This is a surprisingly subtle, well observed autobiography, beautifully paced...Borowiec's war is learning experience and part of the charm of the book is learning with him...All this is described with self effacing gusto.

A timely, angry, terribly moving and drily amusing account of an especially dark period in Poland's often tragic history

This account of the Warsaw Uprising is both harrowing and full of human and even humorous touches . . . The result is an important addition to our understanding of what was happening in Poland during the war years

In this packed, wise memoir, Borowiec describes a journey that is nothing less than an odyssey through the most harrowing of circumstances. Given the fate of many of his fellow Poles, that there was a happy ending for Borowiec is remarkable

Borowiec is at his best when describing his own experiences - his excitement at throwing his first grenade; crawling through the sewers to move from one sector to another; and the surreal moments when normal life seemed to be continuing amid the carnage . . . Most striking, perhaps, amid all the horror, is just how exciting he found it all

A story of defiance, bravery and survival. Warsaw Boy is a real-life Boy's Adventure Story - Eat your heart out, Indiana Jones

A highly readable and engaging first-hand account of the tribulations of a country for which Britain went to war in 1939, and about which most of us still know far too little

An engaging memoir of wartime childhood . . . It is the fresh, often humerous voice of Borowiec that stands out throughout. Warsaw Boy is valuable for the story it tells of what a boy made of the war and what the war made of him

A uniquely personal and harrowing description of one of the most tragic events in the country's twentieth century history

Hugely engaging. For all the horrors that Borowiec describes, his is an affectionate, wryly amusing account puntuated by episodes of warmth and humanity. Excellent

A biography of extraordinary synthesis and historical vision

McLynn brings vividly to life the strange world of the Mongols, describes Temujin’s rise from boyhood outcast to become Genghis Khan, and provides one of the most accurate and absorbing account yet of one of the most powerful men ever to have lived

McLynn has plumbed great depths to produce such a book as this… A very interesting and compelling book, that informs us (in incredible depth) as to the magnitude of pre-planned and executed wars and battles.

In this formidable study McLynn has done his man proud.

this is a deeply insightful and original treatment and, as the Holocaust drifts slowly but surely from living memory and into history, a warning against future complacency

Snyder excels in repositioning the Holocaust in a global context

Timothy Synder reorientates our understanding of the ideological structures and political circumstances that made the Nazis’ genocidal programme possible
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To his recalibration of the conventional topography and chronology of the Holocaust, Snyder adds a novel interpretation of Hitler’s worldview and of the place of Jews in it

Snyder delivers what is surely the best and most unsparing analysis of eastern European collaborationism now available.

As our world fragments and dissolves into chaos, Snyder offers a chilling lesson about how easy it is for people to slip into evil and bloodlust.

a book of the greatest importance… written with searing intellectual honesty.

Snyder's extraordinary book may be about events more than seventy years ago, but its lessons about human nature are as relevant now as then

Disturbing but utterly compelling... The how’s and whys of what happened have never been better explained.

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.