Mortimer's accessible guidebook format brings...[Regency Britain] vividly to life

Ian Mortimer has made this kind of imaginative time travel his speciality.

[An] excellent book... Mortimer's erudition is formidable, and he rarely writes a dull sentence

An entertaining and enlightening read

[Mortimer] succeeds, rather brilliantly, in making a mass of information accessible and entertaining

Ian Mortimer's Time Traveller's Guide to Regency Britain tells you all you need to know about criminals, disease, beggars and other late Georgian delights if you ever find yourself visiting the 1790s

[Mortimer] has already written guides to the medieval, Elizabethan and Restoration periods, and now he's bringing that same mix of telling anecdote and pithy research to Regency Britain, that funny wedge of time squeezed between the Georgians and the Victorians

Thrilling...when you read it, you imagine yourself among your ancestors, and they are as awful and ingenious as we are

Excellent ... Mortimer's erudition is formidable, and he rarely writes a dull sentence ... Georgette Heyer's research for her novels would have been so much easier with this book on her shelf. As for Jane Austen, she would have found in its pages not only her own world, but other Regency worlds she probably never knew existed. And now, two hundred years later, so can we

Every page of The Time Traveller's Guide to Regency Britain is crammed with enlightening information

As entertaining as it is inventive

Put away your Austen: this eye-popping microhistory spares no detail of the slums, squalor and bad dentistry of Regency Britain; a lost world springs from the page

As his outstanding books on Halifax, Salisbury and Churchill also demonstrate, he is a master of the biography. ... Roberts systematically, cogently and helpfully reinterprets his subject's role and reputation.

In this mammoth and meticulous biography, Andrew Roberts presents a compelling case for the defence of George III.

Such is Roberts's persuasive interpretation, supported by a wide range of sources and argued with keen insight into political realities. ... It must be hoped that Andrew Roberts's important, serious and timely book plays an appropriate role in the rethinking that can now hardly be avoided.

magnificent ... In Andrew Roberts, George has found his Boswell, but one with the wit and erudition of a Johnson. Britain's most misunderstood monarch he may have been, but this biographer has entered into this conscientious king's troubled mind with more than customary empathy.

Roberts harnesses a truly extraordinary amount of archival information to offer a comprehensive grasp of a rather tragic, thoroughly misunderstood king.

This outstanding new biography of George III is timely. The first of the Hanoverians to identify as British was mocked, slandered and vilified during his lifetime and is still regularly cited in the American media as the epitome of tyranny. Over the past two centuries historians have dismissed him as incompetent and despotic. Andrew Roberts has no time for such ill-founded nonsense. ... George has found a true champion in Andrew Roberts, who has ridden up gallantly to challenge unfounded prejudice. ... This impressively researched and scholarly account of the King's life and travails is compulsively readable and, in its tragic end, deeply moving. It is full of fascinating detail, insightful vignettes and vivid local colour.

Andrew Roberts's mighty Life, drawing on masses of unseen papers locked up in Windsor Castle, turns on its head the lazy idea of George III as a tyrant halfwit...every page is entertaining

This hefty book - elegantly written, the fruit of extensive research - is the case for the defence of Britain's "most misunderstood monarch".

Deeply researched, it ranges with equal authority from his private life to the military history of the American War of Independence; its tenacious fairness towards its subject gives it the sort of polemical edge that one finds in revisionist history at its best.

No other writer, except possibly Alan Bennett, has set out to make us love King George more. Or admire him more ... What makes Roberts's massive biographies so distinctively rewarding is that he provides the reader with enough evidence to undermine his own conclusions.

The book which impressed me most, and which I most enjoyed, this year is Andrew Roberts's George III. It is based on such astonishingly wide-ranging and original research that I felt I was reading about the period for the first time. Unknown facts and wonderful anecdotes had me turning the pages with a curiosity I seldom feel when reading about supposedly familiar events. Andrew Roberts is remarkably even-handed, and there is no special pleading on behalf of this genuinely misunderstood and wilfully misrepresented monarch who did his best to be a good constitutional ruler during a very choppy period in British history.

meticulously researched ... an eye-opening portrait of the man and his times

A deep, expansive study not only of George III but also of the political and social complexities of England and the United States during his reign.

a deeply textured portrait of George III [and] a capacious, prodigiously researched biography from a top-shelf historian.

an outstanding and surprisingly moving portrait of a misunderstood king, distinguished by refreshing revisionism but also illuminated by deep humanity.

