admirable ... The World According to Colour is a brilliant cultural history ... This intelligent, vividly written book is full of such black, red, yellow, blue, white, purple and green nuggets.

Fox glides into intellectual spaces; colour becomes a philosophical feast - astrophyscis, the origins of civilisation, a palette of moral associations. Though dazzling, everything has a point: when Fox shoots, he scores. You never see it coming, then suddenly all the pieces fit together as though they were meant to be

a tour de force ... he weaves together the historical, cultural and scientific background to provide context for a succession of bravura insights ... this is a brilliant book

In this compelling book, James Fox shows that the meanings connected to particular colours aren't arbitrary but are instead materially, socially and culturally determined ... One of a flurry of recent books on colour, Fox's is distinguished by his broad historical approach and by the diversity of perspectives and sources ... The greatest pleasure of this book is the way Fox's essays move fluently between the material, moral and historical ... This is a book that makes you want to paint.

the book is a pleasure... a compelling and elegant...a rare achievement - a scholarly reference work that invites reading for pleasure.

For once, no problem with Christmas presents this year. The World According to Colour by James Fox is a brilliantly fluent and readable history of colour, galloping across a wide cultural and scientific landscape.

fascinating...In this book (Fox) has gifted each of us a manual to navigate and enjoy the extraordinary design of the world around us.

The women of the Middle Ages, so often silent and inconspicuous in our histories, find voice, agency and justice in this brilliant book

Femina is an important addition to our understanding of a period still - mistakenly - thought to have excluded women from positions of power and significance. Femina skillfully brings out from the shadows the lives of women who ruled, fought, traded, created, and inspired

Spellbinding, passionate, gripping and magnificently fresh in tone, boldly wide in range, elegantly written, deeply researched, Femina is a ground-breaking history of the Middle Ages. It brings the world to life with women at its very heart, centre stage where they belong. What a delight.

This is a passionate, energetic, hugely enjoyable and brilliantly observed book. Both a plea for a new way of thinking about history and a commitment to putting women's lives back at the heart of things, I read it in one sitting. Magnificent.

Janina Ramirez is a passionate voice for women in history. With this bold and masterful book, she salvages women's stories from the dark corners into which they have been pushed, and brilliantly restores them to the centre of the historical narrative where they have always belonged

A compelling and breathtaking account of the women whose stories have been lost, ignored, or silenced in history. As important as it is remarkable

Challenging, inclusive and riveting, Janina Ramirez's book is breaking new grounds. This is a history as you've never read before. A unique page turner

Inventive, informative, surprising - this book is a revelation! Seeing so many remarkable women creating so much powerful history rewrites our entire sense of the medieval past

As both writer and broadcaster, Dr Janina Ramirez radiates tremendous passion for her subject. To spend time in her company is to soon find yourself intoxicated by the vast drama of human history, with all its far-off wonders, frustrating mysteries, and tantalising echoes that still resonate in our modern world

Gripping, incisive, brilliant, Janina Ramirez opens a door into hidden worlds, the secrets of women's lives. She is a detective and guide on this, an eye-opening, wonderful journey into the power, beauty and reality of early women's experiences

Women have been consistently written out of our English history, transformed into ciphers, handmaidens, shadows. Janina Ramirez brings them back out into the light - and they glow with agency, power and passion

de Waal is a writer of grace and restlessly enquiring intelligence, and Letters to Camondo succeeds admirably... Edmund de Waal's beautiful book opens a window onto an entire lost world

A rich and gorgeous meditation on art and grief... Beautifully written, elegantly odd and wonderfully immersive, this is a book like no other

De Waal's sentences like to take the historical weight of the objects he describes, in prose that often puts you in mind of Bruce Chatwin, that other aesthete magically in thrall to painfully buried European history. He builds a picture of Camondo accumulating belongings in an extravagant effort at belonging... [an] unforgettable book

De Waal's gentle and thoughtful probing is persuasive and his exploration of the family history after the count's death in 1935 - especially the deaths of family members under the Nazis - is both poignant and unforced

The form of a series of letters to Camondo... [is] an inspired idea, for it allows de Waal to achieve an intimacy of tone and directness of expression... a powerful address that is both a rupture with and a binding to all that precedes it

A fascinating portrait of the French collector Count Moise de Camondo

Although women have always made art, for far too long, art history has been told as the story of male achievement. Katy Hessel's The Story of Art without Men is a brilliantly readable and lively corrective. Outraged and celebratory, it's chock-full of female trail-blazers - from the Renaissance until the present day - who forged their way, despite facing the kind of hurdles that would stump most mortals

Compiled with zip and wit, even the informed reader will learn something new on every page - we really cannot recommend it enough

A sumptuously illustrated history... at once broad in scope and meticulously researched

This book has blown my mind. Really passionately recommend

An extraordinary eye-opener, and very readable ... we badly need books like Hessel's

Hessel's beautifully written 500-year survey is a welcome, necessary, addition to the bookshelves

Highly readable and lavishly illustrated... a rich storehouse of groundbreaking female art

Astonishing

This book changes everything. As soon as you open it, it's like you've opened a box of lit fireworks - out soars great artist after great artist. Her retake on the canon has changed it forever

Hessel possesses that rare quality of a public intellectual, whereby she can distill vast amounts of knowledge and history into something accessible, relevant and joyful

Extraordinary