The Catholics

[Roy Hattersley] is very good: Catholics is a great read and spectacularly well-researched.. British Politics, especially the shipwrecked Labour Party, could do with a generation of Hattersleys - tough, committed, smart and cultivated.

Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

Enjoyable. Perfectly solid, sensible and often astute.

Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times

Hattersley narrates. with his characteristic energy. His talent for invective remains strong.

Gerard Degroot, Times

[An] elegantly written, sweeping account of Catholics in these islands from the Reformation to the present day. It's a tale of high drama and high stakes, by turns horrifying, romantic and ultimately hopeful.

Peter Stanford, Observer

Hattersley offers a scholarly chronicle of heroism and holiness in post-Reformation Britain, when the age of Catholic saints and miracles was seen to survive against the odds.

Ian Thomson, Financial Times

Thoroughly entertaining. I heartily recommend this volume, which is written with great brio, intelligence and charm; and with a wistful distance from his subjects' faith which I found very appealing.

A.N. Wilson, Catholic Herald

Hattersley. excels in describing political machinations. One must admire his courage, not to say his chutzpah, in undertaking a book of such enormous scope.

Michael Walsh, Tablet

Thoughtful and thought provoking, minutely researched and well-written

Choice

big-hearted, fair-minded, insightful...a joy to read

Frank Cottrell-Boyce, New Statesman

The author writes with authority... He engages with his material and shares his enthusiasm with the reader. But equally he is detached: he has no interest in covering up scandals or selling a party line. The engaged outsider becomes a compelling biographer, at once intrigued and underwhelmed by his subject-matter

Lavinia Byrne, Church Times

Sympathetic and lucid.

Daily Telegraph