Ideas about currency and calculus become thrilling because of the way Stephenson incorporates them into his story... Huge in scope - rich in detail... This weird, wonderful collision of scholarship and storytelling has no peer

A rip-roaring, swashbuckling Romance with a capital R ... A blood-soaked, silver-plated depiction of 17th-century life from both ends of the economic scale, and with enough headlong, balls-to-the-wall buccaneering and Machiavellian plotting to satiate the most jaded of palates

Stephenson excels in marrying geekspeak wtih riotous action. When he describes a battle or a duel, his prose acquires thrilling panache... Jack Shaftoe is magnificent, a swashbuckling hero with a foul mouth and few morals, and his adventures are most appealing

The definitive historical-sci-fi-epic-pirate-comedy-punk-love story. No easy feat, that

It is hard to see who could have done the job better than Schmidt

Schmidt gives us a chance to settle down with poets we wish we had known better

A satisfying selection that reminds us that Lawrence didn't just write about animals, Betjeman wasn't always jolly, and Plath is more interesting for her collapsed perspectives than for her self-exposure

The selections from the greats are generous and well chosen

Being an Amis novel it’s not without the odd good joke, and he is, of course, incapable of writing and inelegant line. It’s almost as if he alone can sense both the golden ratio of a sentence, and its perfect rhythm: it’s like he’s Michelangelo and Keith Moon

Full of hilarious set-pieces, wisecracks and wordplay.

Tillyard is a fluent and attractive chronicler of detail and some of her imaginative liberties are ingenious

This saga of lives swept up in the Peninsular War recalls Georgette Heyer at her best...impossible to put down

A thrilling romance brought to life with exquisite detail

A prodigious talent able to combine meticulous research with novelistic devices...there is much to enjoy and admire

Fluently written and impeccably researched

Gripping

It is time we stopped thinking of the historical novel as a genre, and an inferior one at that. If its ostensible subject matter means that it doesn't attempt to tell us how we live now, nevertheless a novel set back in time may, if it is good, say as much about what it is to be alive as one set in the next street or another country today. Tides of War is such a novel. It is diverting, but not a diversion

A well written, engaging read...beautifully observed

A vivid account of a couple of years in the Peninsula Campaign and a sympathetic portrait of those left behind

A delicious novel by an experienced author who captures the scientific atmosphere of the early 19th century with a devastating study of infidelity

The real life players of the Napoleonic era spring to life

Compelling

Highly assured and almost educational with its broad sweep of history

Tillyard’s achievement is in this original portray log the Regency era and its relevance to our own time