Fans of biographical minutiae will find it invaluable, and the closing insights into the refusal of Blake's libido to synchronise with his fading physicality are deeply moving.

This remarkable book opens the reader's eyes to what fired Blake's writings and art

This fascinating book reconfigures the way we see the 18th century...Schuchard's book brings a fascinating new light to bear on Blake's work

Exposes a forgotten visionary/sexual underworld. Scholarship with the momentum of a detective story

Schuchard reveals a weird esoteric, erotic and apocalyptic counterculture, brewing in what we otherwise consider the "enlightened" 18th century.

Marsha Schuchard has found that grail of researchers - original documents that confirm suspicions about her subject... A fantastic miscellany of sex and mysticism.

Schama is an entertaining and eloquent guide through the triumphs and tragedies

Schama at his best – a labour of love, as full of memorable incident as a Bellow novel and wittier than a Woody Allen movie

A remarkably authoritative and engaging book

Few historians write with the energy of Simon Schama. His second volume on the history of the Jews shows that Schama has lost none of his vigour: the mixture of stories about people, ordinary but more extraordinary, witty asides, Schama family reminiscences, schmaltzy views of Jewish life in past times – all this is there

[A] fascinating journey . . . Kadri approaches his themes with unstinting humanity and intelligence, as well as great fluency

You will come across...a fresh eye, and a clear perspective, in Sadakat Kadri's new book, Heaven on Earth. Learned, level-headed, engaging, Kadri's "journey through Shari'a law" deserves praise on every front

This is an extremely valuable book...Knowing this stuff is important, and Kadri takes us through it wonderfully well. He has a great grasp of the facts and – this is my favourite thing – a good, dry sense of humour

Superb… So much discussion of sharia is marred by misinformation and paranoia: this level-headed book provides a timely corrective

The most gripping, moving and entertaining literary memoir I have ever read.

The story Rushdie tells is never less than gripping.

A magnificent new memoir.

This moving, sometimes irritating, often beautiful and blissfully funny memoir is also a resounding manifesto, reminding us that novelists have a right and duty to tackle the most controversial subjects.

His big, bold, controversial memoir…matches Rushdie’s confident personality.

[A book that] rattles with the terror of the moment.

The big book of the week was Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton

It’s an extraordinary document.

Rushdie says art outlasts persecution, but artists may not. A look at how this dichotomy has played out in his life.

Joseph Anton is as riveting for the small vignettes as the big, historical sweep.

Reads like a thriller...painfully true.

He is compelling here...grippingly reconstructing his long years in hiding.

[N]ot many Americans had heard of Rushdie until Valentines Day, 1989, when the dying Ayatollah Khomeni of Iran issued the infamous fatwa calling for Rushdie’s head... Rushdie spent most of the next decade in hiding, accompanied by armed British agents. He’s now published his account of that stranger-than-fiction time: Joseph Anton: A Memoir.

Aside from the vivid, splendidly told account of his childhood and family background, Rushdie's book charts in, fascinating, grimly humourous detail, the shadowy half-life he lived until that fatwah was lifted on March 27, 2002.