‘At times it feels like a series of free-standing disquisitions on individual books tied together with a fetching thread of reminiscence. It is for the most part very skilfully done.’ – Stefan Collini
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‘Watt, best known as half of Everything But the Girl, says one reason he chose to study at Hull University at the start of the 1980s was because Philip Larkin was a librarian there. The melancholic poet’s voice can be heard in the very first line of Romany and Tom.’ - Sukhdev Sandhu
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‘Nicolson has written a beautiful study: full of insight, generosity and unaffected passion. The writing is exhilarating. This is a book about what Homer means to him and, in some profound way, about what life means to him.’ - Charlotte Higgins
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‘Moorehead’s rigorously researched and well-balanced account relates how an isolated agricultural community not only managed to hide some 800 Jewish refugees, but helped a further 3,000 to cross France’s borders to safety in Switzerland.’ - Elizabeth Lowry
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‘Much of the book is focused on the 1950s, an era when people were called Reg and Beryl and the taxonomies of class were encoded in every action, word and owned object. Meades evocatively captures the social unease of the time’ - Andrew Anthony
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‘Marsh is not interested in giving us a glossed image of the brain surgeon as superman; he wants to shows us the dreadful pressures under which he has lived throughout his professional life.’
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‘As a naturalist she has acquired her bird’s laser-like visual acuity. As a writer she combines a lexicographer’s pleasure in words as carefully curated objects with an inventive passion for new words or for ways of releasing fresh effects from the old stock’ - Mark Cocker
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‘You would expect the Guardian’s Nick Davies, who exposed phone hacking and other criminality among News of the World journalists, to write the best full-length account of the scandal, and so he has’ - Peter Wilby
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‘In a superbly argued and richly detailed account of the interdependencies of slavery and revolution throughout the Americas ... Grandin brings to vivid life the realities of the period’ - Michael Moorcock
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‘Childs’s richly packed, absorbing book presents the human truth of all these momentous events. Apart from anything else, it is a parade of extraordinary characters and a banquet of Elizabeth and Jacobean prose.’ - Simon Callow
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‘The book is a stunning record of the sheer labour that illness brings; and illness combined with motherhood, too. There is no time. There’s never enough sleep. Sometimes Coutts simply lists the impossible contents of one day.’ - Tessa Hadley
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‘The sexual revelations in this book have understandably attracted all the pre-publication publicity. Campbell, however, sets out masterfully the full range of Jenkins’s achievements.’ - Alan Johnson
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Atul Gawande, a practising surgeon, has fearlessly revealed the struggles of his profession. Now he examines its ultimate limitations and failures – in his own practices as well as others’ – as life draws to a close.
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Beginning with her grandparents, Alison Light moves between the present and the past, in an extraordinary series of journeys over two centuries, across Britain and beyond.
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Using satires from Gillray and Rowlandson, paintings from Turner and Constable and the prose of Austen, Wordsworth, Byron, the author of The Lunar Men delves into the archives to explore how the ‘first global war’ affected British society
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