The Phoenix

Critics Review

• What makes this book so fascinating, though, is not just the rich detail, but also its explanations of the emergence of the new thinking that so profoundly shaped the spirit of the age

  INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

• His book is a tour de force of biography, history, politics, philosophy and experimental science

  ECONOMIST

• A wonderfully rich and informative book. To present deep scholarship so accessibly and with such fluency is a rare achievement

• A fascinating picture of the rebirth of London after the Fire and the men who made it happen, combining the history of ideas, architecture and the life of the city in a riveting narrative

• Hollis is a historian with a novelist’s eye for dramatic detail, and an infectious affection for both his subject and his five men. THE PHOENIX is an extremely entertaining work of popular history

  CATHOLIC HERALD

• An ingenious and fluent overview of extraordinary men at an extraordinary moment, with St Paul’s standing as its symbolic heart

  SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

• This is a superlative book. Leo Hollis has that rare gift of making the complex, such as the nature of light and the complexity of national finance, comprehensible to the most lay of readers, whom he rewards – with no dumbing down – with fascinating details and characters

• With Hollis as our knowledgeable guide, we watch as a new, vigorous spirit pervades the City of London… It is this new, enthralling spirit, just as much as Wren’s ‘puzzle in stone’, that is the true subject of Leo Hollis’s fine book

  MAIL ON SUNDAY

• In this fascinating, richly detailed account of how St Paul’s rose from London’s ashes after the Great Fire, Leo Hollis unravels what he calls this “puzzle in stone” to describe not just the new cathedral and its design and construction but also the complex politics, science and philosophy of the day and the ambitions of the extraordinary men who created the first truly modern city

• A truly inspiring story of human ingenuity and persistence in the face of disaster – and of how the future can be built out of the rubble of the past. On top of all that, it’s hard to imagine a better introduction to the politics and culture of this glorious period in English history

• Makes us see St Paul’s as if for the first time, a remarkable achievement

• Leo Hollis has set himself a daunting task in giving us the biographies of five men, recounting the history of England…He has brought it off triumphantly. The entire work is written in lively modern English without a trace of scholastic starch as Hollis successfully juggles the lives of the men while riding the uneasy monocycle of 17th-century politics and religious debate to give us a thoroughly engrossing adventure story

  SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

• A fascinating book

  DAILY MAIL

• In a vivid and engaging narrative, rich in detail, he describes the history of england from thr outbreak of the civil war to the birth of the empire, describing cultural and intellectual change as well as political and constitutional events

  BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE

• The political obstacles… and the social detail of modern London on the make are consistently fascinating

  RA ARTS MAGAZINE

• An enjoyable read

  GUARDIAN

• Hollis weaves a lively tale of modern London’s birth, beginning with a riveting street-by-street account of the fire as it spread from Thomas Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane

  SUNDAY TIMES