RaveThe Evening Standard (UK)This is a book about a place you will probably have never visited and never will: but you should read it nonetheless because what it says has a wider importance, about some of what we have got wrong in the way we respect nature and farming and what we might get right if we change our ways ... At a time of lockdown it is also that most valuable of things, an escape to an open land where curlew still cry and the wind and rain cut in from the sea and city life feels a million miles away ... Laurie has the deep love of a place that’s at the heart of explaining it to others. There’s a certain sort of landscape writing that delights in antique mysticism: as if remoteness and spirituality are the same thing. This book is far better than that. It confronts the loss of open hills to sterile conifer plantations, which make nobody local rich but have obliterated a way of life and the nesting grounds of curlew, a bird which merits the obsession Laurie has for it.
Ben Macintyre
RaveEvening Standard (UK)When Ben Macintyre’s name is on the cover you know you are in for a thrilling ride. He’s a master at unearthing the daring and deceits hidden deep in that extraordinary half century in which Britain fought first Nazi Germany and then the cold war ... But in Agent Sonya, he has pulled off his most remarkable trick: he leaves us admiring, and even cheering for, the woman at the heart of his story, someone who not only wanted to destroy our democracy but helped Russia get a nuclear bomb. She is the strongest character of all in Macintyre’s bestselling series of wartime tales ... I raced through the pages to keep up with the plot. But this really is fact not fiction, made all the more gripping by the photographs that have survived from almost every part of Sonya’s career.
Martyn Rady
RaveThe Evening Standard (UK)... deeply informed, elegantly written and a joy to read. It also shows the Habsburg world to have been even more bonkers than I had thought ... a serious traditional history from the top down — the mass of people only come into it in order to revolt from time to time, usually only to be appropriately repressed. But don’t think that makes it boring. The author scatters asides as treats to keep us gripped, most of which could be books on their own ... It would take a great book to tell this unbelievable tale. Fortunately, Rady has written it.
Charles Moore
PositiveThe Evening Standard (UK)Moore, who wrote with his subject’s permission and encouragement, has spoken to everyone, read everything and written a history which will stand for generations ... If nothing else, this book reveals the sheer hard grunt of running Britain in the late Eighties, Thatcher up night after night, blue fountain pen in hand, scrawling comments on the side of official papers ... Moore’s detailed, pacy and fair telling of the days which led to [Thatcher\'s] downfall would make a stage drama ... If a lot of this is already known from the many memoirs that have been written, then Moore at least does a fine job of bringing the story together and making it fresh. He’s moving, too, on the years after power ... Whether you find the long sections on her time in office from 1987 as interesting may depend on whether your name is in the index. They are informed, clear and heavy-going. But then so is good government. Not everything can or should be a sensation.
James Hamilton-Paterson
MixedEvening StandardReading it is a little like hearing an elderly relative insist the old days were better. You know some things were, but that there is another side to the story too ... He’s right, of course, that some of the losses were tragic ... In the end, though, what spoils Hamilton-Paterson’s book for me is the lack of recognition of the things that went well ... It’s not clear if he wants manufacturing in Britain, or British-owned manufacturers, or why that distinction matters. Moving in its recollection of the objects and firms that made up this lost age, the book is lessened by dubious and angry analysis. Read it for the former and ignore the latter.
