In These Times

'(A) magnificent, richly illustrated book ... Jenny Uglow is a uniquely gifted historian. Her style is supremely elegant and often amusingly bathetic, her researches exhaustive but lightly worn ... No page is without its intriguing anecdote.

'A sumptuous treat . . . By showing us this world through the eyes of ordinary people, Uglow brings it to life.'

Detailed but not trivial, rich yet never heavy, the sharply-observed characters and constant pricks of humour make this book seem almost as if Jane Austen had written a history of her own times.

As crowded and bustling as a Gillray drawing ... at its impressive best, it has the dense feel of Turner's Battle of Trafalgar.

Jenny Uglow has cast her net wide and captured a crucial era in our island story and of European history, that is, despite its wrist-breaking bulk, pretty well unputdownable.

Few can match her skill at conjuring up a scene, or illuminating a character with a swift and glittering line of description. And so it is here ... In These Times brims with life.