MixedThe Telegraph (UK)Charlotte Lydia Riley... is seeking to join a coterie of critics of empire – some historians, some not – who have found a new (and often youthful) audience by expounding the rather simplistic thesis that the worst aspects of modern Britain can be traced directly to its imperial past. Riley’s book does this by examining, with considerable skill, Britain’s post-war retreat from empire ... One suspects, however, that she doesn’t cast an entirely cold eye upon the evidence she gathers ... When Riley puts on the hat of a historian, rather than a cheap polemicist, she has interesting things to say ... Riley’s picture is far from complete, reading sometimes like a primer of recent Left-ish obsessions.
Charles Spencer
RaveThe Times (UK)Charles Spencer has shown himself to be a perceptive and lively historian of the 17th-century civil wars, a gifted storyteller. In The White Ship he looks back a further 500 years or so to another period of bitter division, which followed the reign of Henry I and the catastrophic loss at sea of his only legitimate male heir ... Spencer paints a vivid picture of this richly draped, exultant cast of intermarried aristocrats, the regime’s \'new men\', and hubristic knights keen to cash in their credit with the monarch as they returned to his kingdom ... Spencer’s is a complex tale spanning decades, with a rich but rarely attractive cast of characters, pivoted on one single, tragic winter evening. It is an event and a period of English and European history that should be better known, and now it will be.
Joe Moshenska
PositiveThe Times (UK)Moshenska makes light of Milton and his works as he traverses 11 crucial days in his life. It is occasionally, in Moshenska’s words, \'too full of its author\'; Moshenska never misses an opportunity to declare ostentatiously his distaste at the failings of Milton’s age, such as the brutality of his rigorous schooling, his chauvinism, his misogyny and even his alleged racism. Yet it would be harsh...to be overly critical of a brave study that offers much insight.
Ruth Scurr
RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)The Cambridge historian Ruth Scurr brings shades of subtlety and nuance to a life well known, telling Napoleon’s story through his love of nature and the gardens ... Scurr has attributes too often missing among her contemporaries. She can write, beautifully; and she casts a cold eye on proceedings, unfazed by previous adoration or condemnation of her subject ... His life, outlined in this grippingly original study, had come full circle to the lonely child, far from home. In his beginning was his end.
Cynthia Saltzman
RaveThe Times (UK)A compelling account of the fragility of beauty before avarice . . . It is heartbreaking to read Saltzman’s description of the way in which Veronese’s vast masterpiece, under the well-meaning supervision of Pietro Edwards, the republic’s chief restorer, was ripped from the wall of the refectory, with holes left where nails had been painted over by the hand of the artist, with its body divided, rolled up and packaged for the perilous and damp voyage to Paris . . . Saltzman’s thrilling blend of historical narrative and art criticism is fitting testimony to its enduring greatness.
Martyn Rady
RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)Although he gives the more familiar Spanish Habsburgs their due in this riveting study, Martyn Rady rightly restores the primacy of central Europe to the dynasty, which, born of modest roots in Switzerland and Swabia, became Holy Roman Emperors in 1452 ... One relishes Rady’s wry asides and little gems of knowledge ... In less able hands this complex tale could be mired in convolution, but Rady, a professor of central European history at University College London, is a lucid and elegant writer — historians are advised to follow his model of economy and concision. It is impossible to imagine a more erudite and incisive history of this fascinating, flawed and ultimately tragic dynasty.
