A book of big and bold ideas, Humanly Possible is humane in approach and, more important, readable and worth reading, whether you agree with it or not.

[Bakewell] manages to wrangle seven centuries of humanist thought into a brisk narrative, resisting the traps of windy abstraction and glib oversimplification. But covering such enormous terrain means that Humanly Possible doesn’t quite have the bracing focus of her earlier work.

At its core a tenderhearted story about the least tender of experiences: that of refugee children, separated from their parents and extended family, forced to grow up on their own in a foreign country.

Exhilarating.

Like Bakewell’s previous two books, Humanly Possible skilfully combines philosophy, history and biography. She is scholarly yet accessible, and portrays people and ideas with vitality and without anachronism, making them affecting and alive..

Her book doesn't feel terribly urgent.

Her topic is humanism, and she’s given us a chatty, discursive survey of way more than the 'seven hundred years' of 'freethinking, inquiry and hope' that her subtitle promises.

Sarah Bakewell agrees that humanism is hard to pin down, but she devotes her new book to a dazzling effort to do just that.

A wonderfully learned, gracefully written, and simply enjoyable intellectual history of humanism..

Erudite and accessible, Bakewell’s survey pulls together diverse historical threads without sacrificing the up-close details that give this work its spark. Even those who already consider themselves humanists will be enlightened..