Fascinating... I'm a big fan of everything Jared has written, and his latest is no exception. ... I finished the book even more optimistic about our ability to solve problems than I started.

Upheaval is bold, wide-ranging and original ... probes large and important questions. Unlike most social scientists, Diamond can write invigorating prose that carries the reader along with its sweep ... It deserves to be widely read and pondered.

A riveting and illuminating tour of how nations deal with crises-which might hopefully help humanity as a whole deal with our present global crisis.

Jared Diamond is an undisputed global star of comparative history... Britain could learn from this book about how other nations have dealt with turmoil... He finds intellectually stimulating and unusual examples that provide much food for thought.

Diamond writes so well, and his frame of reference (across disciplines and languages) is so considerable, that almost everything he describes comes across as fresh.

[Diamond] wears the mantle of a modern-day prophet . . . opens textures of historical possibility. Only the most obtuse reader of his latest book, on national resilience, could miss the signs and portents with which it is studded ... The prophet spares us chiselled commandments, but we have been warned.

Fascinating globe-hopping study

As a meditation about a world on edge, it is well worth reading

Persuasive . . . runs refreshingly counter to conventional wisdom

Jared Diamond does it again: another rich, original, and fascinating chapter in the human saga-with vital lessons for our difficult times.

Upheaval is a brilliant, gripping, personal account of nations in crisis, informed by how people respond to crisis. It's an especially timely read today, when nations are stressed and have much to learn about how to survive big challenges. I urge you to read it.

In Upheaval, I find eye-opening lessons about the political and psychological forces that lead to crisis and then resilience, how individuals and nations experience trauma in similar ways, and what that suggests about our future and the world's . . . wise and beautiful.

Jared Diamond is one of the deepest thinkers and most authoritative writers of our time-arguably of all time-and Upheaval proves his prescience in analyzing historical crises within nations at a time when national crises have erupted around the world . . . No scientist has ever won the Nobel Prize for literature. Jared Diamond should be the first.

[An] ecstatic, turbocharged book.

Buford has an inexhaustible zest for life; the book is a tour de force.

Pure pleasure. Masterfully written. If you care at all about food, about writing, about obsessive people with a sense of adventure, you have to read this book. It is, in a word, wonderful.

A book to drool for. Magnifique!

Fluidly readable... exhaustive and enlightening.

As reportage, it's as immersive as you could wish for. It's also hilarious and humbling

Franz Boas, whose achievements are set out in Charles King's The Reinvention of Humanity, recast the foundations of American anthropology. Against the prevailing political and intellectual orthodoxy, Boas and his students insisted that the basic unity of humankind was beyond dispute, and that within this unity there was no natural hierarchy of races, languages or cultures... That their ideas were found radical and strange is an indictment of their culture; that King's book seems timely is an indictment of our own

Timely stuff.

An intricate biographical essay.

[A] richly entertaining study.

A masterful portrayal of the Belle Epoque.

A personal meditation on the belle époque… The Man in the Red Coat is one long, meandering essay in Montaigne mode.

The book is at once a biography of Pozzi in the context of his time and a picture of the time as refracted by Pozzi. Barnes constructs it as a kind of mosaic.

Elegant and resonant.

I’ve just started Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat, and I am already hooked.

A tour de force… Dr Pozzi may not be remembered in medical history but his legacy is an artwork of himself in his prime that has transcended time.

Steeped in the luxury and scandal of Belle Epoque Paris and London, Barnes resurrects the charming, philandering Pozzi.