RaveThe Independent (UK)A narrative that moves between intimacy and the wider sweep of history ... What gives the book its particular resonance is the tension between what is seen and what is hidden ... In the end, The Renoir Girls is less about a painting than about what lies beyond its frame: the passage of time, the shifting of identities, the sudden and often catastrophic turns of history. It is a reminder that even the most serene images can contain within them the seeds of their own undoing.
RaveThe IndependentBrilliant ... Sets out to disentangle the man from the legend ... What emerges is not only the story of one extraordinary individual, but also a deeply felt portrait of a ruling dynasty so frightened, isolated and dysfunctional that it placed its faith in a wandering Siberian mystic ... Rasputin emerges neither as the demonic puppet-master of legend nor as an innocent holy man ... The result is a fantastic, vivid portrait not only of Rasputin but of the twilight of imperial Russia.
Timothy Snyder
PositiveThe Financial TimesSnyder shows how many millions of the deaths in the bloodlands were brought about by what he calls \'belligerent complicity\' between the two men ... Some may find Snyder’s staking-out of the area of the bloodlands too arbitrary for their tastes, and might accuse him of creating a questionable geographical delineation. Agree with it or not, in a sense it does not matter, because Snyder presents material that is undeniably fresh – what’s more, it comes from sources in languages with which very few western academics are familiar ... The success of Bloodlands really lies in its effective presentation of cold, hard scholarship, which is in abundance.
