Redeems from obscurity an unsung hero of true greatness... Sheds invigorating light on the course of the English civil war

Robertson has come up with that desperately rare thing: a subject worthy of biography who has never before been addressed and, to his huge advantage, in his field. The result is a work of literary advocacy as elegant, impassioned and original as any the author can ever have laid before a court

Robertson tells a spellbinding story. He combines lucid analysis of the legal issues with acute understanding of the various factions. His prose is crisp and he inserts some comments that only a professional advocate, as opposed to an academic historian, would make

Fascinating... Illuminating... This is a work of great compassion and, at a time when it seems to be fashionable for politicians to denigrate lawyers, it is an essential read for anyone who believes in the fearless independence of the law

[Robertson's] forensic intelligence can penetrate where professional historians have not reached

The writer who got closest to the human truth about our long-serving senior royals

This immense book is part masterpiece, part sheer exhaustion. The masterpiece part lies chiefly in its breathtaking invention

Everywhere he goes, Mak is quietly ruthless in unmasking the acts of forgetting, selective amnesia, myth-making and historical obfuscation that persist...Mak is a truly cosmopolitan chronicler of shame and self-deceptions

His genius as a historian is his instinct for human stories... At moments in this monumental work... Mak is the history teacher everyone should have had

How eloquently Mak rails against the alliance of consumerism and bureaucracy! ... He has a great eye for telling detail... Only a powerful, humane and serious mind could give coherence to mass detail which, however arresting piece by piece, would otherwise soon become wearying... as much a journey around Geert Mak's head as it is a journey around Europe

Fascinating