As in Tolstoy or Mann, individual lives become romantic instances of destiny and history each performing an office in the onward drift of the greater world…
Malcolm Bradbury The Times

Absorbing…when you encounter one of the huge set pieces that punctuate the action, you are rocked on your heels…
John Walsh, Author's profile in THE NEW YORKER

If Tolstoy were writing War and Peace today he would have to imagine and invent it in the same form as The Book of Kings
John Bayley

Thackara works in the mode of the sublime romanticist …he has no peer among American novelists working today. The hundreds of pages of scenes out of the Nazis' war against civilisation are extraordinary in their power
Al Cheuse Chicago Tribune