SAVAGE KINGDOM: Virginia and the founding of English America
'A swashbuckling saga...sprightly and vivid.' Los Angeles Times.
'In his addictively readable narrative, Woolley not only deconstructs the myth of Pocahontas to reveal a more complex truth, but also tells the multilayered story of how a ramshackle outpost of Jacobean England sowed the seeds of what eventually became the most powerful nation on earth.' Sunday Times
'Benjamin Woolley tells this story in direct, engaging prose, spreading before us a panorama, not just of the lives of the settlers and the natives and of the vacillating cordiality and hostility of their encounter with each other, but of the politics, intellectual climate and international relations which formed the wider context. His book is a delight.' Spectator
GAMES BRITANNIA: A history of Britain told through the games we play
BBC TV 2009
'Woolley proved to be an excellent presenter - one of those rare people who's able to take an ostensibly mundane subject and make it far more illuminating than this viewer at least would have believed possible.' Daily Telegraph
'Well played, Mr Woolley!' Times
THE QUEEN'S CONJUROR: The life and magic of Dr Dee
'A model of popular history...These minds of the past step forward in this book undeniably, obstreperously real.' Washington Post Book World
'An evocative portrait of the Tudor age - Dee casts a spell on the reader.' Literary Review
'An engrossing read.' Newsday
THE HERBALIST: Nicholas Culpeper and the fight for medical freedom
'This is a wonderful book - a delight to read, fast-moving, informed and passionate in its advocacy.' Roy Strong, Sunday Times
'A passionate debate about patient power and medical theory.' Times Literary Supplement
'Woolley's The Herbalist is riveting.' New Scientist.
BRIDE OF SCIENCE: Romance, Reason and Byron's daughter
'It's a thriller.' New Scientist
'She had education, wealth and plenty of talent. Yet her life ended in ruin… An intriguing glimpse into the beginnings of computer science and a reminder that character is destiny.' The Wall Street Journal
'Enthralling.' Sunday Times
VIRTUAL WORLDS: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality
Penguin 1993 UK. Now available on Kindle.
'In his brilliant, almost Swiftean, journey among the philosophers and practitioners of simulation, Benjamin Woolley lays about him with, alternately, a scalpel and a meat cleaver. He neatly dissects the propositions of Barthes and Foucault, that reality is merely a myth... For those who claim that, by putting on an electronic helmet and some wired-up gloves, you can "experience reality", Woolley reserves the meat cleaver.' Sunday Times
'Excellent... How real is reality?... This tour through the simulated, the hyper and the artificial is fascinating and thought-provoking and raises important questions about a great deal of the nonsense being talked by certain philosophers and computer enthusiasts..' Independent
'An often fascinating intellectual journey into the changing face of reality..' New York Times