PositiveLondon Review of Books (UK)Sansom recreates this hopeful yet fleeting and doomed moment with sensitivity and sympathy, evoking a remarkable rebellion that sprang from the trauma of social change ... its legacy is palpable, speaking loudly to modern immiseration and failures of social justice ... it’s obvious that this time Sansom deliberately chose the grandeur of an epic over the pace and scale of a thriller. Some sections would have benefited from a degree of editorial tightening, but the bigger canvas is used to add nuance to feelings and relationships, and, like Brueghel, to fill a frame with the hurly-burly of 16th-century life ... Street scenes are vivid and varied, with cramped tenements, smoking chimneys and brimming sewer channels ... Sansom’s resurrection of the past is both exotically alien and, in its political dynamics and emotions, all too familiar ... One of Sansom’s finest achievements is his exploration of memory. The privilege of hindsight is not denied to his characters, who reflect on the past as it is to them, distant and near, to make sense of their changing situation.
Lyndal Roper
RaveThe Financial TimesWe may think we know Luther, but Lyndal Roper shows how much we’ve missed. The service that her magisterial biography does to his memory is twofold: she presents him both as a human being and as a man of his time. She describes a life as it unfolded, full of ambivalence and chance, not retrospectively mythologised. Hers is a book rich in meticulous research and eloquent prose, acute insights and humane judgments. It is surely the definitive account of Luther’s life and work, and will remain so for many years.