Roberts is in a rich vein of form at present; after bestselling books on Napoleon and Churchill, yet another masterpiece has tumbled from his pen.

Roberts has been justly acclaimed as one of his generation's leading historians ... His new biography seeks to challenge popular myths about the monarch. ... Roberts, employing the same flair for original research and ability to convey historical context and vivid prose that he used in previous books ... thoroughly debunks all the assumptions most people have about the king.

exhaustively researched and written in accessible, non-jargony prose. Meticulous and forensic, it sometimes reads like a defense counsel's case for his client ... Roberts's defense of George III, though, is the fullest, the clearest, and likely to be the most definitive.

Roberts has painted a masterful portrait of a patriotic, diligent and cultivated monarch. ... This new biography is a treasure-house of detail. ... George III is an engaging, humane and at times beautiful testament to the importance of giving our ancestors a fair hearing.

This extraordinary coming-of-age story is like an Albanian Educated but it is so much more than that. It beautifully brings together the personal and the political to create an unforgettable account of oppression, freedom and what it means to acquire knowledge about the world. Funny, moving but also deadly serious, this book will be read for years to come

A new classic that bursts out of the global silence of Albania to tell us human truths about the politics of the past hundred years. . . It unfolds with revelation after revelation - both familial and national - as if written by a master novelist. As if it were, say, a novella by Tolstoy. That this very serious book is so much fun to read is a compliment to its graceful, witty, honest writer. A literary triumph

Illuminating and subversive, Free asks us to consider what happens to our ideals when they come into contact with imperfect places and people and what can be salvaged from the wreckage of the past

A young girl grows up in a repressive Communist state, where public certainties are happily accepted and private truths are hidden; as that world falls away, she has to make her own sense of life, based on conflicting advice, fragments of information and, above all, her own stubborn curiosity. Thought-provoking, deliciously funny, poignant, sharply observed and beautifully written, this is a childhood memoir like very few others -- a really marvellous book

Free is one of those very rare books that shows how history shapes people's lives and their politics. Lea Ypi is such a brilliant, powerful writer that her story becomes your story

Lea Ypi is a pathbreaking philosopher who is also becoming one of the most important public thinkers of our time. Here she draws on her unique historical experience to shed new light on the questions of freedom that matter to all of us. This extraordinary book is both personally moving and politically revolutionary. If we take its lessons to heart, it can help to set us free

I haven't in many years read a memoir from this part of the world as warmly inviting as this one. Written by an intellectual with story-telling gifts, Free makes life on the ground in Albania vivid and immediate

Lea Ypi has a wonderful gift for showing and not telling. In Free she demonstrates with humour, humanity and a sometimes painful honesty, how political communities without human rights will always end in cruelty. True freedom must be from both oppression and neglect

A funny and fascinating memoir

A rightly acclaimed account of loss of innocence in Albania from a master of subtext . . . Precise, acute, often funny and always accessible

A remarkable story, stunningly told

A vivid portrayal of how it felt to live through the transition from socialism to capitalism, Ypi's book will interest readers wishing to learn more about Albania during this tumultuous historical period, but also anyone interested in questioning the taken-for-granted ideological assumptions that underpin all societies and shape quotidian experiences in often imperceptible ways

A classic, moving coming-of-age story. . . Ypi is a beautiful writer and a serious political thinker, and in just a couple hundred readable pages, she takes turns between being bitingly, if darkly, funny (she skewers Stalinism and the World Bank with equal deadpan) and truly profound

Beguiling. . . the most probing memoir yet produced of the undefined 'transition' period after European communism. More profoundly a primer on how to live when old verities turn to dust. Ypi has written a brilliant personal history of disorientation, of what happens when the guardrails of everyday life suddenly fall away. . . Reading Free today is not so much a flashback to the Cold War as a glimpse of every society's possible pathway, a postcard from the future