PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... well-informed and attractively written ... Tristram Hunt perhaps does not make enough of the fact that Wedgwood’s clientele was primarily a feminine one. For it was usually the women who bought the household’s ceramics.
Diarmaid MacCulloch
RaveThe New York Review of BooksHis hugely impressive life of Cromwell ... employs...sources with an immensely painstaking concern to reconstruct the exact order in which events occurred and to ascertain who was where at any given time. He is also able to draw upon an abundance of scholarly writing on the period, much of it of very high quality ... Although his own writing is lucid, witty, and acerbic, MacCulloch’s extremely detailed book—with its careful argumentation, its large cast, and its intricate reconstruction of the networks, connections, and affinities at the court of Henry VIII—makes heavy demands on the reader’s memory and powers of concentration. MacCulloch knows his characters intimately ... But unlike a novelist, he cannot make things up when the evidence is not there. As a result, his narrative abounds in fascinating probabilities, most of them highly plausible but none of them certain. All too often he has to use words like \'maybe\' or \'likely\' or \'possibly\' or \'perhaps.\' He does, however, dispel much of the mystery that previously surrounded Cromwell’s early life ... it is hard to imagine that Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life, based on research spread over several decades, will ever be replaced.
