Ferguson adds another layer to our perception of our origins in this compelling and often poignant account of a pagan warrior society faced with Christianity on the march

[A] confident and fascinating history of Britain... Masterful... It is a volume that speaks well to our own sense of Britain today as a globalised, trading island retreating back to the edges of power... damned good

This single-volume history manages to combine a balanced new survey of the past with a rousing declaration of the historian's moral obligations... This is a very good book to have on the shelf

I thoroughly recommend the book, written by a collection of top-hole experts in their field... Excellent

[A World By Itself] tells how a small group of islands on the rain-swept edge of the Roman Empire came to shape the civilised world, effectively inventing parliamentary democracy, industrialisation, free trade and globalisation, as well as bequeathing to posterity the greatest body of literature on earth

A massive work of scholarship

Compelling

Impressive

A Royal Affair is an entertaining tale ...Tillyard's account of the brothers is heroic...[she] tells this astonishing tale with bravura

She has returned to what she knows-and does-best, teasing out the bonds of love, hate and pretend indifference that bind siblings, no matter what their historical pedigree, into a cat's cradle of consequence

The story is brilliantly told. In its descriptive flourishes it is sometimes fearlessly novelistic, yet it travels long distances for scholarly scruples