‘A page-turner … brilliant all the way through. One of the best books I’ve read in ages’ Lucy Worsley, Sunday Express

‘A dazzling experiment in life writing … Every page fizzes with the excitement of fresh discoveries … Each page becomes a window on to a world that is far stranger than we might expect’ Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Guardian

‘It is rich and scholarly, something fascinating to be discovered on every page … Hughes is a thoroughly engaging writer: serious-minded but lively, careful yet passionate… Some of the encounters in its pages, whiffy and indelible, will stay with me for ever’ Rachel Cooke, Observer

‘It is not often I read a book and think “Wow! Every historian of Victorian Britain should read this”. It is a lyrical reflection on the corporeal bodies of Victorian men and women, as well as on the way their fleshiness has become invisible to historians … This is historical storytelling at its very best’ Joanna Bourke, BBC History Magazine

‘A work of formidable scholarship … Reading it is like unravelling the bandages on a mummy to find the face of the past staring back in all its terrible and poignant humanity’ Lucy Lethbridge, Financial Times

‘History so alive you can smell its reek … With her love of bodily detail, Hughes does indeed put the carnal back into biography’ Lisa Appignanesi, Telegraph

‘No one remotely interested in books should miss it’ John Carey, Sunday Times

‘I can’t think of a recent social history I’ve enjoyed more’ The Big Issue

‘Beautifully constructed, narrated not only with wit and gusto, but a clear sense of purpose’ Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

‘Sex certainly rears its many heads, but so does every other aspect of Victorian life, from farming techniques to court etiquette, dentistry to oil painting’ The Times, Book of The Week

‘Refreshingly unusual … brilliant’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times, Books of the Year