Contains a wonderful gallery of precisely drawn yet constantly surprising Tudor and Stuart portraits, like an album of perfect Hilliard miniatures that dazzle us with their cosmopolitan attitudes and globalised lives. Taking us from Italian renaissance scholars in Oxford to English Jesuits in Goa via a Kentish samurai in 17th-century Edo, this is a perspective-altering take on a world we usually think of in far more domestic and provincial terms

William Dalrymple, Guardian, What to Read This Summer

Many books claim to be a new way of looking at history, but this book truly is, as Das draws on extensive archival research to enrich and complicate the picture by telling the stories of those who lived through it

Breeze Barrington, Financial TImes

Triumphant . . . Nandini Das has a cinematic writing style in which zoom shots and closeups coexist. She allows her characters to speak for themselves, reassessing their beliefs from multiple vantage points. The reader is never less than transfixed by her breadth of expertise, storytelling skills and commingling of historical and literary evidence . . . No one who reads this book will ever see Tudor and Stuart history in the same light again

John Guy, Literary Review

A traveller's guide to Tudor England . . . Thoughtful and thorough . . . Illustrates how questions of nationality, identity and belonging became ever more pressing in an increasingly interconnected world

Katherine Harvey, The Times

An elaborate and elegant polyphony of voices . . . Das's interpretations at times rise to the transcendent . . . It is salutary to be reminded that rigorous scholarly history can also be stylish and lyrical

Peter Marshall, History Today

Tells the story of Britain through people often left out of the accounts: the migrants, merchants, pilgrims and exiles

Martin Chilton, Independent, Books of the Month