If you buy one book to mark this Waterloo anniversary, buy this one

It is all here – and all told with the same verve, eye for anecdote and command of the material. This is a very good book, and a model of how narrative history should be written... anybody remotely interested in the battle should read

Invigorating and compelling

I was gripped by the wealth of detail and humanity in the book... This is how the tales of battles should be told, whatever the time, place or outcome

A grim story – but well worth the telling

What is truly gripping is the human horror, and the realization that what counts in war is not glory or patriotism, but victory, supremacy and the uncompromising need to prevail

Original and fascinating… If you buy one book to mark [the] anniversary [of Waterloo], buy this one

O’Keeffe describes these fraught, uncertain days with skill and a touch for ground-level detail... [He] has told in vivid colors a story that is often passed over in most narratives, but that is alive with drama and human tragedy

O’Keeffe has done a magnificent job tying up loose ends and telling a story that needed to be told

O’Keeffe brings an unjaundiced eye to what has been a well-told tale

[The book] makes a lasting impression.

Authoritative, wide-ranging and thoroughly readable.

The Good War…can feel one step away from the action but is no less compelling or valuable. His is a chronology of a war of our time; it holds one’s attention and he has done his research.

a wholly readable and utterly persuasive attempt to get us to look at the Holocaust in a different light

this is a deeply insightful and original treatment and, as the Holocaust drifts slowly but surely from living memory and into history, a warning against future complacency

Snyder excels in repositioning the Holocaust in a global context

Timothy Synder reorientates our understanding of the ideological structures and political circumstances that made the Nazis’ genocidal programme possible
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To his recalibration of the conventional topography and chronology of the Holocaust, Snyder adds a novel interpretation of Hitler’s worldview and of the place of Jews in it

Snyder delivers what is surely the best and most unsparing analysis of eastern European collaborationism now available.

As our world fragments and dissolves into chaos, Snyder offers a chilling lesson about how easy it is for people to slip into evil and bloodlust.

a book of the greatest importance… written with searing intellectual honesty.

Snyder's extraordinary book may be about events more than seventy years ago, but its lessons about human nature are as relevant now as then

Disturbing but utterly compelling... The how’s and whys of what happened have never been better explained.

Highly praised, and indeed it is a worthy contribution to the subject.

Harding has recorded the fate of the house and its inhabitants, from the Weimar republic until reunification. This is German history in microcosm ... as exciting as a good historical novel.

An inspirational read: highly recommended.

A genuinely remarkable work of biographical innovation.

I’d like to reread Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey every Christmas for at least the next five years: I love being between its humane pages, which celebrate both scholarly companionship and deep feeling for the past

Ruth Scurr’s innovative take on biography has an immediacy that brings the 17th century alive

Anyone who has not read Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey can have a splendid time reading it this summer. Scurr has invented an autobiography the great biographer never wrote, using his notes, letters, observations – and the result is gripping

A triumph, capturing the landscape and the history of the time, and Aubrey’s cadence.

A brilliantly readable portrait in diary form. Idiosyncratic, playful and intensely curious, it is the life story Aubrey himself might have written.

Scurr knows her subject inside out.

The diligent Scurr has evidence to support everything… Learning about him is to learn more about his world than his modest personality, but Scurr helps us feel his pain at the iconoclasm and destruction wrought by the Puritans without resorting to overwrought language.

Acclaimed and ingeniously conceived semi-fictionalised autobiography… Scurr’s greatest achievement is to bring both Aubrey and his world alive in detail that feels simultaneously otherworldly and a mirror of our own age… It’s hard to think of a biographical work in recent years that has been so bold and so wholly successful.