Acclaim for The Great Fire of London Popular narrative history at its best, well researched, imaginatively and dramatically written... The author marshals his story and his mass of contemporary quotations with great skill.
The brilliance of its narrative chapters... a marvelous eye for evocative detail. Hanson's prose is animated by the ferocious energy of the fire and seems to be guided by its inexorable movement. He creates the literary equivalent of the special effects in a disaster movie... A rich mixture of imagination and research.
He writes with knowledge and verve. As if making a television documentary on a natural disaster, he includes a gripping technical chapter on the mechanism and chemistry of combustion. This works brilliantly... The book gains immeasurably from the author's eye for detail and from his understanding of the beliefs and prejudices of the day... Informative and lively account.
The best depiction of the Great Fire seen to date... He manages to describe not only the atmosphere of the event itself, but also the experience of living in seventeenth-century Britain.
