What a fabulous book! This is one of the best non-fiction history books I have ever read. It was informative but it didn't deliver the facts in a dry way. It made you care about pretty much all the 'characters' and tried to show them in a balanced light. It also gave you hypotheses while letting you know precisely what evidence there was for it but explaining the thinking too using absences in historical records as much as entries. It was just really clever but not too academical and really accessible from a knowledge point of view. Now on to the bad...

The font size is a joke. I know I'm getting old (43) and my eyes aren't great (they have never been great, I had glasses as an 18 month old) however I showed the book to my partner who has 20/20 vision and even he said the font size was ridiculously small. I got a headache every time I sat down to read. If the book wasn't so interesting I would have definitely given up!