A poetic and fascinating exploration of life on Doggerland... This is one of the only books I've ever read that has made me feel better about climate change.

A magical, mesmerising book - a book which makes you feel giddy at the thought of the deep gulf of history hidden just beneath your feet.

Breathtaking... [a] splendidly rich book... I admire the intelligence, the appetite for discovery and the shining imagination that have gone into [Time Song].

Julia Blackburn's marvellous Time Song: Searching for Doggerland...is startling, funny and often very moving.

[Time Song] is time travel... wonderful.

Rarely have I read a book in which there is such an entrancingly liquid and easy drift between the metaphorical and the actual… This is not science or history (there are enough books like that) but understanding – so that in [Blackburn’s] hands the ancient Doggerland landscape of distant summers becomes filled again… This book is a wonder.

Time Song is not a straightforward book about Doggerland. It is much more interesting than that… Time Song is richly peopled, Blackburn’s unflagging curiosity and sharp eye bringing a diverse cast of characters vividly to life. She sifts their stories not just for information, but for meaning; she’s conjuring for us not merely the facts of Doggerland, but the weight of its omission from our history books, our collective memory and our imaginations.

One of my favourite writers in the whole world is Julia Blackburn and she has produced yet another uncategorisable masterpiece which is Time Song... [Blackburn] is one of our great original writers... [Time Song] is a beautiful, beautiful book.

There are many beauties to be found in Blackburn’s writing, particularly when she turns an observant eye on landscapes and the evidence they provide of the prehistoric peoples who inhabited them.

Majestic… The genius of Time Song is that the diverse form of the book subtly suggests that narratives may not be continuous… [this] book on the past is above all a response to the urgent problems of the present.

[Julia Blackburn] has an inimitable approach to non-fiction… down-to-earth – though always thought provoking… begging to be set to music.

There is something quite magical about this book. It is full of surprises, of twists and turns, changes of tone and focus. Blackburn casually compresses vast sweeps of geological time into a paragraph… She has a deceptively simple way of writing, almost childlike, never embellished, but behind it lies an artfulness that once sensed, is beautiful beyond words… absolutely delightful.

Julia Blackburn is an impossible-to-categorise writer, curious in every sense… and she has a genius for the imaginative leap, for thinking her way into the past.

It is in her descriptions of the sea and her imaginings of the land it submerged that Ms Blackburn's book is most arresting… the combination of wry observations and personal reflections makes Time Song gripping.

Time Song is fiendishly clever… Archaeologists have long known how past and present co-exist. None, however, has been able to express it so convincingly.

Julia Blackburn’s marvellous Time Song...is startling, funny and often very moving.

An engaging and informative link to deep history.

A deeply consoling book.

Dreamy, poetic, meditative, wildly discursive and intensely personal… [Blackburn] has a witchy way of ascribing human personality to other species, and even inanimate objects… Provocative and poetic.

Eric Williams's study identifies many of the sinners and the sins committed in the building of British and global capitalism ... Capitalism and Slavery makes us stare down that history and compels us to seek redress from the relevant culpable parties

Praise for Joanne Paul's monograph on Thomas More

Brilliant and lucid. This is an original and illuminating work that should be compulsory

Fascinating. Paul shows an impressive mastery

A powerful and thought provoking memoir . . . wonderfully human, it is a story of missed opportunities, disillusionment and hope that ultimately invites readers to ask themselves what it means to be free

This vivid rendering of life amid cultural collapse is nothing short of a masterpiece

Remarkable and highly original . . . Both an affecting coming-of-age story and a first-hand meditation on the politics of freedom

A probing personal history, poignant and moving. A young life unfolding amidst great historical change - ideology, war, loss, uncertainty. This is history brought memorably and powerfully to life

Unique, insightful, and often hilarious. . . Albania on the cusp of change, chaos and civil war is the setting for the best memoir to emerge from the Balkans in decades

A lyrical memoir, of deep and affecting power, of the sweet smell of humanity mingled with flesh, blood and hope

Free is astonishing. Lea Ypi has a natural gift for storytelling. It brims with life, warmth, and texture, as well as her keen intelligence. A gripping, often hilarious, poignant, psychologically acute masterpiece and the best book I've read so far this year

Lea Ypi's teenage journey through the endtimes of Albanian communism tells a universal story: ours is an age of collapsed illusions for many generations. Written by one of Europe's foremost left-wing thinkers, this is an unmissable book for anyone engaged in the politics of resistance

This extraordinary coming-of-age story is like an Albanian Educated but it is so much more than that. It beautifully brings together the personal and the political to create an unforgettable account of oppression, freedom and what it means to acquire knowledge about the world. Funny, moving but also deadly serious, this book will be read for years to come

A new classic that bursts out of the global silence of Albania to tell us human truths about the politics of the past hundred years. . . It unfolds with revelation after revelation - both familial and national - as if written by a master novelist. As if it were, say, a novella by Tolstoy. That this very serious book is so much fun to read is a compliment to its graceful, witty, honest writer. A literary triumph

Illuminating and subversive, Free asks us to consider what happens to our ideals when they come into contact with imperfect places and people and what can be salvaged from the wreckage of the past

A young girl grows up in a repressive Communist state, where public certainties are happily accepted and private truths are hidden; as that world falls away, she has to make her own sense of life, based on conflicting advice, fragments of information and, above all, her own stubborn curiosity. Thought-provoking, deliciously funny, poignant, sharply observed and beautifully written, this is a childhood memoir like very few others -- a really marvellous book

Free is one of those very rare books that shows how history shapes people's lives and their politics. Lea Ypi is such a brilliant, powerful writer that her story becomes your story

Lea Ypi is a pathbreaking philosopher who is also becoming one of the most important public thinkers of our time. Here she draws on her unique historical experience to shed new light on the questions of freedom that matter to all of us. This extraordinary book is both personally moving and politically revolutionary. If we take its lessons to heart, it can help to set us free

I haven't in many years read a memoir from this part of the world as warmly inviting as this one. Written by an intellectual with story-telling gifts, Free makes life on the ground in Albania vivid and immediate

Lea Ypi has a wonderful gift for showing and not telling. In Free she demonstrates with humour, humanity and a sometimes painful honesty, how political communities without human rights will always end in cruelty. True freedom must be from both oppression and neglect

A funny and fascinating memoir

A rightly acclaimed account of loss of innocence in Albania from a master of subtext . . . Precise, acute, often funny and always accessible

A remarkable story, stunningly told

A vivid portrayal of how it felt to live through the transition from socialism to capitalism, Ypi's book will interest readers wishing to learn more about Albania during this tumultuous historical period, but also anyone interested in questioning the taken-for-granted ideological assumptions that underpin all societies and shape quotidian experiences in often imperceptible ways

A classic, moving coming-of-age story. . . Ypi is a beautiful writer and a serious political thinker, and in just a couple hundred readable pages, she takes turns between being bitingly, if darkly, funny (she skewers Stalinism and the World Bank with equal deadpan) and truly profound

Beguiling. . . the most probing memoir yet produced of the undefined 'transition' period after European communism. More profoundly a primer on how to live when old verities turn to dust. Ypi has written a brilliant personal history of disorientation, of what happens when the guardrails of everyday life suddenly fall away. . . Reading Free today is not so much a flashback to the Cold War as a glimpse of every society's possible pathway, a postcard from the future