'The funniest book I have read for two and a half years'

'The whingeing memoirs of a snivelling leftie. The man should be shot'

'Very funny'

'Excellent...Whatever your politics Things Can Only Get Better will make you laugh out loud'

'Very funny and much better than anything he ever wrote for me'

If you have 18 euros in your pocket and at least two days left to live, then you should do one more thing to die without regrets, and that is to read this book.

This lyrical saga...succeeds both as a revelatory tale of the artist as young man and a gripping portrait of the young Jewish state itself.

Detailed and beautiful...as he writes about himself and his family, Oz is also writing part of the history of the Jews... We are in the hands here of a capable, practiced seducer.

Readers keen to live a Good Life – and prepare for a Good Death – should dive head first into this fount of ancient but still modern wisdom.

In this wise and delightful guide to the Grecian's teachings, Professor Edith Hall makes a highly convincing case for the ongoing relevance of ancient thinking

[Hall] peppers her account with stories from her own life in a frank, discursive style

Hall navigates her way through the Aristotelian oeuvre with elegant ease

A clear and frequently interesting survey of Aristotle’s thought

[The] conversational tone…suits her subject – recreating the congenial atmosphere of an Athenian symposium

[It is] mesmeric to hear Aristotelian wisdom freed from dusty, leather-bound volumes to be so emphatically applied to our every-day experience

Told in a light and humorous way, Elkin’s cultural meander provides plenty of food for thought.

A fascinating way to write about George Sand, Virginia Woolf and others, plus Elkin’s own artistic explorations of Paris, London, Venice and Tokyo. It makes us all want to be London wanderers.

Elkin delivers a prococative yet light and humorous read, mingling her own memories with those of the female artists she portrays.

With this book, Elkin hopes to track down the female equivalent – the flâneuse – to ‘see where a woman might fit into the cityscape’… It is a timely effort: in the Trump era of manspreading and male privilege, it is especially vital that we pay attention to notions of gendered space. Elkin’s prose is wry, insightful and saturated with detail

Delightfully meandering.

Elkin is a beguiling writer, and resolutely female, her sentences doing what Virginia Woolf wanted women's sentences to do, which is to "hold back the male flood"… Flâneuse is a riposte to all that macho stomping about… Flâneuse is so rich with shining trinkets and wise thoughts that not a single page disappoints or bores. It's that rare thing these days - a work of feminism which is enthused by literature and art and ideas rather than pop culture.

Elkin explores the history of people and places in astonishing detail. She writes with a passion and personality that creates the kind of familiarity which encourages us to believe that the women she studies were close friends of hers… Elkin's first person, colloquial yet witty style lets you into the recesses of her imagination and invites you to be her travel companion

Lauren Elkin is one of our most valuable critical thinkers – the Susan Sontag of her generation

The acclaimed historian of Russia sweeps the brittle high society of pre-Revolutionary St Petersburg, the terror-chilled jails of Stalin's purges and the secrets of 1990s Moscow archives into a tragic panorama.'

A seamlessly written and moving portrait of the soviet Union in miniature from the Revolution to the age of Yeltsin.

What is striking is how he has thrown himself heart and soul into the romance and emotion of his drama. The novel throbs with sex, maternal feeling, revolutionary fervour and terror ... Terrific stuff