This is a great topic and a really well written book, but this is a case where the audio did a huge disservice to the book itself. I was very confused by the author reading off numbers after almost every sentence. I assume now those were maybe references to footnotes? I am unclear on why that was necessary, I've never come across a nonfiction book that did this and it majorly affected my reading experience.

Have had to abandon attempts to listen to this after the introduction, as, where contemporary recordings exist, they have been used in place of the narrator. The quality of these recordings is poor and hard to understand, and I would imagine completely inaccessible to someone relying on audio, which feels at odds with the general attempt to provide audio-descriptive alternative text and captions for photographs, and the inclusion of spoken footnote numbers? The book itself is very interesting, and I will be reading the rest in physical form, but wouldn't recommend the audiobook alone. I don't fault the narrator at all, and will listen to the chapters that are read from transcripts, am just frustrated that this is not provided as an alternative for the others!

I couldn’t get on with the constant numbers being thrown in mid sentence so had to abandon listening. I’m sure the content of the hard copy is good and I’ll still recommend my students refer to the text for the information, but the audiobook wasn’t a winner for me personally.