"As a historian Lord Norwich knows what matters. As a writer he has a taste for beauty, a love of language and an enlivening wit.... He contrives, as no English writer has done before, to sustain a continuous interest in that crowded history." -- Hugh Trevor-Roper
"Will become the standard English work of Venetian history." -- C. P. Snow, Financial Times
"Lord Norwich has loved and understood Venice as well as any other Englishman has ever done. He has put readers of this generation more in his debt than any other English writer." -- Peter Levi, The Sunday Times (London)