingly poetic treatment of wider themes.

Records [Higgins’] own travels around the island in search of Roman traces. She includes plenty of anecdotes about the continuing fascination with the Roman past and its penetration of the present.

Higgins produced another remarkable British travelogue… that was at once thoughtful, learned, witty and superbly written.

Filled with passion and personal interest… Higgins walks us around the landscape of this country as it would have been 2,000 years ago, and in doing so she ably captures the spirit of Britain now, Britain then and Britain in between.

Whether at Hadrian’s Wall or in a car park in the City, she [Higgins] shows how Roman traces are woven through British life.

A fascinating look at how we have viewed Rome's presence in these islands and what a debt we still owe to Roman achievements.

Part history, part travelogue, [Higgins] also brings to life the eccentric archaeologists who have tried to recapture that lost civilisation.

A fresh and readable account

Under Another Sky is not only a work of personal history, it is more personal than that... It is conversational, anecdotal, in a way that makes it easy for [Higgins] to slip in quite a lot of information

A delightful, effortlessly engaging handbook to the half-lost, half-glimpsed world of Roman Britain... The result is an utterly original history, lyrically alive to the haunting presence of the past and our strange and familiar ancestors

The beauty of this book is not just in the elegant prose and in the precision with which [Higgins] skewers her myths. It is in the sympathy she shows for the myth-makers.

Evocative...a keen-eyed tour of Britain.

Packed with fascinating and thought-provoking insights.

A captivating travelogue.

A delightfully heady and beautifully written potpourri of a book.

A fascinating look at the debt we owe to Roman achievements

A fascination exploration

Highly readable but profoundly researched, The Trigger represents a bold exception to the deluge of First World War books devoted to mud, blood and poetry

a fascinating original portrait of a man and his country