It's a visceral book and very visual. It's got little details that just take you there immediately. I don't know what it would be like for someone who doesn't know the history but to me, it feels like you're watching something happen before your eyes. -- Orlando Figes * Fivebooks.com * Bulgakov's love for Kiev at this time of the Russian civil war is reflected in two ways. There's a boyish love, a proud schoolboy fascination with its workings and its lights and its cosiness under the snow, and a sorrowful adult's love, looking down with a mixture of acceptance and bitterness at a great city being racked by fratricidal upheaval -- James Meek * Guardian * [ Bulgakov] began as a journalist, and this served him well with The White Guard, whose prose is taut, concise, but lyrical too -- Doris Lessing
