An affectionate and insightful account of 20th-century history that also amounts to a manifesto for the power of words - and belonging.
Helen Davies
Sunday Times, Book of the Year
Compassionate and wise... An effervescent and essential writer.
Nick Cohen
Observer
David Aaronovitch is to be congratulated on his Le Carre like sleuthing into the deceits and self-delusions of his parents and their communist friends. He has produced a wise, funny and sometimes heart-breaking account of how otherwise good and nice people are capable of believing a load of total and utter b
ll
cks about the world, the class system and themselves. It is an invocation of a vanished tribe that is still relevant, alas, to the Britain of Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone and Owen Jones, I loved it.
Boris Johnson Party Animals is an utterly engaging and truly humane story about fitting in, opting out, and finding meaning. Unflinchingly honest, it is by turns harrowing and hilarious. Not since Clive James's Falling Towards England has there been a memoir so clearly destined to become a classic in its own time.
Amanda Foreman David Aaronovitch has written a compelling account of the Communist mindset in post-war Britain: a superb mix of social history, Marxist philosophy and often painful family biography. It is a hugely revelatory insight into a lost world and its modern legacies.
Tristram Hunt A raw...extraordinary new memoir-cum-social history... Vivid and moving.
Rachel Cooke
Observer
The extraordinarily gripping final section... elevates his book above similar memoirs by other children of party members... Tremendously frank, often moving.
Dominic Sandbrook
Sunday Times
A colourful, sentimental, damning and funny part-history, part-autobiography. That is, until an extraordinarily brutal final chapter... [that] reveals Party Animals to be more than just a revealing memoir, but, hopefully, Mr Aaronovitch's catharsis.
Mark Leftly
Independent on Sunday
Deeply personal... A clever and moving portrait of a strange, unexplored subculture, of dedicated self-education by desperately poor young men, of undoubtedly good causes adopted for the advancement of a wicked and dangerous purpose.
Peter Hitchens
Mail on Sunday
A rich and forensic examination, all the more uncomfortable for its honesty and the authoritative knowledge of Left-wing politics that Aaronovitch brings to it ... Like Lorna Sage's Bad Blood, this is a riveting autobiography that forces you to think about your own family history.
Evening Standard
An uncommonly gripping book, not just as political or social history...but as an account of the lies that families tell themselves to survive.
Robert Hanks
Daily Telegraph
An honest portrait of communist obsession... A stirring personal yet expansive history of the ideals his committed communist parents strived towards... Aaronovitch fuses his adolescent memories with historical landmarks in the communist way of life... A memoir's reach is too narrow, a historical biography's too vast. Party Animals is a smart and well-balanced mix.
Guy Pewsey
Independent
In his closely observed memoir...Aaronovitch has concentrated both the tragedy and comedy of western communism into a family, his own... The description Aaronovitch gives of his family and of the Party community is rich, subtle and poignant... The best thing he has done.
John Lloyd
Financial Times
A painfully honest memoir.
John Sutherland
The Times
Aaronovitch's song of love and pain for the lost family of British communism.
Martin Kettle
Guardian