It does what every good book should manage to do, and what a hundred other books on whisky (and a thousand other books on Scotland) have signally failed to do: makes you want to go for a drink with the author.

Studded with bracing shots of pure insight and eloquence. And he's sound on the scotch as well.

A very readable and hugely informative book, and Bank’s gentle humour permeates the pages.

It’s an engaging piece of work, part love letter, part memoir.

A very beguiling fusion of memoir, history and current affairs.

A voyage that a malt connoisseur of any level will find as enticing and as warming as that first sip of the nectar that has a history as rugged and unpredictable as Scotland’s enticing and formidable terrain.

A beautifully realised fusion of travelogue, social commentary and drinking guide. Scotland's most famous export is decanted into full-bodied, humorous prose.

Fiery, variegated, and full of delicious moments.

Banks' finely-honed sense of place makes you want to get on a train, head to the Highlands and never come back.

Raw Spirit charts its own course through the social landscapes of everywhere from Skye to Lothian, where obscure distilleries compete against the world-famous, with a wide cast of characters bringing them - and the liquor - to life.

The book I return to most often . . . It's like slipping into a warm bath.

Thiswritten account of aroad-trip around the country’s distilleries in search of the ‘perfect dram’ is thebest substitute for the real deal[…] Filled withinsightful and witty observationsabout the whisky-makingprocess andthe peopleand places encounteredalong the way, this isa rip-roaringand informative delve into the unique history and enduring appeal of this iconic spirit.

Jared Diamond is one of the deepest thinkers and most authoritative writers of our time-arguably of all time-and Upheaval proves his prescience in analyzing historical crises within nations at a time when national crises have erupted around the world . . . No scientist has ever won the Nobel Prize for literature. Jared Diamond should be the first.

[An] ecstatic, turbocharged book.

Buford has an inexhaustible zest for life; the book is a tour de force.

Pure pleasure. Masterfully written. If you care at all about food, about writing, about obsessive people with a sense of adventure, you have to read this book. It is, in a word, wonderful.

A book to drool for. Magnifique!

Fluidly readable... exhaustive and enlightening.

As reportage, it's as immersive as you could wish for. It's also hilarious and humbling

Franz Boas, whose achievements are set out in Charles King's The Reinvention of Humanity, recast the foundations of American anthropology. Against the prevailing political and intellectual orthodoxy, Boas and his students insisted that the basic unity of humankind was beyond dispute, and that within this unity there was no natural hierarchy of races, languages or cultures... That their ideas were found radical and strange is an indictment of their culture; that King's book seems timely is an indictment of our own

Timely stuff.

An intricate biographical essay.

[A] richly entertaining study.

A masterful portrayal of the Belle Epoque.

A personal meditation on the belle époque… The Man in the Red Coat is one long, meandering essay in Montaigne mode.

The book is at once a biography of Pozzi in the context of his time and a picture of the time as refracted by Pozzi. Barnes constructs it as a kind of mosaic.

Elegant and resonant.

I’ve just started Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat, and I am already hooked.

A tour de force… Dr Pozzi may not be remembered in medical history but his legacy is an artwork of himself in his prime that has transcended time.

Steeped in the luxury and scandal of Belle Epoque Paris and London, Barnes resurrects the charming, philandering Pozzi.