High Minds

High Minds is partly social history, partly a history of ideas. It is the personalities involved that contribute such liveliness to this assured and magisterial narrative. * Matthew Dennison, The Sunday Telegraph * [A] stimulating and thoroughly enjoyable book...[Heffer] is sometimes tendentious but never unreasonable, writes notably well and provides an admirable introduction to a period of history which many of us will think that we know quite well but have never considered from this point of view before. * Philip Ziegler, The Spectator * [I]t is really a whole bookshelf of books. If you want a succinct volume on the Clarendon Commission and the debates on education, there is a not-so-slim volume embedded here. There is another on the desperate case of the formidable Caroline Norton and the battle to give women rights...another on the great philanthropists; another on crime and punishment; another (wonderfully detailed and compelling) on the Great Exhibition and the foundation of Albertopolis; another on the sewers; a terrific essay on the struggle between Gothic and Italianate architecture; and of course plenty of politics...This is a great sweeping, confident book, demonstrating the self-same energy and passion as do the Victorian heroes Heffer celebrates. It is a magnificent achievement. * William Waldegrave, The Times * High Minds is worthy to the task: serious, scholarly, grand and determined...an excellent guide to the aesthetics of the age. * Tristram Hunt, New Statesman * Heffer has written a stunning overview of the great and the good - and the not-so-good - of Victorian society and of the changes which a largely benevolent capitalism brought about. * Sarah Bradford, The Literary Review *