Illuminating ... Johnson has not only lifted a corner of the curtain which covers China's reality beyond its glittering eastern cities; he has drawn the whole curtain.

A gripping tale.

A captivating and an important study of what is happening on the ground in China today.

[A] groundbreaking compendium... bracing and urgent... This collection is an extraordinary update to an ongoing project of vital truth-telling

Readers will discover something new and redefining on every page ... This visionary, meticulously produced, profound, and bedrock-shifting testament belongs in every library and on every reading list ... [an] invaluable and galvanizing history ... revelatory

This invaluable book sets itself apart by reframing readers' understanding of U.S. history, past and present

A sweeping study of the "unparalleled impact" of African slavery on American society... The result is a bracing and vital reconsideration of American history

A much-needed book that stakes a solid place in a battlefield of ideas over America's past and present

Restores people erased from the national narrative, offering a motivating, if sobering, origin story we need to understand if we are ever going to truly achieve 'liberty and justice for all'

The ambitious project that got Americans rethinking our racial history... expanded into a book incorporating essays from pretty much everyone you want to hear from about the country's great topic and great shame

The groundbreaking project from The New York Times, which created a new origin story for America based on the very beginnings of American slavery, is expanded into a very large, very powerful full-length book

Pleasingly symmetrical... [a] mosaic of a book, which achieves the impossible on so many levels -- moving from argument to fiction to argument, from theme to theme, and backward and forward in time, so smoothly

From Brexit Britain and Donald Trump's America to the cynical politics of Poland and Hungary, she feels beset by a new chauvinist right that has no regard for rules, truth or institutions. Ms Applebaum evokes an acute sense of betrayal as people she trusted turn against her, quicker than she thought possible. Her personal story is a parable of what can happen to alliances in the absence of a common adversary, and when the hardships such enemies inflicted fade from memory.

This is an illuminating political memoir about the break-up of the political tribe that won the Cold War.

Equal parts memoir, reportage, and history, this sobering account of the roots and forms of today's authoritarianism, by one of its most accomplished observers, is meant as a warning to everyone. ... critically important for its muscular, oppositionist attack on the new right from within conservative ranks-and for the well-documented warning it embodies. The author's views are especially welcome because she is a deliberate thinker and astute observer rather than just the latest pundit or politico. In the spirit of Julien Benda, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno, Applebaum seeks to understand what makes the new right "more Bolshevik than Burkean."... A knowledgeable, rational, necessarily dark take on dark realities.

In this powerful and elegant book on James Baldwin, Eddie Glaude weaves together a biography, a meditation, a literary analysis, and a moral essay on America. Like Baldwin's own essays and books, it is at times both loving and angry, challenging and uplifting, and always beautiful. Both Baldwin and this book speak directly to today

A powerful study of how to bear witness in a moment when America is being called to do the same

Glaude's book is neither straight biography nor straight history, but rather historiography, reaching back and forth in time to show what Baldwin - whose centenary will be celebrated in 2024 - has to say to us and to teach us through his many writings at a time when "the idea of America is in deep trouble"

A powerful, genre-defying work

Fascinating . . . An urgent and honest overview of Baldwin's work

Many complicated human relations are on display in these irresistible diaries . . . The editor deserves the greatest praise. He has rightly included everything that brings Channon's shimmering brittle world to life . . . He has a gift for the sharp, striking phrase which bring events to life. If diaries are to achieve immortality, the diarist must be a first-class writer. Channon passes that with flying colours.

Better than any history or histories of these two decades . . . like a fusion of Debrett's and the Almanach de Gotha . . . Scrupulously scholarly . . . Simon Heffer has done a great service by revealing in this extraordinary new edition of the Channon diaries the decadence and complacency of the English political and upper classes.

The abundant footnotes . . . swarm with everything you might want to know about the British aristocracy between the wars . . . It's like reading Bertie Wooster set loose among the pages of Burke's Peerage, with lots of sucking-up where the jokes ought to be . . . His pen portraits of friends and rivals alike are etched in acid.

The fascinating, unexpurgated interwar diaries of the Tory MP and social alpinist Henry "Chips" Channon, who met everyone who was anyone from Hitler to kings, the Pope and the Mitfords. Bonking, snobbery and bitchy remarks abound in this big beast of a book.

I did enjoy the Chips Channon diaries, the new first volume. My most pleasurable reading experiences are diaries and letters. History unfiltered, not refracted through a historian's imagination. The Chips Channon diaries bring alive a section of society in the 20s and 30s with great vividness.

Chips Channon wrote witheringly about everyone-except Hitler. But his diaries still make for strangely addictive reading . . . [Simon Heffer] has done a superb job.

These unabridged, risqué, waspish, snobbish, social-climbing diaries have been worth the wait . . . All credit to Simon Heffer for his masterly editing and annotation.

The diaries are indeed indispensable for anyone seriously interested in the political and social history of interwar Britain.

Brilliantly and painstakingly edited by Simon Heffer. The enlarged Channon diaries have rightly attracted a great deal of attention . . . they are more detailed and more frank, and maybe more honest, about the opinions and sexual escapades of some of the leading figures in British politics and high society in the years between the world wars.

It sounds perverse to say that Channon's snobberies and prejudices make the diaries, but the unabashed exposure of these failings gives you an oddly impressive picture of a person in the setting of his time - the picture, I mean, is absorbing, whatever the subject's shortcomings. And though this colossal self-portrait describes much that's misguided, vain, and idiotic, it prompts you too to imagine those perishable qualities that history and biography so often fail to capture: the charm, generosity, personal magnetism, and brilliance of conversation that must have explained and sustained Chips's progress, the "success after success" that the diaries record and celebrate.

One of the most talked about books of this year . . . compelling and significant.

Channon's jaw-dropping account, lovingly curated by the historian and former Mail writer Simon Heffer, is compelling.

Delicious, dangerous and utterly compulsive.

Dripping with bons mots, anecdote and scandal, [these] are addictive, even if they elicit repulsion as well as delight.

A momentous publishing event. Candid, unabashed, vivid and manifold. They will be prized for their powerful evocation of social milieux . . . Heffer's footnotes are always informative, just and accurate, often amusing, and can seldom be faulted.

An unadulterated masterpiece . . . A larder of quotable treats.

Scintillating wit, memorable descriptions and compelling gossip. Heffer has done a magnificent job. Riveting.

Whatever you think of him Channon ranks among the great diarists. He is at turns brilliant, witty, trivial and spiteful, with observations about some figures whose names have stood the test of time. Simon Heffer has done an excellent job as editor and his copious footnotes are often as entertaining as the diaries.

An inspired diarist. After devouring this volume readers will be salivating for the next.