"...horrifying and important..."

"a richly textured and moving record of a history that has largely been lost...."

"She enjoys a cumulatively hilarious string of entries showing how her young life was built around things that didn’t happen..."

"engaging..."

"Langford has reinvented a genre..."

"elegant proof that Michael Peppiatt’s powers of observation remain undimmed and acute..."

"not merely addictive and refreshing, but also instructive..."

"beautiful, fanciful prose ..."

"...a gripping new book..."

"Haber’s analysis of her subject’s work is perceptive, but explaining a joke is tantamount to killing it..."

"A former foreign correspondent enjoys the pleasures of a bygone age..."

"Auberon Waugh’s skewering of humbug would spark a Twitter meltdown today..."

"wonderfully insightful..."

"His ability to sum up war’s jarring juxtapositions remains chillingly precise..."

"McPhee finds surprising poetry in the material at hand..."

"witty, ingeniously-structured narrative..."

"this excellent book is an unashamed love letter to the public library system..."

"Carew does excel at pinpointing the disjointedness between the life we boast about and the messy lives we actually end up living..."

"a challenging and instructive story..."

"it is a relief to find the art of the doorstop biography still alive..."

"the sheer volume of the research can occasionally threaten to overwhelm the narrative..."

"Gietinger is good at bringing out the absurdity of the farce that followed the murder..."

"Greene is to be applauded for contributing to the posthumous reputation of Jennings’s poetry..."