RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... a thick forest of stories in a book that deserves its own very long life. Because her aim is to highlight the heroines rather than the heroes, it will stand in future, like all retellings of myth, as revelatory not just of the mists in which recorded time began but of its own time. Her technique is ingenious ... Higgins creates her own finest tapestries from those within the strands of the myths themselves ... This is a beautifully produced book, with sinuous fine-lined illustrations by Chris Ofili. Higgins is journalistic but scholarly.
Edward J Watts
RaveWall Street JournalWatts...takes his readers from republican Rome to Republican Washington with a resounding theme that anyone promising to restore lost greatness is probably up to no good ... This is a powerful lens through which to view the past, both for those who already think they know it well and those who have practical uses for it ... Elegant analysis ... He gives a masterly account of the complex family who founded the Roman empire’s last and longest-lasting dynasty.
Robin Lane Fox
PositiveFinancial Times (UK)Lane Fox’s emphasis is less on philosophical wranglings or the fortune of chancers than on detailed observation, the path that takes him to the gold-rush island of Thasos and the controversy over who was the Hippocrates who got the credit for so many doctors’ work ... Scholars will argue over how persuasive is Lane Fox’s long argument for the earlier date, based on vocabulary, on the types of diseases (no war wounds) and on inscriptions and remains (“the most massive erect penis to survive in Greek sculpture”).
Alex Preston
PositiveFinancial Times\"The [book\'s] style seems fey at first and the self-referencing somewhat clumsy, but the form is potent ... Each section, from Peregrine to Peacock, Robin to Wren, is illustrated by the artist, Neil Gower. These pictures, most intensely of Swift... and Waxwing, are alone worth the price of a book beautifully presented in matt orange cloth.\
Bettany Hughes
PositiveThe Financial Times...Bettany Hughes’ Istanbul is built deliberately on what is passing as well as past. It is a story of numerous overlapping names, changes that often happened more slowly than the guidebooks tell us ... She retells the bitter clashes of civilisation that have occurred where Europe meets Asia... She is equally assiduous and rather more passionate in finding what brings the world together in Istanbul, the place with the longest claim to be its centre ... Hughes’ more hopeful stories come from the city’s formidable trade in ideas, arts and goods, only briefly interrupted by catastrophe... Sometimes she writes too much like a television presenter, placing herself on a boat where someone once crossed or something once happened. Mostly she writes from a safer distance ... Hughes is not an argumentative historian. She avoids the debates of academe. She is a wistful and impassioned cosmopolitan who has produced a challenging story for 2017.
Daniel Mendelsohn
RaveThe Financial TimesAn Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic, a surprising piece of art itself, begins with these three words for moving through space and time, the travels of a suffering hero (from trepalium, an instrument of torture), his hard journey (from dies, a day), the distance of his voyage (from via, the road) ... Jay Mendelsohn is a retired engineer and mathematician, seeking certainty, unafraid to challenge his son, admiring heroism but unsure whether Homer’s Odysseus, 'a man of pain' in Greek, is a hero at all ...Homeric questions about fidelity and force majeure, heroism and survival, are elevated from the motions of the junior seminar by the wary, warming relationship between the two men ...a moving book, as full of twists and turns as its subject, often beautiful too.
Michael Kinsley
RaveThe Wall Street JournalTo [Parkinson's], and to his wider topic of old age, Mr. Kinsley brings wisdom and artfully suppressed anger, wistful humor, well-pitched prose and the bite of the thinker against the pretenses of the world....Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide is not a little book about economics or Parkinson’s disease, but it is a big little book about what happens when we begin to think beyond who has won the race.
