Reads like the sleazy world described in Graham Greene's Third Man with several noughts added to the transactions

A major feat of detection . . . a remarkable story . . . the murky post-war world of racketeering and corruption . . . it is all here . . . they have solved the mystery as far as anyone could solve it

A riveting thriller-style account of what happened to the Nazi gold hoard

Absolutely brilliant ... McPherson has fresh approaches to the war's background, the four years of struggle and the aftermath

McPherson wears with equal ease the hats of biographer, economist, sociologist and military historian .. Probably the best single-volume history of America's Civil War yet written

A starting point and an intellectual inspiration ... a classic of masterly historical writing.

James is not afraid to touch his pen with the flame of ardent personal feeling - a sense of justice, love of freedom, admiration for heroism, hatred for tyranny - and his detailed, richly documented and dramatically written book holds a deep and lasting interest.

Revolutionarily, the book abandoned the old narrative of black victimhood in favour of accenting the agency of the formerly enslaved who, fuelled by a desire for liberty, fought to achieve autonomy.

The standard and the main text through which the Haitian revolution is studied ... a book I've read back to back many times ... An incredibly brilliant book, an undeniably magnificent contribution to scholarship.

Reading and rereading The Black Jacobins, I am struck by its incredible wit and humanity, and James' determination to write a history of slavery in the Caribbean in which people of African descent appear as thinking, feeling human agents - in other words, as the protagonists of their own history and not background characters in an essentially European story.