This is an energetic, ambitious, provocative work by a young historian of notable gifts, which deserves a wide readership

A gifted historian...he tells the big story well but also illustrates his themes with many small stories and appealing anecdotes.

Todman explores every aspect of the British experience of the war...rich in telling detail and reliant on the records kept by a host of ordinary Britons as they came to terms with the events going on around them...what ordinary people thought about the time they were living through provides a texture and depth that older wartime narratives have often lacked.

[Dan Todman] has succeeded in creating something that adds to our perception of what happened during this critical period...It is a compliment to Todman that time and again in reading his book I found myself thinking that I wanted to know more about this or that aspect.

The first volume of Dan Todman's new history of Britain and the Second World War is a tour de force. Taking the story up to the end of 1941, Todman provides us with a judicious guide to the road to war and its catastrophic first phase, offering in addition a shrewd portrait of Churchill which is worth the price of the book alone. Total history at its best.

Bold and breathtaking... I have never read a more daringly panoramic survey of the period...Todman has taken on a mammoth task but, at half-time, he shows every sign of completing it triumphantly.

Pulsing with imaginative energy… Home is a compact triumph

Beautifully, sparely written…lingers in the mind long after the final page is turned

Toni Morrison still has the power to shock and deliver hope

Each word resounds with sultry, heat-oppressive Georgia

Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature.

Powerful, sparse prose

Compelling...brief but intense...Morrison writes with her usual lyricism

It is beautifully, sparely written, as with all Morrison's work, and lingers in the mind long after the final page is turned

Spare and visual…a writer of consummate.

Pulsing with imaginative energy, it displays Morrison’s veteran ability to combine physical and social immediacy with psychological and emotional subtlety. A fine addition to Morrison’s expansive chronicling of black American history, Home is a compact triumph.

A highly fractured tale intended to resemble the crumbling nature of Money’s existence post war. Nothing is over-laboured. Each word resounds with sultry, heat-oppressive Georgia.

Morrison's writing is so deft that even barely sketched characters leap off the page

Home is a powerful reminder of the impact the past plays on the present

Morrison can say more in one word than most novelists manage in an entire book. Superb

Bursting with poetic language and horrific events this is a penetrating insight to the African-American experience

It is a powerful set-up, building suspense and a mounting sense of anxiety

Toni Morrison’s mesmerising prose manages to be both elegiac and visceral at the same time

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.